February 08, 2013  |  permalink

Fast Co.Design: 4 Simple Hacks To Foster Office Collaboration

(Originally published at Fast Company’s Co.Design on February 8, 2013.)

Zappos has a cubicle problem. The online retailer is famous for its fanatical devotion to both customer service and corporate “cultural fit,” going so far as to pay insufficiently committed new hires as much as $2,000 to leave. The epicenter of this cult is the Zappos headquarters in suburban Las Vegas, where beneath the glitter and confetti piled on every surface (Zappos Family Core Value #4: “Create Fun and a Little Weirdness”) in the name of boosting morale (#7: Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit) are vanilla cubicles that wouldn’t look out of place at Dunder Mifflin. Which would be fine, were it not for item #6 on the company’s list of prime directives: “Pursue Growth and Learning.” Cubes are not exactly optimal for that.

Which is why the cubes will be cast aside when Zappos moves downtown this fall to new digs in the former City Hall after a $60 million renovation. In addition to his 10 core values guiding the company’s cultural evolution, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh has added three Cs: collision, community, and co-learning. Hsieh’s big bet is that exposing his employees to serendipity—within both the office and the city—will ultimately make them smarter, happier, and more productive. That means: no hiding behind partitions.

Zappos isn’t scheduled to start moving into City Hall until September, but in the meantime, the company’s merchandising and design teams have already moved downtown into two floors of temporary office space doubling as a testbed for Hsieh and his lieutenants to put their theories into practice. Here’s what the rest of Zappos’ 1,200 employees have to look forward to:

1. POWER AND ETHERNET CORDS DANGLING FROM THE CEILING.
“The most important quality of this space is adaptability,” says Zach Ware, Hsieh’s right-hand when it comes to planning the move. “Ceiling power-and-data was something we had a hunch about, and so we went to Facebook”—which instituted the practice first—“and they confirmed we weren’t crazy. We had to convince every architect and every fire inspector—who insisted it would be a mess—this was okay. So you’ll notice that nothing in this space is tied down,” which means moving the desks of the resident merchandising, design, and creative teams is simple and constant.

2. TRADE PERSONAL SPACE FOR COMMON AREAS.
The original cubicle—the Action Office II from Herman Miller—was later denounced by one of its designers as perfect for employers “looking for ways of cramming in a maximum number of bodies.” But those cubes were spacious compared to the desks at Zappos’ downtown office, which offer just 70 square feet of personal space—barely a third of the industry standard. “We still have a responsibility to maximize our density,” Ware says, and that means trading personal space for more common areas, ranging from pods of oversized, high-backed couches to communal tables strategically positioned between groups.

“That wouldn’t happen in Henderson,” Ware says, pointing to one such table around which a gaggle of employees are eating cake. “I know for a fact that three or four different departments are represented there. They wouldn’t have collided if there wasn’t a space for doing that.”

3. MAKING YOU GO OUT OF YOUR WAY FOR THE GOOD OF THE COMPANY.
Zappos’ suburban campus is famous for its single set of doors—anyone leaving or returning from lunch is bound to run into a colleague. Downtown employees are spread across two floors, which—as decades of research by MIT’s Thomas Allen and others attest—means they might as well work in separate cities as far as seeing each other on a daily basis is concerned. Zappos’ kludge is simple but effective—employees must check in on one floor and forage for lunch on the other. It will keep them circulating until the company manages to build an internal stairwell.

4. WORK WITH STRANGERS, NOT YOUR COLLEAGUES.
Hsieh’s biggest bet is that Zappos has more to learn from smart people outside the company than inside it. To that end, Ware and a pair of colleagues plan to open this month the first of a trio of coworking spaces named Work in Progress, where employees might share desks—and tips—with the startups Hsieh is busy luring to Vegas. The company’s City Hall headquarters will open this fall with a free coworking space off the lobby, in hopes someone with the next billion-dollar idea just walks through the front door.

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February 04, 2013  |  permalink

“Engineering Serendipity” at TEDxDumbo.

At last, my talk on cities and serendipity at October’s TEDxDumbo has been posted online. My apologies for the sound drop and any other technical difficulties, and my thanks to Lorelei Bandrovschi for having me.

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January 16, 2013  |  permalink

“Smart Working;” My Talk LSE Cities’s Urban Age: Electric City


It was my pleasure to speak at the 2012 LSE Cities Urban Age conference, which was devoted to the theme of the “Electric City.” I spoke very quickly for ten minutes about the future of the office, cities, and the inevitable fusion of the two.

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December 28, 2012  |  permalink

“Chartered Territory” one of The Atlantic’s Best “CityReads” of 2012

I’m very gratified to note that “Chartered Territory” – my investigation of Paul Romer’s charter cities idea and its propose implementation in Honduras – was selected as one of the best long-form “CityReads” of the year by The Atlantic. I’d like to thank Next City’s Diana Lind for commissioning the story as part of its inaugural lineup of Forefront features. Now to see which best-of lists I can make in 2013.

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December 14, 2012  |  permalink

INABA’s “Adaptation” and FR.EE’s “You Are The Context”

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Back in May, the architect Jeffrey Inaba – founder of his eponymous studio INABA and Columbia University’s C-Lab – interviewed me about the implications of “smart cities” for a project he was working on in conjunction with FR.EE (aka Fernando Romero EnterprisE). That project has since spawned two books, INABA’s Adaptation: Architecture, Technology, and the City, a deep dive into the fusion of digital communications technologies and cities in all its forms, and FR.EE’s You Are The Context, a romp in the mold of Rem Koolhaas’ Content nearly a decade ago.

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“As the city becomes more technological, architecture will become more essential,” Inaba writes in Adaptation. “Technologies are growing as part of the functioning of cities, and as a result, the design of the urban environment will take on central importance. But this shift won’t occur as we might think.”

The book features interviews with me, K2S Advisors’ Michael Keane, McKenzie Wark, Boston New Urban Mechanics, Seth Pinsky, Jay Nath, Matthew Chalmers, and many others, several of which – including mine – are reproduced in You Are The Context. Archinect has been kind enough to post a PDF version of Adaptation downloadable here. To whet your appetite in the meantime, here’s a brief excerpt.

JI: If you were commissioned to write a science fiction novel about the city, what kind of story line would you develop? Science fiction often takes one aspect of reality and plays out its consequences into the future with projected advances in technology. What aspects of the city would you extrapolate in this sci-fi sense?

GL : As a teenager I read cyberpunk voraciously. It’s interesting to see how many ideas William Gibson and Bruce Sterling got right in the sense of imagining a data-security state where only outlaws, hackers, and drifters exist without an official identity in an official system.

The other day someone pointed out to me that social networks, in the way they evolve, will continue to draw in and quantify, in very linear states, our relationships with other people, making them more and more transactional. The people who can opt out are going to become the most powerful, wealthiest, most attractive people. Not being part of social networks will become the sexiest proposition possible. Opting out is going to become increasingly seductive. I’m also very curious about the question of how much physical environment we’ll need when we bring networked information to bear on it. Will we need office towers? Will we need office towers as they exist now, these totally homogenous zones for bringing people together under the rubric of a single corporation? How filtered can they be?

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The Japanese architect Hitoshi Abe is working on a project called Megahouse, where the city is basically your living room. Perhaps as we move through cities, we will belong to clubs and guilds that have different turf around the city, and every building will have a room that you’re invited to use–sort of like car sharing. Car ownership will be a thing of the past. And the city will exist as a whole fleet of point-to-point, mass-transit, robotic vehicles. And then there will be all these questions around that, such as, who controls the fleet? How is it run?

And then the other thing I’m particularly interested in is the vision that Gary Shteyngart has, in Super Sad True Love Story, of the Äppärät, a device that we feed more and more of our data into, so we will know who everyone around us is in real time. We’ll have geosynchronous devices that we mount to Big Data and social media networks that will be able to alert us as to who’s near us. The city’s greatest quality is serendipity, the generative power of bringing strangers together. What happens when you try to systematize this, when you make serendipity a service? This is what apps like Highlight and Sonar are trying to do. On the one hand, people recoil when I talk about this; they physically recoil. But in the future, wouldn’t you want that? Wouldn’t you want to know who the person next to you is? How much data is unlocked because we want it to be, and how much is unlocked unwillingly? I would pay five bucks a month or more if I had a device that could tell me in real time that someone walking by me has a really powerful context and that I should get to know them and why.

Those are the sorts of things that I imagine in a very low-grade manner, but it isn’t IB M coming in from above and wiring the city with networks. It’s simply a merging and overlapping of data sets: Facebook meets LinkedIn meets FourSquare meets various other apps. Andrew Keen argues in the Atlantic that this isn’t serendipity at all. I was at a conference where someone said, ‘This isn’t serendipity; it’s stalking.’ To which my response was, ‘Of course. That’s why it’s a service.’ How porous does the city become? How porous do organizations become? Because I think companies are trying to be more like cities. Anyone who has read Steve Jobs’s book and Jonah Lehrer’s book, or Geoff West or Jane Jacobs, knows that cities are the most generative environment of all. So how do we build organizations to be more like cities? I think that question is also why technology companies are getting ‘into’ the city: they sense something here. They sense the limits of the Silicon Valley model, and they’re trying to evolve into something else.

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December 11, 2012  |  permalink

The Complete Studio X X-Cities

Last spring, Anthony Townsend and I hosted “X-Cities,” a series of talks at Columbia University’s Studio-X devoted to the thorny issue of “smart cities.” Four of the five talks (the fourth installment wasn’t recorded) are posted below for your viewing convenience. Perhaps we’ll resurrect the format at a later date.

X-Cities 1: Making the Case for Smart

Lindsay and Townsend are calling the series “X-Cities,” where X marks the spot at which information technology and mega-urbanization converge. In this first session, the pair will lay out their respective cases for the top-down, intelligent design of “smart cities” versus the bottom-up evolution of crowd-sourced “civic laboratories.” Is information technology a real tool for city-building? And, if so, what is its bright and/or scary future?

Lindsay and Townsend will also lay the groundwork for future X-Cities sessions this spring, which feature a stellar list of participants responding to questions on how the relationship between cities and government is being reshaped by ubiquitous computing, what role the private sector will play, how smart technology might redesign the physical fabric of the city, and what the limits on data sharing in tomorrow’s open cities should be.

 

X-Cities 2: My Life Inside Big Data: Power Struggles in Information Security, Open Government, and the Real Time Milieu

In the past decade we’ve cycled from an Orwellian response to 9/11, locking down public data access, to an open data movement that promises to transform government. In both cases cities have been at the nexus of discussion and policy. Now we are on the precipice of another shift in the data landscape with the emergence of pervasive real time sensors, arriving in the form of mobile devices.

Special guest Sean Gorman, founder of GeoIQ, will cover his voyage through these shifts - from navigating the threat of university collected open data being classified by the government, to starting an open data crowdsourcing site funded by the government, and then to trading beer for data in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. What kinds of scenarios will the new streams of data emerging from mobile devices and social media create, and what will their impact be on the city?

Sean Gorman is the founder of GeoIQ, a collaborative web platform for geographic data analysis. Previously he was in academia as a research professor at George Mason University and before that a graduate student at the University of Florida. In between he worked for startups in the DC area building online communities, providing Geo-IP location, and mapping telecom infrastructure.

» Continue reading...

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December 11, 2012  |  permalink

Co.Exist: Can Architects Create A New Neighborhood Of Skyscrapers In New York?

(Originally published at Fast Company’s Co.Exist on November 29, 2012.)

While thousands of New Yorkers struggle to rebuild in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, a much larger project is poised to begin construction on a new neighborhood from scratch on the city’s west side. The Manhattan-based developer The Related Companies expects to break ground this month on Hudson Yards, the $15 billion city-within-a-city built atop a platform over the eponymous rail yards. Cities built from scratch have been popping up in Asia, but what will happen to New York when it adds an entire new high-rise city into an already thriving metropolis?

We will soon find out. The mega-project reportedly received its first $400 million of financing last month to cover phase one of what will eventually include 12 million square feet of offices, condos, hotels and retail enfolded into a quartet of towers—the tallest of which will rise higher than the Empire State Building. Picture Columbus Circle’s Time Warner Center (another Related project) scaled up and re-conceived in Rockefeller Center’s image.

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Related chairman Stephen Ross has drafted a passel of architects to bring the projection to fruition, including Elizabeth Diller of starchitects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the consummate showman David Rockwell, and Skidmore Owings and Merrill partner David Childs, who designed One World Trade Center. But the task of master planning a neighborhood from scratch has fallen to the less flashy firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, best known as the builder of such “supertall” skyscrapers as Shanghai’s 1,614-ft. World Financial Center or Hong Kong’s 1,588-ft. International Commerce Center.

Hudson Yards may shock New Yorkers with its instant addition of a neighborhood the size of downtown Detroit to the north end of the Highline, but this is exactly what KPF—among legions of other western architects have been doing in Asia for years. “This isn’t really a supertall,” KPF co-founder Bill Pedersen said while glancing at a model of the project in his office; Manhattan’s skyline has some catching-up to do. While Pedersen insists the plan for Hudson Yards “is pure New York,” i.e. not a New York version of the Korean city New Songdo, the project bears unmistakable traces of the firm’s decade-long building spree abroad.

» Continue reading...

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November 18, 2012  |  permalink

Empires: A film about networks

In May 2011, I was asked to participate in Empires, a documentary bringing “together international philosophers, scientists, artists and business leaders to give description and analysis to the contemporary moment as defined by computational tools and networks. It states that networks are not new and have been forever with us in the evolution of our cities, trade, communications and sciences, in our relations as businesses and nation states, in the circulation of money, food, arms and our shared ecology. Yet something has deeply changed in our experience of time, work, community, the global. Empires looks deeply to unravel how we speak to the realities of the individual and the notion of the public and public ‘good’ in this new world at the confluence of money, cities, computation, politics and science.”

Director Marc Lafia and producer Johanna Schiller have gamely tossed the rough cut of the film online (above); I was fortunate enough to be included. Not that I’ve watched my performance – Marc shot me in a Chinatown park, stoking me into mania. I’m too scared to watch.

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November 18, 2012  |  permalink

Co.Exist: In China, New Sustainable Cities Are Rising From Nothing

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(Originally published at Co.Exist on November 16, 2012.)

In 1902, a self-taught urban planner named Ebenezer Howard published his utopian vision for “Garden Cities”self-contained circular towns radiating from a central city, connected only by train. Neither town nor country, they were a dense, compact fusion of the two: suburbia without sprawl.

Although Garden Cities never really caught on in the West, the Chicago-based Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture has resurrected the idea with Chinese characteristics: a “prototype city” twice as populous and 20 times as dense, with a tower taller than the Empire State Building at its core. Working with one of China’s largest real estate developers, the firm aims to build them by the score.

The first is slated for a patch of farmland roughly 10 miles from the core of Chengdu, China’s westernmost mega-city. Designed according to the specifications of Beijing Vantone Real Estate Co., the master plan calls for 80,000 residents to live and work within a half-square mile circle in which any point will be at most a 15-minute walk away.

» Continue reading...

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November 01, 2012  |  permalink

Theatrum Mundi/The Global Street

My talk on “Engineering Serendipity” at Theatrum Mundi/The Global Street on October 12, 2012 at Columbia University. (Fast-forward to the 42:15 mark to hear me speak.)

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Greg Lindsay is a generalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a non-resident senior fellow of the Arizona State University Threatcasting Lab, a non-resident senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative. He was the founding chief communications officer of Climate Alpha and remains a senior advisor. Previously, he was an urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and augmented reality at urban scale.

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