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A sample of Dyslexie, a tyepface designed to help dyslexic people (image: Christian Boer via Scientific American)

We all have the wacky family member or coworker who insist on decorating their emails with a variety of fonts and colors. And woe to the poor soul who sends a graphic designer an email written in comic sans. But choosing a font is more than just a matter of decoration and taste. A well designed typeface, like a well designed…well, anything, can make a brand iconic, can benefit the public good, and it can even improve lives.

An example of a typeface with such potential is Dyslexie, from studiostudio graphic design. It’s estimated that about 15 percent of the world population have some form of dyslexia. For these people letters and characters can appear flipped, rotated, and transposed. As a result, they have trouble decoding the system of lines, curves and dots that we perceive as written language. As its name implies, Dyslexie was designed make reading easier for people with dyslexia. And to look good doing it.

Samples of the Dyslexie typeface (image: studiostudio graphic design)

Among its distinguishing features, the lower portion of letter has a heavy baseline thickness, weighting it down to help prevent it from flipping. Additionally, larger openings and spaces in letters make them more distinguishable from one another, as does the use of a very subtle italic on some characters. Characters that can appear identical when flipped, such as the lowercase b and d, have different elliptical curves with distinct slopes.

The preliminary research that produced the typeface (pdf) included a relatively small survey of 43 people, single-word tests, and one control font: Arial. While Dyslexie didn’t prove to increase reading speed compared to Arial, the test group did make fewer reading errors, and the designer suggests that the study could be expanded in the future to test speed and comprehension to further refine the typeface.

A comparison between the old Highway Gothic signs (top) and the new Clearview signs (bottom). (image: cartype)

Clearview is another typeface designed to make a difference. Last year, New York City spent $27.5 million to replace 200,000 street signs with new, easier to read, mixed-case versions printed in Clearview, which was created way back in the 1990s specifically to be used for transit signage.

Also last year, researchers at the MIT AgeLab, working in conjunction with design studio Monotype Imagining published a paper (pdf) arguing that automotive GPS navigation systems could be redesigned to reduce the time that drivers take their eyes off the road. Their research showed that a certain style of typeface could reduce the time drivers look down at their dash by 10 percent. Those quick glances add up.

Samples of the Whitney typeface designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones (image: Hoefler & Frere-Jones)

More recently, The Whitney Museum of American Art unveiled a new graphic identity that “embraces the inventive spirit of the Museum, and signals other changes afoot” as the museum prepares to move to its new Renzo Piano-designed building in 2015. A major component of this rebranding, which was masterminded by designers Experimental Jetset, is a new typeface, Neue Haas Grotesk. The last time Whitney moved into a new building, Marcel Breuer’s masterpiece on Madison Ave. (1966), they also adapted  a new typeface – a bespoke design by Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Aptly named Whitney, it ensured consistency among their publications, promotional materials, and public signage. Crafted in 52 styles, it was incredibly diverse and worked well for long form reading in print catalogs, larger wall graphics and way-finding signs, explanatory text, and even translates well to computer screens.

That pulldown list of strange and exciting fonts in today’s word processing programs is a constant temptation and expressing individuality is important, but if you happen to be that wacky family member or coworker, why not take a second to think about improving the lives of those people you’re cc’ing.

Festo’s Smartbird (image: Festo)\

Human flight has become boring. Air travel is a testament to man’s ingenuity and imagination. In the words of comedian Louis CK, “you’re siting in a chair – IN THE SKY.” It’s amazing. And yet, in only 50 years or so, flight, something scholars and inventors have been investigating for centuries, has become a banality. Sometimes, even an inconvenience! And though we may have mastered the skies to the extent that unmanned aerial vehicles can be sent anywhere on the planet, there is still some mystery left to discover. For while drone technology may seem to be the only area where advancements in flight are being made, many researchers today, like Archytas and da Vinci before them, remain fascinated by something that seems much simpler: bird flight, and by the possibility of creating unmanned aerial vehicles of a very different nature.

Take for example, SmartBird (top image) a project developed 2011 by Festo, a global leader in automation technology. Inspired by the herring gull and the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Smartbird is a robot with articulated wings that function just like their biological inspiration, generating thrust and forward motion. With Smartbird, researchers wanted to decode bird flight to develop a machine that could take off, fly, and land using only its own wing-flapping power. The “mechatronic and cybernetic holistic design” was made possible by using lightweight construction materials and a unique mechanism that allows the wings to twist and torque in a way that approximates real birds. SmartBird is not necessarily the future of aviation, but was created as a proof-of-concept for technology that may one day be used to help create more efficient factory automation and new power generators. However, it’s natural flight movements and seagull “disguise” seem to imply more tactical uses.

The Robo Raven, developed by University of Maryland Robotics Center

More recently, researchers at the University of Maryland Robotics Center have successfully launched a “micro air vehicle” that has been in development for eight years. After many test flights, many crashes, and many adjustments, the Robo Raven, as it is known took to the skies for the first after the team made a design breakthrough in April. Their new design features programmable wings that can be controlled independently, like real bird wings, allowing for high velocity dives, rolls, and other aerial acrobatics. The silver mylar-winged robot is much smaller and much more abstract in appearance than the SmartBird, but its movement is incredibly realistic. So realistic in fact, that it has even fooled nature – several early models were torn apart by hawks. It’s really quite something to see. The project’s success was also made possible by recent advancements in manufacturing like 3D printing and laser cutting. The Maryland team suggest that one day, the relatively lightweight, cheap, and versatile technology of robot birds could potentially be used for agriculture and environmental monitoring. There are other possibilities as well, including surveillance – Robo Raven has already been outfitted with a POV camera. If these robotic birds become natural enough, the drones of tomorrow could be undetectable to  the untrained eye.

But you don’t need drones or robots to survey of a city from the skies. New York architects Aranda\Lasch have shown that cyborg pigeons will do just fine.

images from the Brooklyn Pigeon Project by Aranda\Lasch (image: Flickr)

Aranda\Lasch developed The Brooklyn Pigeon Project as an experimental biological satellite. A flock of trained pigeons, ubiquitous in New York City, were equipped with a small battery, video camera, and microphone, and flown in spiral patterns over Brooklyn. The project is both a documentation of flocking behavior and an attempt to craft a true birds-eye view of the city. The avian cartographers of the Brooklyn Pigeon Project are sensitive to environmental stimuli that their human counterparts can’t observe. Their flight patterns are affected by sound, smells, and their ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field  form. The resulting maps differ dramatically from the purely technological “grid” of modern GIS systems to provide a unique perspective on the city that, in the words of the designers, “contrasts directly with the way the city is increasingly recorded and represented today.”

Top image: Julius Neubronner’s pigeon cameras. Bottom image: a photo taken from a pigeon (image: wikipedia)

The Brooklyn Pigeon Project has a precedent in the work of pharmacist, inventor, and amateur photograph by the name of Julius Neubronner  who, between 1907 and 1920, developed dozens of miniature cameras designed to be attached to carrier pigeons via tiny leather harnesses. While initially created as little more than a hobby, Neubronner anticipated that his invention would have military uses and indeed his pigeon photographers were  briefly enlisted and deployed to safely take photographs over enemy lines (part of an ongoing effort to militarize animals, as noted in ion’s history of animal soldiers). Although slightly more unweilding than the BPP cameras, Neubronner’s device is perhaps more ingenious.

It’s exciting to think that the  avian world still has much to teach us. We still strive to capture the world as experienced by birds – the way they so elegantly move thorough the skies, see the ground, and detect the invisible forces that surround us. New research, combined with new manufacturing technologies, is bringing us a little closer to the day when the familiar airplanes and intimidating drones filling our skies will be replaced by autonomous, naturally flying, all-seeing, robotic birds. Despite centuries of investigation, we’ve only just started to unlock the secrets that nature perfected over eons.

Riddel’s Revolution helmet (image: Riddel)

In professional football, the only line of defense against head injury –other than the defensive line– is the helmet. But the earliest football helmet looked more like a padded aviator cap than the high-tech crash-tested helmet used by today’s players. There’s a reason for that.

There are a few different stories about the invention of the football helmet but the earliest and the most frequently told dates back to they Army-Navy game of 1893. Admiral Joseph Mason Reeve (“the father of carrier aviation”) had apparently been kicked and hit in the head so many times, his doctor told him that another hard impact could lead to “instant insanity.” Determined to play in the big game, Reeve went to his shoemaker and had him fashion a moleskin hat with earflaps. So it was that the helmet –I’m using the term loosely, here– was born. But the football helmet would see battle off the field as well – Reeve took the design back to the Navy and it was briefly used by paratroopers during the first World War.

A chronology of NFL helmets (images: NFLevolution.com)

In the early 1900s, soft leather skull caps appeared as optional headgear worn by few players. By the 1920s, hardened leather helmets were first worn, slightly increasing the level protection. Slightly. Perhaps more importantly, these early helmets inspire the popular vision of  “old-timey” football, not to mention such films as the underrated Leatherheads, starring George Clooney and John Krasinski. But I digress.

Again, it’s worth reiterating that helmets were not mandatory. That wouldn’t happen until 1943. During the 1920s and 1930s, variations of the leather helmet appeared, but in 1939, the game changed –or at least became safer– when John T. Riddel introduced the first plastic helmet. Unfortunately, as plastics became more scarce during World War II, so did the more durable helmet. After the war, the helmets went back into production, but there was a problem with the plastic mix that cause many helmets to break into pieces. Remember that scene in Batman Begins where the cowl shatters? I imagine it was something like that.

As a result of the faulty plastic, the NFL banned the helmets. Within a year, the error had been corrected and the plastic helmet was formally re-introduced to professional football just a year later, quickly followed by the padded plastic helmet. (Note to people who get hit for a living: it’s always a good idea to add more pads.) Another important change came in 1948 when Los Angeles Rams halfback Fred Gehrke painted horns on either side of his helmet, making the rams the first professional team with a helmet emblem.

Up to this point, all the helmets were still open faced. And almost all those open faces had black eyes, bloody noses, and swollen lips. That changed in 1955 when a single face bar was added to the padded plastic helmets. And of course, with the invention of the face mask came the invention of the face-masking – banned in 1956. The single bar face mask was the invention of Paul Brown, the first coach of Cleveland’s professional football team, who came up with the prototype in order to keep starting quarterback Otto Graham in a game after he took a hard hit right to the kisser. Brown and the equipment manager quickly assembled the crossbar, patched up Graham, and sent him back on the field to win the game.

After the victory, a slightly more formal design was created and all Cleveland players were required to wear the single bar masks. Other NFL teams soon followed suit. Brown patented his design, known as the BT-5, and it went into production by Riddel, who still make the official helmet of the National Football League. By 1962, facemasks were worn by every player in the game. Former Detroit Lion Garo Yepremian was the last NFL player to play without any facemask, only adapting the crossbar in 1967. “’I would wake up every morning with blood in my mouth,’ he told ESPN. ‘I learned my lesson.’”

Though the single bar face mask was an important innovation, it was soon replaced by increasingly complex styles of face protection. In 2004, the NFL formally banned single bar helmets, but some players were grandfathered in. This exception was made exclusively for kickers, who like the single bar because what it lacked in safety, it made up for in visibility. The last single bar helmet appeared on a professional field in 2007.

A sampling of the many face masks offered by Riddel (image: Riddel)

During the 1960s and 70s, manufacturers developed thick foam padding that was installed in the helmets and in 1975, the full face mask appeared. Today, dozens of face mask designs are available, offering a variety of options related to protection and visibility. By the mid 1980s, the football helmet had become a complex, highly engineered piece of equipment. A typical helmet weighed three pounds, with an outer shell composed of polycarbonate over a layer of aluminum and vinyl foam on top of plastic and then a thin layer of leather. The inside of the helmets were lined with foam padding and plastic pods or an inflatable layer designed to absorb the shock of impact and create as tight a fit as possible.

In 1995 the football helmet went high-tech, when a new rule permitted quarterback to have a radio transmitter in their helmets, making it possible for a team’s coach to call in plays without the need for elaborate sideline semaphore. The use of radio receivers –or should I say radio quarterbacks–are now regulated by the NFL, but it’s up to the teams to decide what kind of system they use. This sometimes can prove to be more of a hinderance than a help, as illustrated by the San Francisco 49ers, who until this year, were known for their terrible helmet radio system that would cut off in the middle of a called play or even pick up pilot chatter from passing aircraft.

Despite the relatively recent integration of this technology, helmet radios are by no means a new development in professional football. Once again, Paul Brown proves to be an innovator. The Cleveland Browns patriarch, who has many coaching “firsts” on his record, experimented with a citizen’s band radio in his quarterback’s helmet as far back as 1956. The last great official change to the helmet came in 1998 when transparent face shields were allowed to protect players’ eyes. Tinted visors, though they may look cool, are only permitted by the league with the approval of appropriate medical documentation.

Crash testing a football helmet (image: Riddel)

Finally, it’s impossible to talk about helmets without saying a few words about safety. Head injury is a growing concern in all sports, but especially football. Just this past summer, 2,000 NFL players joined together in a lawsuit alleging that the League failed to adequately inform players of the neurological risks –dementia, depression, reduced cognitive ability, sleeplessness, early-onset Alzheimer’s– associated with getting pounded into the dirt day after day. Surprisingly, the rule book is light on helmet specifications. While there many incredibly specific rules on intentionally striking a player with a helmet or otherwise using the helmet with any sort of malicious intent, there are no rules dictating what kind of helmet a player can wear other than the stipulation that all helmets must be approved by the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE).

Players are free to choose their own helmets for their own reasons, be it protection, nostalgia, or even vanity. Believe it or not, vanity was even a concern back in the halcyon days of Paul Brown, whose players initially objected to the face mask mandate because they made players too anonymous. Today, helmet mandates in the NFL rule book focuses only on the chinstrap and face mask:

Helmet with chinstrap (white only) fastened and face mask attached. Face masks must not be more than 5/8-inch in diameter and must be made of rounded material; transparent materials are prohibited.

That’s it. The only official rule on helmets. The only other regulations have to do with logos and branding. While the NOCSAE conduct myriad tests on helmets, they do not simulate conditions that can result in concussion, as The New York Times recently reported. However, there are signs that this many be changing. Today’s professional helmets are primarily made by two companies: Riddel and Schutt. Both manufacturers have released helmets designed specifically to protect against concussions after research found that most concussions were caused by hit impact to the side of the head or jaw. The NFL have also taken steps to ensure players safety, such as requiring a brief examination on the sideline after head blows, but the issue remains one of the most controversial in sports.

From humble, hand-cobbled beginnings in a shoe shop to the highly engineered designs produced in the elaborate testing facility of today’s top manufacturers, the football helmet has come a long way in just over a hundred years. But so has the game. Players are faster and stronger than they ever have been and the hits just keep on coming. New materials, new designs, new technologies, and perhaps even new regulations will make sure the helmet keeps up with the game.

Coolidge Dam, Arizona, circa 1930 (Flickr: Water Archives)

Even long after the Wild West’s taming by urban and industrial development, the territory between the Rockies and the Pacific still stands as a symbol of fearless independence. But while the narrative of self-reliance may hold true for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Hollywood starlets, the land Westerners inhabit, argue Hadley and Peter Arnold of the Arid Lands Institute, “was engineered for dependence, placelessness, and a brittle vulnerability to change.”

When John Wesley Powell proposed in the late 19th century that state borders be defined around watersheds to form citizen-managed “hydrologic commonwealths,” he was responding not just to what would make the most sense ecologically, but also to what land divisions would mean for social equity given the extremely uneven spread of natural resources across the U.S. “Powell’s idea was that each of those commonwealths could be organized in a new kind of grassroots democracy,” says author and conservationist William DeBuys, “His whole perspective was based on the idea that unless the ground rules were correct and the institution of settlement were adapted to the land, then settlement would result in a society that was unjust and unsustainable.”

Farmer in the Imperial Valley (Library of Congress)

Powell had foresight. As the Arnolds put it in their Drylands Design exhibition text, our political geography became “a federalized landscape rather than a localized one; concentrations of power rather than distribution of opportunity.” The limitations on the amount of acreage for which a private land owner was entitled to received federal irrigation assistance loosened through the 1960s, DeBuys reports, until “finally the Supreme Court said it’s ok for the Bureau of Reclamation to supply water to people with thousands and thousands of acres. So now reclamation agriculture has produced some of the most feudal landscapes, places like the Imperial Valley, where there’s an owning class and a very poor laboring class and very little in between.”

To address this issue using the original commonwealth framework would be far more complex today than it was in the 1890s, not only because the landscape has been transformed drastically by a century of hydraulic engineering, but also because policies, populations and the climate have all changed. But there’s still a strong argument to be made that understanding how water works and designing our built environment to accommodate its cycles would greatly improve today’s architecture, urban planning, and water management policy.

The new territorial capitals of the hydrologic commonwealth network

Several of the entries to the Drylands Design Competition set out to do that, reframing Powell’s basic proposal in the context of 21st century conditions. Landscape architects Laurel McSherry and Robert Holmes submitted a proposal that would replace the lower 48 states with 86 commonwealths encompassing natural watersheds, each named after its primary river. The redrawing of the U.S. map would also include a relocation of the nation’s capital—long sited at the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers—to the Yellowstone River, near the geographical center of the United States.

Why do this?

“To ease the resource burden stemming from the excessive concentration of political and economic functions at its current site…In the United States, and with specific reference to water, the position of the federal government, its siting in the District of Columbia on the eastern edge of the continent, produces a bias against understanding the full consequences of the aridity of the half of the nation that lies west of the 100th Meridian.”

In McSherry and Holmes’s vision, the commonwealths would be bundled into territories, and the most arid of the commonwealths would become the regional capital. The distribution of decision-making power and the more widespread direct exposure to living with limited water supplies would then, in theory, lead to policy decisions that more appropriately addressed the hydrology of the area.

The U.S. map probably won’t be redrawn any time soon, but the design concept provokes consideration of how a country as large and geographically varied as the U.S. deals with the depletion of its resources. The White House won’t be transported to Yellowstone on a flatbed in the dead of night, but state-level politicians already have the opportunity to think about water management at a smaller scale. There’s power in making that thought process more literal by envisioning a different composition of American political territories.

Decentralized water distribution strategy (Incidental Water design proposal)

Another submission to the Drylands competition zoomed in on Phoenix, the nation’s poster metropolis for overdevelopment and artificial hydrologies. Incidental Water calls out the entrenched notion of “promised water”—the sense that governments and developers have long given citizens, that no matter their local conditions, they’ll have water. The designers point to the geometry of grids as a fundamental obstacle to sustaining the water supply. “The project dislocates the grid, skewing, rotating and warping conventional connective tissues of Phoenix…Aquifer regions, watersheds and biomes have replaced state lines, canal vectors and the US electrical grid as layers contributing to project’s understanding of the West.”

Future energy production and distribution nodes for Phoenix (Incidental Water design proposal)

Incidental Water redesigns the developed landscape to be more flexible, able to accommodate extreme weather events such as a hundred-year flood. Currently, the vast stretches of impermeable surfaces in a city like Phoenix mean that the water bestowed by heavy rains causes problems, rather than presenting a resource recharge. With appropriate infrastructure, rain can be absorbed and stored. Electrical power, irrigation and drinking water all would be generated and distributed through more localized, nodal systems.

In both proposals, the redrawing of political boundaries almost seems like the most unlikely outcome—the most “conceptual” idea—while the rethinking of power generation, irrigation sources, and responses to extreme weather events seems well within the immediate grasp of local decision-makers.

Hydrologic Commonwealths for the American West, proposed by John Wesley Powell, 1879

This is a story about a group of designers in Los Angeles in the year 2012, who are developing design strategies for the year 2020, or 2050, or beyond. But even this future-focused, west coast plot line has an historical thread that ultimately leads back to the Smithsonian. So that’s where we’ll begin. It won’t seem like a design story at first, but it will become one.

113 years ago, an ancestor of the Smithsonian’s Department of Anthropology was established by the US Congress in order to archive research related to the American Indians. The Bureau of Ethnology, as it was initially called, fell under the direction of John Wesley Powell, a scientifically-inclined polymath who had explored the American West extensively and who ran the archive like a living lab for studying U.S. land and society.

Among the many publications Powell produced during his tenure, the most oft-cited is his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, which was meant to illuminate for federal government officials back east how inappropriate existing land divisions would be in the intensely dry western territory.

Ensuring that settlers would be able to farm the land they acquired, Powell recommended that parcels be defined according to the natural water drainage patterns, and that farmers form self-governing bodies to manage their watersheds. “If these lands are to be reserved for actual settlers, in small quantities, to provide homes for poor men, on the principle involved in the homestead laws, a general law should be enacted under which a number of persons would be able to organize and settle on irrigable districts, and establish their own rules and regulations for the use of the water and subdivision of the lands.”

Powell recognized that the origin point of all the settlers’ potential water sources was snow. “The fountains from which the rivers flow are the snow fields of the highlands,” he wrote in his report. He also saw that this natural geological story would have to become an engineering story in order for western development to thrive. But the small-scale, cooperative approach he envisioned did not play out. Instead, over the next century, massive, energy-intensive infrastructure was built to transport water over vast distances. Family farms gave way to industrial agriculture, urban centers ballooned and became sprawl, public utilities gained power and influenced policy.

But for all the change, one important thing remains the same: We still get our water from snow. “30 million people in the U.S. West depend on snow,” says Hadley Arnold, co-director of the Arid Lands Institute (ALI) at Woodbury University, “We drink it, we grow our economies on it. We are a snowmelt-dependent society.” And that’s a problem, because global warming has altered the timing, volume and intensity of precipitation cycles. To quote from the exhibition materials for the ALI’s show, Drylands Design, at the Architecture + Design Museum in Los Angeles, “Current western water infrastructures deliver diminishing snowpack using energy sources that accelerate its disappearance.”

Arnold and her husband, Peter, founded the ALI—which bears echoes of John Wesley Powell’s legacy—with the goal of engaging design students and professionals, scientists, policymakers and the public around rethinking the built environment in the context of water scarcity. “The design of our infrastructure is obsolete,” Hadley says, “Not physically, in terms of rust or disrepair or the need for more, but conceptually obsolete. It is not designed to do the job that is needed to be done.”

Watershed Commonwealths, proposed by Robert Holmes and Laurel McSherry, 2012

And this is how we arrive at the increasingly common assertion that climate change is a design problem. More than a century after Powell challenged the government to design infrastructure and territorial boundaries in accordance with existing landscapes, the task for designers, architects, engineers and planners can no longer be only to follow some of Powell’s logic, but to find ways to undo much of the detrimental development that has occurred in the meantime. “We have to reverse all the engineering that has gone into building code and city infrastructure,” says Hadley. Drawing again on the ALI exhibition materials: “Captured rainwater, storm-water runoff, gray water and wastewater combined form the West’s largest undeveloped water supply. Opportunistically exploiting this supply requires, at every scale, an inversion of the usual order of things: flood as opportunity; surface as sponge; roof as cup; waste as sustenance; city as farm.”

To develop specific strategies around these goals, the ALI partnered with the California Architectural Foundation to organize a conference, a design competition and an exhibition. The image, above, comes from one of the winning teams from the competition, who took up Powell’s hydrologic commonwealth concept and adapted it to contemporary conditions. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be using the competition winners as well as the conference program and exhibition framework as launch pads to explore drylands design in terms of ecology, history, technology and economic markets. We’ll investigate the potential of an “Occupy Watershed” movement, and look at how designing highly visible water infrastructure, as opposed to hiding systems away from public view, could be one key to mitigating the water crisis.  Stay tuned.