Author Archive
Case study pamphlets
Case study pamphlets are up on the front page of this site! For each case study, you’ll find links to a downloadable PDF and to Lulu where a bound and printed copy can be purchased. The series will be rounded out by an introductory “Course Files” pamphlet and a closing pamphlet, “Urban Research”. These last two pamphlets will be posted next week very soon! (Sorry for the delay. As I am using the urban research pamphlet as a template for future urban media labs, I’m taking some extra time with some behind the scenes formatting…)
Final grades have been submitted to the New School, and you should have all by now received feedback on your work via email over the course of this week and next. Please expect a message from me to your New School account in the coming days. Each of you should have by now received feedback on your case studies in the form of embedded comments in the PDF document itself.
5.11 last class
Hi all, A few quick reminders for tomorrow:
– Case study groups will be asked to spend 10 min each to update on work progress. Please bring visuals on USB drive, or have ready to bring up online.
– I will bring a little wine + food (in as little packaging as I can!) In the interest of reuse, please also feel free to bring any food you might have and want to share, but absolutely no obligation, and certainly do not buy anything.
-Finally, links to case study guidelines and recently posted FAQs are above.
See you soon!
Case Studies due 5.16 | FAQs posted
All final case studies are due Monday, 5.16 @noon. Download and review all case study guidelines here, and refer to formatting and submission guidelines for detailed submission instructions.
Questions? I’ve dedicated a separate page to FAQs. You can reply to this post with further questions or you can email them to me [blaustej@newschool.edu] directly. You can also bring your questions to our last class Wednesday. While course evals are being filled out, I will be available to chat in the hallway.
NYU talk on municipal waste and reuse 5.11, 12-2pm
A fitting event to attend before our last class:
Samantha MacBride | Materials Flows in Cities: Just Sustainability and the Logistics of Collection
This event is open to the public with photo ID. RSVP here.
May 11, 2011 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor, IPK Main Conference Room
End of Semester Deadlines!!
URBAN RESEARCH: All WASTEmap site tags should be uploaded by the end of the day Friday, 5.6. Make sure your name appears on all of your tags for the semester.
CASE STUDIES: All final case studies are due Monday, 5.16 @noon. Download and review all case study guidelines here, and refer to formatting and submission guidelines for detailed submission instructions.
Comments off
in the news: nuclear waste
<jessica> Off this week’s e-waste topic, but in light of yesterday’s 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, here’s an interesting article from The Guardian (UK) on building repositories for nuclear waste.
Class 4.13: Manufactured Landscapes
Reminder! Manufactured Landscapes, a terrific documentary on photographer Edward Burtynsky’s work in China, will be screened in the classroom tomorrow (with Kasia’s help – thanks to Kasia). It will start at 6 and will last 90 minutes.
You’ll find the film powerfully segues from what Barthes called the stuff of alchemy into our fast-approaching conversations about e-waste (see e-waste team’s provocations for you below!). Also from your reading last week, here is Jeffrey Meikle on plastics and the information age: “Computer housings, electronics components, automobile interiors, and high-tech sports equipment – not brittle polystyrene toys – pervaded the experience of the 1980s generation… Despite an improving reputation, however, most people… identified the era not with plastic but with information, with devices for recording, storing, reproducing, and manipulating sounds, words, and images. Though physically sheltered by the built environment, people found their emotions and thoughts ever more simulated by immaterial experiences. Even the plastics that facilitated these synthetic experiences by means of film, tapes, discs, and coatings receded from view and from consciousness” (8).
Enjoy the film! Class will not be meeting 4.20 – please use the time for your case studies – and we will resume 4.27 with e-waste. I’ll be keeping up with online discussions and urban research from afar and will see everyone 4.27.
on the Penn water symposium last weekend
See Inga Saffron’s review of this symposium on water just held at Penn’s School of Design this past weekend.
on paper: a few more thoughts
<jessica>
I know that plastics are on the brain this week, but I wanted to throw out a few more thoughts to Ran and Ray about paper. As I was walking around my neighborhood yesterday afternoon, it occurred to me that – amidst all that provocative talk about the comparative value of paper as a communication medium in the digital age – we did not really discuss it in the context of the city. So in the spirit of the discussion that Ran and Ray began about those sheets of paper that are heavier with significance and those that may be less so, here are a few captures:
9/11 missing posters at St. Vincent’s Hospital in the Village
9/11 missing posters at Ray’s Pizza in the Village
the ubiquitous newspaper dispensers (monuments to all variations of communication, trash, loitering, and occasional creative reuse in the city)
Cobble Hill message board
BLDGBLOG on a Brooklyn hood outside the city’s sewer system
Here’s yesterday’s BLDGBLOG on a Brooklyn neighborhood known as “The Hole”:
1) A neighborhood in Brooklyn known as “The Hole” is thirty feet below sea level. It is so close to the water table, in fact, that local homes are not connected to the city’s sewer system, relying instead on cesspools; the streets—with names like Ruby, Emerald, and Sapphire—are often flooded, on the verge of permanently returning to marshland. The Hole is a short documentary by Courtney Sell and Billy Feldman about this neighborhood; cowboys on horseback wander through water-logged streets while abandoned housing developments soak up rain like giant sponges.
99hooker
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Elizabeth Zephyrine McDonough
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jessica
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jen rhee
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Victoria
Ray
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yeongran
urban media lab: waste 
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