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Occasionally the mind needs to wander, be allowed to stray from the familiar pasture and seek answers that are found where they are not expected. That is a lesson that "design thinking" teaches us. So it happened that after watching the movie "the Imitation Game" in which it's protagonist Alan Turing makes remarkable progress in problem solving, it seemed that the film offers inadvertently a set of instructive lessons about how to solve problems and how to design, neatly packaged for evening entertainment, no less. Alan Turing, Mathematician Alan Turing  was a British mathematical genius, who can be seen as the inventor of the computer ( Turing Machine ) and definitely was the one who broke the German WW II code which was produced with an encrypting machine called  Enigma . Although dead since 1954 his name has been in the news lately because of a pardon Queen Elizabeth gave him posthumously in 2013 (he had been convicted of "indecency" because of homo...

Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth. (H.L. Mencken, the Libido for the Ugly, 1927) Neither natural ability without instruction nor instruction without natural ability can make the perfect artist.   (Vitruvius, 10 Books on Architecture) That good design adds value to buildings and, on the urban scale, to entire cities, is an increasingly popular insight, yet, not a new one. Design review as part of development approval has been around for decades, a testament to the importance of good design, despite Mencken's spiteful observation. (One of the oldest review committees may be the   Vieux Carre Commission , established in New Orleans in 1936, admittedly for mostly historic preservation, a subset of design review). In Baltimore the importance of design is recognized wi...

When on a snowy night we half wake from the rumble of the plow and see the yellow flashers reflected on the ceiling, we go back to sleep with the conviction that the mayor and the local public works crew are doing a great job keeping our streets clear.  The politicians know, if voters don't see snow and ice combated military style, their re-election is in jeopardy. Salt in abundance But the thing that should be keeping us awake is the ugly flip side of the battle for clear roadways. Recent news highlighted the increasing salinity of our rivers and streams, and points the finger at one chief culprit: the exponentially growing consumption of salt, sodium-chloride, to fight icy roads, a practice that started in the US quite a bit after the automobile, in 1938. Imagine this: US road salt consumption jumped in 25 years from 9.5 million metric tons annually (1980) to 19.6 million tons in 2006 (in 2013: 22 million tons).  Knowing that one truck holds about 7 tons of salt, that is a f...

This article is part of a series on simple measures how to improve urban transport. See also: Pedestrian Safety , Water Transit and Complete Streets  No matter how much sexier and livelier the debate about streetcars, light rail, subways or commuter trains is, the reality is that the majority of transit in the US happens on buses. Last year, buses were used nationwide for more than 5.35 billion "unlinked" trips ( APTA report ), which means bus trips account for half of all transit users and thus outdoes all other transit modes combined. Bus stop on Charles Street, Baltimore The most frequented mode of public transportation is also the most maligned, the least popular and the one with the biggest image problems. One could add to that list that it is the most poorly funded: With only between 23 and 27% of all transit investments the mode which transports more than half of all passenger gets only a quarter of the money. One would think that there would be a rich body of policie...