Tag: twitter

Taller buildings let us design better towns

I lived in a range of places as a kid, partly because my father was a bit of an itinerant who didn’t know what he wanted in life, other than that I mustn’t live with my mother. Go figure.

Eventually I got to settle down with my grandmother, but in the process I learned a lot about life as a child in different places. Where I felt safe and where I did not.

I did not feel safe in large council estates surrounding cities. I did feel safe in a caravan park. I did not feel safe in a city centre. I did feel safe in a built up part of a large city, living in an apartment block.

Right now I live in a mid-sized house, with a decent garden, in the town of Widnes. It’s nice. I genuinely think Widnes is a very lovely place to live in. Where I am, I have easy access to nature, pleasant walks, parks, a GP, a train station, shops and am not too far from a major hospital. It’s getting close to the ideal 15 minute neighbourhood and I’d say it’s one of the better planned areas I’ve lived in. It’s higher density than some old neighbourhoods I’ve been in, but way lower than others.

But it’s not sustainable. It was built on countryside. Soon more houses will be built. These houses will be between 90m² and 150m². Not that big, really, and they’ll take a fair chunk of land up.

Meanwhile, I can think back to a place that I really enjoyed living in as a kid in Spain. It was rented by my father, so it wasn’t unaffordable, and it was bigger and nicer than any house I lived in here in Britain. It was clean, I didn’t suffer asthma there… almost perfect. And within a short walk we had bars, restaurants, a bodega, and sports facilities. I loved it. I could play safely in the playgrounds with friends, and even went to school there as we had a primary school on site!

Here’s a snip from Google Maps.

As you can see it’s a big old building. I estimate there are between 400 and 500 apartments, varying in size from approximately the three bedroom 90m² apartment we lived in and the larger end apartments which I believe are about 140m².

The caravan I lived in with my grandmother can be seen here although in other pictures it seems it’s been knocked down:

Let’s have a think about housing density here, however.

The caravan park I lived on, including internal roads but not the road to the caravan park used about 320m² per home. Some were more densely packed, some more loosely, but it’s a fair approximation. My current house sits on about the same, funnily enough. The apartment block, however, uses about 100m² of land per home and includes playgrounds, two swimming pools, three tennis courts, a basketball court, shops, bars and more! Use the slider below. Both images are at exactly the same zoom level, and see how 400+ homes compares with about 200 homes for facilities and space use. Our towns could be half the size they are, and rammed with leisure facilities, all at lower cost.

Halsnead Park in Whiston with approximately 210 homes Club del Mar in Alicante with approximately 400-500 homes

Why don’t many British people live in apartments then?

Trust.

That’s it. One word. Due to systemic issues in how the UK treats and manages high density housing, we’ve ended up with a situation where there is very little trust in large apartment buildings.

We have miserable stories like The Decks in Runcorn, where residents have been waiting a decade for resolution and have felt locked in their unsellable apartments.

Historically there have been a number of disasters often down to poor design of buildings so that if something bad did happen, people died. Grenfell is the classic disaster.

By Natalie Oxford – https://twitter.com/Natalie_Oxford/status/874835244989513729/photo/1, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59913134

You had this tower block with a single stairway, no decent quality fire extinguishing system built in, flammable cladding. So many people were let down by the way this country treats high density housing. It was a disaster.

Meanwhile, when I visited family in Poland I noticed there were three stairways in the apartment block – the central one and one at each end of the building. Each corridor also had fire doors at each end, with security access, making it safe but also giving people plenty of options for escape. At the bottom you had a playground, sports facilities, and nearby a park and woods along with good access to public transport and very close shops.

High density housing makes living easier and nicer. You don’t have a garden to tend constantly, and you get a decent amount of space for the money because you’re not handing over a pile of money to wealthy landowners.

But we can’t get from where we are to where we should be without addressing these systemic issues. Meanwhile, we can’t be denying young families genuinely affordable, quality housing. So that means we keep building on land that really shouldn’t be built on. Because we’re scared of towers. And I understand why.

We can build better neighbourhoods, with better facilities, and better lifestyles. It’s possible. I’ve seen how it’s done in other countries. Having family in Spain and Poland, and friends in many other countries has taught me a lot. Being poor up to the age of about 25 has also taught me that we can’t foist middle class solutions to working class problems either. That got us the Southgate estate. It stank of piss.

Design Dilemmas: When bathrooms become battlegrounds

In the world of transgender rights, the battle for the bathroom has reached fever pitch, especially in the USA. Now, I’m not here to referee in this brawl – because on one side of the debate you have the ‘TERFs”, and on the other, the trans rights activists sometimes labelled “handmaidens”. Both are terms about as socially acceptable as weeing all over the toilet seat, and on the extreme fringes of both you find calls for violence. It seems every modern campaign group needs its villains and its sycophantic followers.

Both sides have got themselves worked up about issues that I’m pretty sure most transgender people would prefer to be handled with a little less shouting and little more thought. I have my own opinions, but that’s not for me to share here. What I’m looking at is how design can make the situation better, by picking on one such contentious issue: public bathrooms.

We’ve all got to admit that the concept of women only spaces wasn’t dreamt up at a lovely cocktail party. They often serve as a refuge from the stormy reality of life that many women face. The abused, the desperate, the traumatised who’ve experienced the worst aspects of a male dominated society are, quite rightly, entitled to seek out a safe space away from men.

Meanwhile, imagine you’re a transgender woman and are about to transition.  You’ve got to live life as a woman for at least a year or two before anything permanent happens. It’s an obvious safety precaution so decisions aren’t made in haste.

So out you go on your first night in full femme mode. Nature calls, and you head to the bathrooms. You aim for the ladies, because, well, that’s where you belong now. But for some women in there you might be as welcome as a fox in a chicken coop.

Head into the men’s toilets and many trans women are as vulnerable to the nasty side of men as the traumatised women who want their safe spaces. You don’t feel you belong there.

All you want to do is check your lipstick and adjust the heels.

And there’s a twist here. I’ve met some women who are burly and could beat the majority of men in arm wrestling. They may look pretty masculine too. They’re now sometimes finding themselves being shouted at for heading into the ladies’ bathroom!

About designing loo layouts. The Brits generally build them with two doors going in, and stalls that are pretty private or, as is increasingly common, the toilets are individual spaces with floor to ceiling walls.

Americans, however:

They love a gap! You could pass a handbag through that! Nobody wants to make eye contact with someone taking a dump.

So how about work is done to make sure bathrooms accommodate everyone? Picture a row of stalls which are just little rooms with proper walls. Private, no tinkling sounds being shared. Just a nice, lockable door for each person with a sign saying “Thinking Room”.

We can have scents and nice music for everyone, and ladies can compliment the prospective ladies for their make-up skills. Remember – the more people there are around the more likely they are to hear a shout for help. Predators hide in shadows, after all.

Just a thought. Ultimately then, this isn’t a potty problem. It’s a design problem. And that means we can design our way out of this mess, and make sure everyone is happy. Or are we going to just keep arguing until we’re just too old to care what’s going on in the next door toilet cubicle?

Comments. Please. Just remember the one rule on my site. Be kind.

A little change on this website

In the past, this website was sort of my place to keep family and friends in touch. I first set it up in 2005, just before going away to Peru on travels. It was a great. Facebook had been invented but wasn’t generally available or popular yet, other platforms weren’t well thought through or scattered, Twitter didn’t exist. But installing WordPress on my cheap Yahoo web hosting turned out to be one of the easiest ways to publish content and share it with the world.

But then the day came when I upset some far right people, and I realised some content had to go away. My trust in the world diminished. A man shouted abuse aimed at me at our house one night. Nobody else in the family witnessed this, incredibly – the kids were asleep, my wife was brushing her teeth with an electric toothbrush, and all I did was simply close the bedroom window and ignore the man. No point feeding a fire.

That was the moment when I realised that being hyper online, sharing everything, and also trying to fight to protect people from the malevolent sides of society came at a cost. Before that I’d been campaigning against Brexit, and continued to do so.

A year after that abusive night – I had a heart attack. I document some of that here, and here. I don’t recommend it, but I did realise that for most of my life I lived under a constant strain. As a kid I attended seven or eight (I actually lost count!) schools before I was twelve. I’d lived in multiple countries, and most of that with an abusive, violent and frequently drunk father. Each school was a new challenge – standing out, but then also being reasonably bright, and a bit weird was tough. But I learned about people, what makes them tick, and also that the only thing that really worked once a bully had decided you were a victim was to fight back. You could win a battle with words, or you could win it physically. It worked.

It always worked.

And it has to stop. I’m too old, too tired, too spread thin to fight and, more importantly, to take the damage. Obviously I haven’t been in a physical fight in a very very long time, but verbal fights? Arguments? Online battles with the world? Plenty. And I see many people just quietly standing at the side. They might agree, but they’re not going to fight that battle.

I disagree with ignoring injustice, but I’m also at that stage where I think that fighting small battles is pointless when there’s a broader war going on. So instead, from today, I’m turning my mind to making this blog about the intersections between design, technology, publishing and ethics.

Why? Because this is the stuff I know about these days. That’s all. And I hope I can make it interesting and useful to others.

Twitter is about to die. Here’s why.

Something odd has started to happen on Twitter for me, and it’s cutting my usage of it down quite dramatically. Why? It’s because it seems the spammers are winning…

https://twitter.com/nrhansonp/status/318959016602660864

https://twitter.com/fierofan11q/status/318758157247709184

https://twitter.com/DavidThiebaudc/status/318665593605738497

https://twitter.com/catazettler3/status/318327663506890752

https://twitter.com/clintonxbaurer/status/318093880182591488

Every. Single. Day. I get lots of these. Some disappear into the ether, others remain on the Interactions tab on Twitter. Given that these tweets outnumber genuine interactions there’s a problem, because whenever any service starts to get more than about 50% spam its usefulness drops off. Email has that, and email has suffered, but commercial spam filtering is so good that most of us have a provider that makes it continue to be useful.

What happens is that I’m powerless to stop this Twitter spam. It’s not like I can install something in my Twitter client. Marking content as spam is astonishingly clunky in Twitter.

I’ve made some great friends on Twitter, but I’m fed up of seeing the alert pop-ups on my phone, so that’ll be the first place I disconnect it from. And then it gets that little bit less useful… I’ll start to forget to check-in. Suddenly, a few days will pass when I don’t look on Twitter.

I doubt this will affect everybody, but it could be enough to mark the end of Twitter as a global and egalitarian short-form publishing platform. I remember when CIX died for me – there it wasn’t the spam, but the number of grumpy nutters with too much time on their hands driving out the useful but quiet individuals.

I know I’m using Twitter less these days, but the general level activity amongst the older Twitter community really appears to be dying down. Celebrities and the media are still busy, but they alone can’t sustain the system – it needs the grass roots using it to keep it relevant.

I hope Twitter can fix this, or soon I’ll just give up. What do you think? Are you being spammed to death on Twitter? Are you using it less and less?

Tim Ferriss and why I don’t like his emotional blackmail

I appreciate, right away, that by writing about Tim Ferriss I’m going to give him the oxygen of publicity. And what follows may just be a small-minded rant. I don’t know – feel free to tell me if I’m wrong by commenting….

Four minute workweek would be too much for some... (picture of Vicky Pollard from Little Britain courtesy of the BBC)
Four minute workweek would be too much for some... (picture of Vicky Pollard from Little Britain courtesy of the BBC)

If this is actually just a small-minded rant, feel free to tell me in the comments.  I need to know if I’m just an idiot who hates somebody doing well and raising money for charity….

I appreciate, right away, that by writing about Tim Ferriss I’m going to give him the oxygen of publicity.  That in discussing him we all encourage him to continue to use attention seeking devices to increase his influence and marketability.

And boy, does he know how to market.

Here’s a guy who’s written a book with an interesting concept.  It’s titled The 4-Hour Workweek.  Very interesting it may be.  But I haven’t read it.  Nor will I.

Because to read it would mean giving money to someone I find incredibly irritating.  I mean, the guy gets everywhere.  But he’s a fascinating study in popularity.  Just like the most popular kids at your school probably weren’t the most capable or interesting, neither is he.  Let’s go through some things:

1. Use of emotional blackmail to increase influence

Basically, the more people who follow your tweets on twitter, and the more people who follow your blog, the more influence you carry.  Tell 100,000 people what you think about something, and you’ll influence them.  Some will blindly take on-board your opinions, while others will be a little more cautious.  But 100,000 people who treat you almost like a God?  That’s power, that is.

Anyway, his latest way to build followers is to use a not-so-subtle form of emotional blackmail.  He will raise for charity $3 for everyone who follows him on Twitter with a limit of 50,000. Now, you’d have to be pretty mean-spirited not to click that Follow button.  That’s all you have to do to raise $3 dollars to help educate some US children.  I mean, if you hear about this initiative and don’t click then you must be a truly horrible person.  For five seconds work you can raise $3 dollars.  That’s, like making $2160 an hour for charity!  Wow!

I believe this guy is using the tricks religions use to gain followers.  The upside of following their instructions may not be massive, but the downside could be huge.  And he uses this approach All The Time.  It’s horrible to see.  See, in religion you can say things like “follow the guidelines in this book in order to receive eternal salvation” and “if you don’t follow us you could be cast into eternal damnation.”  It’s like Pascal’s wager – if the religion is correct, then a small amount of investment of time and effort leads to a massive pay off (ie. eternity in heaven) but if you’re wrong and death is just death… well, you haven’t lost much, have you?  Ratio of cost to potential gain is ridiculous.

2. Four hour workweeks don’t appeal to me

I mean, I enjoy my work.  Simple as that.

3. But perhaps one of the things that turns me off is the overbearing air of smugness

Look at the guy’s header pictures.  You can tell he isn’t English.  You couldn’t go into an English pub and face your mates if you had a picture of yourself striking a sort of zen-style karate pose on your website’s header (carefully revealing your muscles, of course) unless perhaps all your friends were just like you.

4. In the end though, it’s the emotional trickery

The promises are high.  The headlines beguiling.  And you know, to someone working a dreary job or with difficult people what he discusses sound attractive.  But a lot of it reminds me of me when I’d discovered I could make lots of money as a PeopleSoft developer.  I really had it all – I could work moderately hard for short periods, taking plenty of breaks between contracts, travelling, fast cars, and sleeping with beautiful models.  Ok, forget the bit about models, but really, life looked good.

And boy was I happy to let people know this.  But when I thought about it, I got into corporate systems because at 18 I wanted to get a job coding and the only suitable job I could find around here was at a corporate.  I trained up and, one day, took my skills out onto the open market.  But the truth is, I was just lucky.  How was I to know, in 1987, that ERP developers would be highly sought after in highly paid roles that the universities were failing to train for?  I’d much rather have been a games developer – but truth be told, I wasn’t that good… Good for my wallet and lifestyle, because game coders typically earn less than ERP coders, but this was all pure chance.

In summary, Tim Ferriss is probably little further ahead of the curve than a lottery winner releasing a book called “How To Choose Lottery Numbers and Become Super-Rich Like Me.”  That would be patent nonsense, but no more or less manipulative than his own lifestyle guruness.

So when this rich young man tries to pressure me into trying to find more people who can learn about him and adore him by tweeting about his new scheme, I find myself feeling ever so slightly sick.  The idea sounds, initially, excellent.  But why doesn’t he just give the money directly to charity?  Why does he make it into conditional love?  Why does he make it feel like a psycho girlfriend or boyfriend who says “if you loved me you’d do it.”

Maybe I’m Wrong

In a way I’d like to be.  But I always want to look at the motives behind people.  Maybe I’m just an idealist.  But if I’m right, it might just dissuade people from posting some of the self-promoting junk that clutters up Twitter, forums and blogs.  Not just his junk, but other people’s.  There’s a growing tide of the stuff.  It’s annoying.

Anyway, just a final call to action – you can follow me on twitter too if you like.  I just won’t pay anybody anything.  I also promise to try not to sell you anything, or retweet marketing gumph, competition announcements and so on.  I may however, complain vehemently about whatever random irritation that cropped into my head that day.

Edited to add a link above to the Tim Ferriss’s blog post on the matter.  And tags.