Veritas et Venustas

Ugly Is As Ugly Does

THERE IS NO NEED for New York City's taxi of the future to be SO ugly. Before we have thousands, or tens of thousands, of these driving around the city, New York should send Nissan back to the drawing board for the $1 billion plus contract.

• The stubby nose with the little grille above the swollen bumper is ugly.
• The wide lower grill goes badly with the tall swollen bumper.
• The headlights are ugly.
• The pseudo-biomorphic nose and the half-circle wheel wells with outlines are a bad combination.
• The wheels are small for the size of the taxi.
• The front side windows are ugly, and their shape goes badly with the door shape.
• The front and back halves look like they were designed for different vehicles. The windows are a particularly bad combination, but the boxy front and the "sculpted" front also go badly together.
• The black rear quarter already looks like dated graphics.
• This looks like a body designed by committee. There is no harmony.

Pictured below is an outgoing Ford hybrid. It's probably not as good inside as the new taxi, but design is about solving problems, not settling for an unbalanced solution.

BTW, that ungainly, unbecoming view on top is an official Nissan / NYC photo.

And here are some previous thoughts:

V&V: A Sense of Well Being
V&V & WSJ: Building For Beauty
V&V: Truth & Beauty

Donald A. Norman, Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things

Ego Music

I got nothing to do
You got nothing to say
Everything is so fucked up
I guess we like it that way

Everything Falls Apart by Hüsker Dü

The punk rocker calls the song “despair meets resignation” and says it's a way to "build a new way of life through music.”

The songwriter also says, "I am an island." Really. That's the ego speaking. It likes to be alone and unhappy.   

Cogito Ego Sum,
Egonomics,
Egotecture,
Egological,
Egolution

If you don't think this is amazing, you were born a lot later than I was

MY FIRST COMPUTER had no hard drive - everything, including the operating system, was stored on 16K floppy drives. And internet access was far too slow to store things in a "cloud" no one had ever heard of. My first cell phone wasn't in my pocket until a few years later, and the first 2G network came out 7 years after I bought the desktop.

Outdoor Screening, Tonight: Battle for Brooklyn

UPDATE: Battle for Brooklyn opens this Friday, June 17th at Cinema Village in Manhattan

“Don’t miss Battle For Brooklyn, a terrific film version of the sorry tale of Atlantic Yards, a cautionary tale for all cities.” — Roberta Gratz, author The Battle For Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.