One of these magnets is not like the other…

a more nuanced edit on my block on Uudenmaankatu:

Grenoble

Bangalore

Genoa

Johannesburg

Singapore. No durian fruit, a.k.a. the stinkbomb.

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!

Cape Town

Cameron Highlands

Maputo

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 have a threesome. It’s easy to see how things can get carried away.

There are the KTVs where teenagers (mostly girls) go for wholesome fun at the mall after school. And then there are the KTVs where adults (mostly guys) go for “entertainment plus.” We walk passed a strobed-out dance floor and secure one of the private rooms in the back. The room is lined with couches and in the center is a coffee table with an ash tray and a box of tissues. A waiter holds the flashlight in his mouth as he serves us drinks in the dark. If you want additional company, hired club girls are brought in and lined up for the choosing. What happens after that is less formal.

When a Britney Spears video comes up, her cleavage is blurred out. Muslim practices trump others in Malaysia and nudity and sex is censored in all movies. One girl gushes about the scenes she and her friends missed in Titanic but found later on YouTube – him painting her naked, them “making love.” One guy tells me he was shocked when he saw the uncensored version of Basic Instinct. I’m wondering how short the censored version must have been. At the same time as Britney’s bosom crease is blurred on the screen, the guy with the bottle of whiskey is offering me coke, which I politely decline. The Asian in me wants to get best value for this room, so John, Michiel and I stay to the end and sing increasingly ridiculous songs until four in the morning. But it doesn’t end so well for others – earlier that day a guy at a cafe tells me about the seedier side of KTVs and just how dark it can get. “Just last week, in the club upstairs, a Chinese national girl was offered 2000 ringgit to snort a line of coke seven feet long. She did. And then she died.”

“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…

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 of the street – and not just swervy-drunk, but zig-zag-bumping-and-holding-onto-the-building-drunk. Girls and guys are equally spotted stumbling in near-black-out-mode during the late hours in Helsinki. In any other city they’d be a target. Here they regularly pass out on the sidewalk and others politely walk around them. Is there such a thing as feeling too safe?

For a city as big as Helsinki, the public trust is off the charts. Babies in baby strollers are left outside of stores. Bikes are left unlocked in front of supermarkets. Laptops, cameras and bags are left on cafe tables unattended. Beyond high employment rates and no desperation to steal, some think it’s the homogenous culture and some think it’s a behavior maintained after a tipping point. There’s an unspoken camaraderie in the cafe if the guy next to you leaves his camera unattended and you later do in kind with your bag. When people give you the benefit of the doubt, you want to give them the benefit of the doubt back. Something happens when you come back and see that nothing happened.

But Helsinki is so safe that people think they can get shit-faced and publicly swerve home without worries. Should anyone ever think their city is that safe? Does a hint of danger increase sobriety? Andreea and I see a shape on the sidewalk. As we get closer we see books, blood, and a man slumped on his side. “Oh my god are you ok?” He wakes up. He’s trashed. “Ya ya..” “Oh my god what happened?” “Nothing nothing…” His face is punched in and he says something about his keys. Andreea calls the police. I gather up gruesome things from the sidewalk – book pages are stuck together with blood, his glasses are broken, his keys are red and sticky. He won’t tell us what happened but he has enough memory to say he lives here so we walk him in to the building. “I’m not a Nazi… Who are you?… You are angels…” The key fits into the apartment door and it opens up to a giant and tidy home with a diplomat-worthy dining room and two bathrooms. “Please stay, what are your names…” We tell him he really needs to rest and we put his things on the table and leave and wonder if he’ll remember any of this tomorrow.

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 store doubles as a local grocery. The population is over 330,000 and counting, blighted houses are down to one-third, and a new mayor, Mitch Landrieu, was just elected by a landslide. Things are definitely on the up and up and here’s to exciting new times for a city that someone once told me “has more heart than a shitload of hearts.”

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 apart (”If you do not ask the time limits by asking clarification, video tracks will be settled between us”), but this is what you get for being an expat. Learn the language or enjoy creative cooking instructions like “pour into a mature pasta strainer” and “catapult the water.” When I first arrived I was pumped to learn Finnish. A year later the extent of my vocabulary still sits around hei (hi), kiitos (thanks), miten menee (how are you), mahtava (awesome!), kippis (cheers!), and hei läskiperse (hey fat ass!). Since most Finns speak English and work at Nokia is in English, the experience has been more like Expat for Beginners, and even Finns admit the language is complicated and hard on the eyes. I feel most immigrant-y when I get my mail or go to the grocery store. Typing words like “haltuunottotodistuksen” into Google Translate isn’t easy and I bring the serious-looking stuff to my Finnish co-workers for help. I only translate mail that looks like I might get deported. I’ll wait for a point-and-shoot translator gun for the rest.

Despite appearances, appelsiini is in fact not apple juice but orange juice (apple juice is omenamehun); leipäjuusto is Finland’s tasty mozzarella-like “squeaky cheese”; and that’s about as advanced as I get with food words. I treat the grocery store as a sensory experience and pick what feels right. I believe the milk in the lighter blue packaging means it has less fat. I pick the mystery meat slices that look most delicious. I choose the salad dressing that’s not too orange and not too yellow. I try the bread in the green packaging this time and the orange packaging next time. I have no idea what this is but I like the design of the label. I go by the pictures. I know what it’s like to be illiterate. This has actually encouraged me to linger longer around the fresh produce, which feels familiar without effort (I know you, banana), but winging it also means you end up buying a zucchini when you meant to buy a cucumber.

Gas station in North Carolina

I ask James for movie recommendations.

“Mannequin.”

“Schindler’s List.”

“House Party 3.”

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 the back in the dark and the exhaust pipe is pumping out fumes right by the door so we develop a knock system to keep in contact with the guys driving. Two knocks: still alive. Four knocks: pull over. No response: really pull over. It’s a 40-minute drive and the bakkie stalls at every few traffic stops and the ignition and motor are so loud we can’t hear what’s going on up front. At the beginning we sing camp songs and by the end we hold scarves and sweatshirts over our faces to filter out the fumes and just keep it together. Belinda is the smallest so we treat her like the canary in the cave.

When we arrive in Diepsloot everyone laughs at us, Bongani thinks we’re nuts, and no one needs to say we’re on a budget. When we jump out of the back we look like a misfit swat team or a muted clown car. When we go out at night we don’t worry about the car getting stolen. Our only concern is breathing and making the wheels go, and that equation breaks down on one of the last nights when Mark, Crighton and I are driving back from Melville. The bakkie stalls at a traffic light and no pumping-and-turning sequences can make it start again. A tow-truck-driver tugs us to the nearest gas station…

where he checks under the hood and says it belongs in a museum…

and I, being Asian, take a picture…

and Matthew and Ricky come out and help push the beast all the way home…

and the next day a guy comes and replaces it with this bad boy. Same same? R.I.P. Bakkie.

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 design students don’t go to class ha… In 2001, James Reeves, Steve Baker and I holed up and made this stop-motion animation for the fun of it. Construction workers and spacemen build a space station, send faxes, and find friendship, all to a very soupy electronic soundtrack. After all these years this low-fi copy is the only surviving version, but the fuzziness probably adds to its janky charm. Direct YouTube link here.

Low winter sun and Le Soleil Est Pres De Moi by Air makes even riding the bus romantic.

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 and the things they’ve tried to stop it, like No Honking Day. But how do you tell the driver in front of you to stop honking…

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, and use it again next year. This means no contamination of the groundwater. This also means that many winter walks involve you, your thoughts, and one tiny pebble caught in your shoe.

Bangalore

“Have you sold any today?”

“Yes, to that restaurant over there… Don’t go there.”

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…

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.

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.

“Every design process is incomplete unless it takes into careful consideration what could be done with the product by a dictatorial megalomaniac in command of a national economy, a secret police, and a large army.” – Bruce Sterling

“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.”

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.

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 street food containers. Neat! I asked vendors where they got the idea and they all said they saw another guy doing it. Cheaper than buying dedicated bags and more striking and customizable to boot. And imagine the bonus reading material and centerfolds customers could unfurl after eating…

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.

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.

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.

The flash cards are also available at Project No.8’s new store No. 8a in the Ace Hotel. If you’re a New York store interested in carrying the cards, please contact Maggie@tandn.org.

3″ x 4″ die-cut cards are printed on 12pt coated cover stock by Colortone.
The word on the street: BLDG BLOG. Boingboing, Gothamist, FastCompany, Public Workshop

Download a pdf version!
Read my article about the process on the Urban Omnibus!

32″ x 22″ fold-out poster is printed on heavy 80 lb. Lynx Brightwhite Smooth matte paper stock by Westcan/Printcrafters Inc.
The word on the street: The New York Times, New York Magazine, TYPO Magazine, Communication Arts, BLDGBLOG.
This project will be featured in the 2010 National Design Triennial by the Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum!

Tickets from street vendors – mostly for parking their cart too far from the curb, parking on restricted streets, parking too close to a storefront, and not “conspicuously” wearing their license

Typical page from current regulation book. Snap!

Meeting with street vendors to develop the guide

Distribution event, 2009. Vendor photos by CUP

The team: Sean Basinski, Rosten Woo, John Mangin, and Candy Chang

And something Sean recently found from 1905:

“I think it would be a great advantage to all the peddlers to have a translated copy of the license issued. As it is, some of the Italians cannot understand the regulations of the road and the ordinances of the City. If it were printed in English…in Yiddish…in Greek, Italian and Syrian for the others it would prove to be a great aid to them.”
- Rev. Bernardino Polizzo, 1905, during a hearing on the pushcart menace

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 is an unfiltered platform that facilitates freedom of expression and constructive discussion amongst youth in the Middle East (with provocative video mashups to boot), but they have to constantly get their nerd on and rewire their internets in order to keep their lines open to the rest of the world. At least not as bad as in China, she said, where the internet police are even more sophisticated in their nerdy ways. Spread that. The exhibit of 100 posters from designers around the world launches December 10th in 20+ cities including Beirut, Belgrade, and Buenos Aires. Latest news here. If you want to print them out you can download big versions here and here.

Read my article about the process on the Urban Omnibus!
Installation assistance by Kay Cheng.
The word on the street: Gothamist, Utne, The Design Studio for Social Intervention

More images on Flickr

Results:

All Post-it notes on final day.

Post-it notes whittled down to ones with responses (half of total).

After the week-long installation it was a pleasant surprise that 1) nearly all the Post-it notes stayed in tact after multiple rain storms and 2) people responded! 151 notes out of 300 were filled out. What a fun and easy way to collect neighborhood info… The results are tallied below:

Nearly half of responses came from people living in their apartment for 2 years or less – a reflection of the temporary-ness of many New Yorkers/renters? The winner of Cheapest Apartment goes to someone living in a studio in Carroll Gardens for 43 years that costs $146/month (!) And the Most Expensive goes to someone in a 4-br in Cobble Hill for 4 years that costs $3,720/month. Some other interesting responses about monthly rents:

3 br in Red Hook for 13 yrs – $200
1-br in Brooklyn Heights for 1 yr – $3315
1-br in Jersey City for 3 yrs – $1000 (”w/ a backyard bitches!”)
3-br loft in Chelsea for 30 yrs – $1095
1-br in Cobble Hill for 11 yrs – $893.45
1-br in Carroll Gardens for 21 yrs – $350
2-br in Clinton Hill for 14 yrs – $700
2-br in Williamsburg for 10 yrs – $800
2-br in Carroll Gardens for 55 yrs – $350
2-br in Bethlehem, PA (the only non-NYC-area response) for 1 wk – $730

52 responses came from people living in 1-br apartments in Carroll Gardens. Below are the range of costs depending on the number of years people have lived in their apartment:

A few lifers are getting some good deals, but it seems like some costs have caught up with time. I printed “cost(s)” on the notes to invite input from both renters and owners, but the responses were mostly from renters. Now I see that I still botched the wording – most Brooklynites buy complete brownstones/houses rather than apartments. The only owners who entered info were people who I met while tending to the project – one guy has lived in a two-apartment house in Carroll Gardens for 30 years and it cost him a mere $125,000 (it’s worth $3 million now). He also happened to know my old landlords around the corner and said their family was “trouble” (agreed, ha). And a woman named Deborah bought three homes in Bed Stuy from 1988-2003 and never paid more than $250,000. They put her two sons through college and will allow her to retire early. “Like they say,” she said, “they’re not making any more of it. Get yourself some real estate!”

View pdf of final report.

Credits: Project Director: Laura Kurgan. Project Coordinator: Steven Caputo, Research Associates: Johnna Cressica Brazier, Deborah Grossberg Katz. 2006 Fellows: Candy Chang. Andrew Colopy, Derek Lindner, Leah Meisterlin, Julia Molloy. This work builds upon a two year research project: Graphical Innovations in Justice Mapping, a collaboration between the Justice Mapping Center, the Spatial Information Design Lab and the JFA Institute. Project Team: Laura Kurgan, Eric Cadora (Project Directors), Sarah Williams, David Reinfurt. Invaluable research and thinking was also provided by the students in the GSAPP Advanced Studio, Spring 2007: Johnna Cressica Brazier, Steven Caputo, Jane Estrada, Laura Lee, Catie Liken, John G. Lloyd, Annemarie Scheel

Percent persons living in poverty per block group, 2000

Percent adults admitted to prison per block group, 2003

Prison expenditures per block in thousands of dollars, 2007

Justice reinvestment network in Central City, 2007

The word on the street: BoingBoing, DailyCandy, Spacing Magazine, Geez Magazine

Team: Monica Bansal, Alyssa Boyer, Candy Chang, Kay Cheng, Leticia Crispin, Reuel Daniels, Jen Graeff, Beth Helton, Lily Langlois, Ryan Walsh, Eleanne van Vliet. Faculty & support: Eliott Sclar, Sumila Gulyani, Christie Marcella, Sigurd Grava, Julie Touber, Nicole Volavka, Patrick Kinney, Mike Reilly, Peter Ngau, Musyimi Mbathi, University of Nairobi Department of Urban and Regional Planning

3′ x 10′ project poster, designed by Candy. View pdf of poster

Screenshots of mid-presentation, designed by Candy. View pdf

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 law on security deposits, privacy, repairs, eviction and more. Learn more about the project and buy them in Tenants & Neighbors’ online store!

Team: Bongani Baloyi, Lucky Mkah, Lungile Maphumulo, Tebatso Lebotsa, Selaelo Chuene, Phumlani Suka, Warren Mabona, Lawrence Matshidiso, Sam Sikhosana, Anja Bredell, Jennifer Graeff, Belinda Kanpetch, Crighton Nichols, Elonah O’Neil, Dr. Marc Aurel Schnabel, Michelle Tabet, Candy Chang

Thesis advisor: Robert Beauregard, Thesis reader: Sarah Williams

In addition to the event, I designed a local resource guide made for and by recovering female drug addicts. During peer support meetings the women would scribble down and xerox a recommended event and pass pages around; they had no easier way to keep track. To help remedy this, the guide includes a blank calendar to help maintain a positive schedule for peer support meetings and more. It also includes a map of female-friendly organizations, key of services, and list of phone numbers for crisis, legal and recovery help. The pamphlet is easily xerox-able at community facilities and, as suggested by VANDU members, the pamphlet folds down to wallet-size for easy portability. 2006.

Temporary park on Hastings Street

The team, minus VANDU Women’s Group (for privacy)

Entire Global Studio Vancouver family, working with other community groups in the area

Thanks to university support and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, equal numbers of students from both developed and developing countries have been able to participate in the month-long program. As a student in Vancouver 2006 and a project associate in Johannesburg 2007 and 2008, I’ve worked with recovering drug addicts and a community news group and helped the team on projects that focus on information-sharing, the environment, housing, and the arts. I’ve also worked with cofounder and convener Anna Rubbo to develop and design many things along the way, including a website and exhibition (pdf of the panels, some below). It’s involved over 30 countries, 50 universities, and 10 disciplines – and is the reason I have so many Facebook friends. Get a glimpse from the images below and check out the website for more information.

View pdf of all panels

The crew: Sarah Williams, Michael Wilkerson, Jennifer Kaminsky, Amanda Huron, Catherine Herdlick, Candy Chang. Stickers printed by Stickergiant.com.

Google map of sticker locations in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Brooklyn

Guided tour, September 2007

Guided tour, September 2007

Work in progress

Project website

Photo credit: Evgene Belikov

Photo credit: Evgene Belikov

View pdf of facts page

]]> http://candychang.com/the-hair-district/feed/ 0 http://candychang.com/pedestrian-timeline/ http://candychang.com/pedestrian-timeline/#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:36:19 +0000 admin http://candychang.com/main/?p=2125 Did you know squirrels didn’t arrive on Governors Island until 1931? That’s right. To bring local history to the streets, I stenciled 20 landmark events in the history of Governors Island along the sidewalk. From a bucolic nutfest to a military base to a future public park, the mysterious island just south of Manhattan has gone through a lot. As visitors walk along the path, they can easily get their learn on about the local area while enjoying a leisurely stroll. Created with temporary spray-chalk, the Pedestrian Timeline was part of the Figment public art event on Governors Island in June 2008.

Stencils in reverse order to emulate the stroll if you scroll up:

]]> http://candychang.com/pedestrian-timeline/feed/ 0 http://candychang.com/bike-map-covers/ http://candychang.com/bike-map-covers/#comments Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:28:09 +0000 admin http://candychang.com/main/?p=2230 Things are definitely on the up and up for NYC bikers as the City continues to add new bike lanes each year. They can easily find them thanks to the NYC bike map (free at any bike shop). I got a chance to offer the Department of Transportation some designs for the 2008 bike map cover. Alas they went with something in-house, but I thought I’d post the three design directions here so they can have a brief life beyond my laptop.

View pdf

View pdf