Notebook « Candy Chang

urban planning, signs, public space, design, Helsinki, print, NYC, public installation, Africa, music, law & order, India, Asia, New Orleans,
Reselling One of these magnets is not like the other…	The Trucks of the Sidewalk In reference to the ground signage dividing bikes and pedestrians in Helsinki… a more nuanced edit on my block on Uudenmaankatu:	Knowing What People Did By What They Shouldn’t Anymore Grenoble Bangalore Genoa Johannesburg Singapore. No durian fruit, a.k.a. the stinkbomb.	Immigration Graffiti The tables tell the story in Finland’s immigration office in Malmi: Chechnya 09, Espana, Israel, Be cool, Kosova, Moskova, 30.9.2008 Today, Kurdistan PKK, Kill Bill, Estonia, Turkey, Ahmad 2010-1-13, Iran, Unite, Somali, Vive la France, Hello Everybody!

Clothes Make the Building Cape Town Cameron Highlands Maputo	How The Other Half Sings The screen says “SEXY. Give me a dime so I can phone my mother” and we’re singing Every Breath You Take for the third time because I can’t figure out how to work the remote. Someone knocks the balloons from the ceiling. A man stumbles in with a bottle of whiskey. Someone offers me money to [...]	The Long Nail “Why do you have a long thumbnail?” “Hahaha…” ear-cleaner, nose-picker, status-symbol (non-menial-job-worker), cigarette-wrapper-opener, screw-driver, coke-scooper, roach-clip-replacer, luck-bringer…	With Great Safety Comes Great Drunkenness It’s Josephine’s birthday and we’re dancing at Siltanen and sometime in the a.m. we decide to move the party to Redrum. Some people take taxis (although nothing in Helsinki is far) and some people bike. Andreea and I walk and one of the first things we see is a drunk guy on the other side [...]

Fix Everything My Ass When I was working on a criminal justice project in New Orleans in 2006, there were still houses on top of cars. And this was one year after Hurricane Katrina… Last month Sean and Carolina show us around their neighborhood in the Marigny, where restored shotgun houses and abandoned shells sit side-by-side and a mardi gras [...]	Expat for Beginners I’m watching Google Translate re-calibrate in real time as I enter Finnish into the text box, and it’s making government mail kind of exciting: “In order… In order to fall… In order to continue to be on Social Security… In order to include the Social Security system you must submit a new oleskelulupanne…” By the end it falls [...]	The Art of Random Gas station in North Carolina I ask James for movie recommendations. “Mannequin.” “Schindler’s List.” “House Party 3.”	The Life of a Bakkie We’re living in Berea and we need to go back and forth to Diepsloot so we rent a bakkie for the month. Who knows what animals and objects and animal-objects were once in the back of this truck, but for one month it was me and thirteen other people with a good attitude. We’re sitting in [...]

Stop-Motion Finding old projects is always fun, or at the very least entertaining. While digging through an old external hard drive I found this one which takes me back to a time when I was consumed with kneeling on my apartment floor groping toys into the late hours of the night. This is what happens when [...]	Helsinki at Noon Low winter sun and Le Soleil Est Pres De Moi by Air makes even riding the bus romantic.	Please Honk Driving etiquette turned around – trucks and autorickshaws in India actually ask drivers to honk at them with some pretty elaborate bumper signs. It’s the lazy man’s driving strategy – “Ima keep driving like this. If you have a problem with it then toot.” You can imagine what kind of ruckus this causes in traffic [...]	Pebbles After Helsinki’s first big snow, the City sprinkles pebbles on the sidewalks to give pedestrians grip over the ice. How many pounds or kilograms of pebbles they must have, I’m not sure, but they continue to add more after each snowfall until the Spring (who am I kidding, Summer) when they sweep it, store it, [...]

How to Find Rats Bangalore “Have you sold any today?” “Yes, to that restaurant over there… Don’t go there.”	Public Shame Some storefront windows in Johor Bahru, Malaysia feature surveillance video shots of shoplifters as a warning to others and a form of public shame. Makes me wonder about the upshots of surveillance and if Helsinki can do the same for all the drunk people who pee on the streets…	Wonderland Turku, Finland If it’s going to be winter, then let it be WINTER. The Big Ship by Brian Eno on repeat while gliding on a train through soft Finnish snow forests.	Free Maps Finland offers free local maps in choice public spaces like Helsinki’s train station and outside of Turku’s tourist office (above, demonstrated by the lovely Suvi). Just push the button and out pops a handy guide and a welcoming feeling.

Elevator Ride “You know, after people complained that elevator rides took too long, someone had the clever idea of putting mirrors on the walls. People didn’t complain after that.” “Oh that’s clever, so people had something to — oh, we’re here.”	Navigating Your Wine Fun and classy signage in Helsinki’s Alkos that includes over 20 icons to help customers feel out potential food pairings. The duck with the holes? Game birds ha.	Jugaad with Paper While in India I learned a new word – jugaad = making do, being resourceful, getting your MacGyver on. Sometimes this comes in seriously retooled forms like a floating bicycle by Mohammed Saidullah to fend off flood waters and cross the river. Other times it comes in small details like these magazine pages and flyers turned into [...]	Writer’s Block Get excited for unique developments in Johannesburg like Another Urban Renewal Project! Buy this Ethnic Coaster in Cape Town! It’s from Ethnic. Visit Bangalore’s many landmarks like The Oterra and Something Else! Be sure to take Stuff and make sure you don’t do That Thing.

World Wide Website Makeover Along a miracle mile in Georgia I finally entered the 21st century and updated my website. No more table-tinkering in Dreamweaver like a caveman. Now it’s all Wordpress-ified (big thanks to James for the advanced moves). Plus, bigger pictures and bigger fonts for bigger fun.	Frenchmen Street Fuck yeah for brass band disco rock taco truck bottle rocket booty-shaking block parties on Frenchmen Street! New Year’s Eve in a mild climate changes everything.	Censorship One of these posters I made will be in the exhibit Poster4Tomorrow, a global event highlighting the censorship that still muffles citizens around the world. I got a first-hand schooling from TED Fellow Esra’a Al Shafei who can’t have her picture taken/posted for fear of being identified by various Middle Eastern governments. Her organization MideastYouth.com [...]	Buy Tenants’ Rights Flashcards! The tenant flash cards can now be purchased online for $10! The boxed set makes a handsome and righteous gift for anyone living in New York state, and all profits go to the good work of non-profit Tenants & Neighbors. It was great fun creating them and now you can enjoy good times learning the [...]

Flash cards have arrived Last year I got a generous grant from Sappi Ideas That Matter to create flash cards on tenants’ rights with the NY grassroots organization Tenants & Neighbors. After working together for months and sending them out to the printers, the cards have arrived! The boxed set of thirty cards translates NY state’s official Tenants Rights Guide [...]	Open Doors I’m back after an intense and enlightening month of ethnography field research in Asia and Europe. Still thinking about all the people who’ve touched me over the past weeks and parsing through over 3,000 photos (I’m a good Asian!). Lots of thoughts and observations to trickle out over time, but as a start, trains with [...]	Dog Parking By an S-Market grocery store in Helsinki.	The Day After This is what the sidewalks look like during Vappu, the Finnish May Day celebration where students dress like race car drivers (academic jumpsuits color-coded by university department) in sailor hats (graduation caps)… and everyone drinks large quantities in public space… until the next day, when it’s capped off with a “quaint” picnic in Kaivopuisto Park with the [...]

I’m a TED Fellow! I’m so happy and honored to be a 2009 TEDGlobal Fellow! Yay! The inspiring conference features some of the world’s biggest thinkers and doers and I’ve spent many mind-churning hours glued to my laptop watching videos that include Bonnie Basler on how bacteria talk, Malcolm Gladwell on choices, Jimmy Wales on the birth of Wikipedia, Kwabena Boahen on a [...]	Global Polis Exhibit Two of my projects, Million Dollar Blocks New Orleans and the Guide to Street Vending in New York City, are currently featured in the NYC exhibition The Global Polis: Interactive Infrastructures. Curated by Nader Vossoughian and organized by the Center for Architecture, the exhibit awesomely highlights communication tools as just as important of an infrastructure [...]	Making the Process Public NYC’s Urban Omnibus generously gave me the floor to write about the process of working with the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) and The Street Vendor Project to create a fold-out poster demystifying the regulations of street vending in New York City. None of it could have happened without CUP’s Making Policy Public program, which pairs [...]	I’m in The New York Times! Article all about the street vendor guide! And check out my project page for more photos of the guide and the distribution to vendors!

Pass Out Some Vendor Power! It’s hot off the presses! As part of Making Policy Public, I collaborated with street vendors, the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), and The Street Vendor Project to research, compile and design this guide to street vending in NYC. It clarifies the rules so NYC’s 10,000 vendors can understand their rights, avoid fines, and earn an honest living. [...]	California Dreamin’ Etherea record store, NYC When played enough times, songs will become forever bonded to a particular place and time in your life. Bel Biv Devoe’s Poison reminds me of my parents’ home (it was the radio, not them ha). Giorgio Moroder’s The Chase reminds me of my first NYC apartment. Nico’s These Days takes me back [...]	Green Since 1508 Before the salad days of electricity and air conditioning, there were Persian wind towers like these in Dubai. They cool buildings during the day and warm them at night by some clever architectural prowess I don’t fully understand. More here.	I’m on the Urban Omnibus! NYC’s Architectural League recently launched an inspiring online project called the Urban Omnibus that showcases design and activism in the City. They were kind enough to feature my thoughts behind my Post-it Notes for Neighbors public art project. Check it out here! Big thanks to Cassim Shepard and the Omnibus family!

Art of Packaging Customized storage for guns, pipes, and medical tools at the National Museum of Finland. The art of packaging, ritual, and making your things feel special.	Easy Dates to Remember Watching Obama at 7pm today with Finnish subtitles… and his Google maps GPS location at the bottom of the CNN screen. It happened to be Voting Day, November 4th, when I received my official job offer from Nokia and then giddily voted for Obama. And now hours within each other, Obama and I both officially signed [...]	How I Got Here Exactly 9 months ago, in April 2008, I read a New York Times Magazine article about Jan Chipchase and became intrigued – a “human behaviorist” for Nokia who travels the world and humbly observes in order to better understand how people live, work, play, and use technology. I followed his blog, where one month later [...]	Data Walk I’ve got a bag of proposals that may never see the light of day, but they can live on here for funzies and future inspiration. One of these is Data Walk: Bringing Demographics to the People. According to data from the 2000 Census, a particular block east of Allen Street is 50 percent more Asian [...]

Making Memories In exactly one month I’ll be moving to Helsinki, Finland! I’ve accepted a job at Nokia and will be working as a “Design Specialist” with an inspirational group of international designers and thinkers. I’m really excited and look forward to good times improving communication tools and wearing mittens. But before that, I’m on a mission to [...]	Global Studio Global Studio is fun! Initiated by the UN Millennium Development Goals, Global Studio is a place-based action research program where interdisciplinary students, academics, and professionals from around the world come together to collaborate with residents, community groups, and local government to learn from each other and facilitate needs in disadvantaged communities.	Seeing What You’re Breathing Hell yes, this is lorem! When I pass by people in Chinatown wearing face masks I always wonder if the air quality is really that gnarly. Someday the answer will be as easy as opening a mobile phone app! I worked with Spatial Information Design Lab co-director Sarah Williams and Columbia University Computer Science PhD candidate Sean White on visualizing [...]	Vendor Power! I’m a big fan of my fellow Chinese lady who sells $2 noodles at the corner of Elizabeth and Hester Streets, and I have a new appreciation for all the drama she has to endure as a street vendor in NYC. As the designer for one of the Making Policy Public projects, I’m working closely [...]

Parties in Power Political shifts over time Visualizing the shifts in political power since the beginning of the United States	Casual Note I’m consolidating my blogging jones so if you don’t see me here, it’s because I’m all up on The Important Project. But this one deserves doubling up: How to Draw a Man in a Casual Sweater. I love the internets!