Form versus Function - bad design

This is what a bunch of designers reckon a delivery bike should look like. Looks cool, eh? I must admit I was fooled at first. Then I got to the end of the article in Design Observer. Read it here. And read the comment at the bottom. What Peter van de Veer says is spot on. It needs a small front wheel for greater stability. No crossbar so the rider doesn't have to cock his leg over a rear - carried load. Upright riding position for greater comfort and safety. In other words, an updated version of this:
 Yep, an old - fashioned butcher's bike. Ten a penny when I was a kid. Or this...

A dutch bike. Note the hefty stand folded up over thje rear mudguard; that daft kickstand on the cool bike would collapse under a heavy load.
The new bike's designers were more smitten with its cool looks than its functionality. And a moter too? With the battery hidden in the frame? Overcomplicated. Bad, bad, bad.

Form follows Function - good design

   Everyone knows what this is. Every time you switch the news on you see it. Any company would kill for a brand identity like this. It's a design classic if ever there was one. Purely functional, no frills. So simple that children could use it, and frequently do. Made to do a job, and do it very well.
  The germans invented the assault rifle. Most of the world's armies had realised that battle ranges had been reduced to 400-500 yards  so the standard rifle cartridges were unnecessarily powerful, and what was really needed was a weapon that could chuck out a lot of bullets, really fast, over that distance. It required a cartridge midway in power between the pistol cartrides used by sub-machine guns and the full-power long cartridges used by conventional rifles.
  We can thank Hitler for the name, when he decided that this..
..the MP(maschinenpistole, ie sub-machine gun)44 should be renamed the more aggressive - sounding STG(sturmgewehr, ie storm - or assault - rifle)44. Looks like an AK47, doesn't it? This was the first real assault rifle, and it mightily impressed the soviet soldiers on the recieving end. It wasn't perfect, though. German industry was disintegrating at the time, so the gun was too heavy, poorly made and none too reliable.
 Now reliability is something the russians take seriously. They know how harsh their environment is - horrendous cold winters, baking heat and dust in summer, mud deep enough to drown a lorry in the autumn. They know that their soldiers are usually uneducated, ill - trained peasants. So they make their weapons as simple, reliable and idiot- proof as humanly possible. And they weren't that bothered with copyyright law then, either.
 So when Mikhail Kalashnikov put together his world - beating design, he combined facets of the american Garand rifle and Browning - designed Remington model 8 rifle with the STG44. He engineered the whole thing for maximum toughness,with working parts chrome-plated to resist corrosion. And he wasn't interested in aesthetics - just practicality.
 What he created was the world's premier killing machine. The soviets generously distributed millions of them to anyone who could inconvenience their foes, ie. the west. They are all but impossible to jam, even with no maintainance, so are a godsend to guerrilla groups.They are also very easy to copy: an estimated 100 million have been made, and most will still be floating about somewhere. They are such an iconic image of struggle that they feature on the flags of Mozambique, Zimbabwe and East Timor. When your design ends up on a flag, youu know you've done it right.

A Design Classic - or maybe not

Look at that. A classic English pint pot. What could be more traditional?

When I started drinking, back in the 70's, this is what beer usually came in. If you wanted a straight glass, or a 'tall hat' as they were called, you had to ask for one.

Glasses must have looked like this forever. Or maybe not.

The 'dimple' glass didn't exist before the late 1940's. It was designed for two connected purposes; and when these became obsolete, it was replaced.

Until the turn of the century, beer came in pewter or porcelain tankards. You didn't want to see the bits floating in your pint back then. But as pubs became lighter, and beer became clearer, glass manufacturers spied an opportunity.


The first mass produced beer glasses tended to be straight and handle - less. In the late 1920s ten - sided, handled pots became the norm; these featured in many 1930s adverts. The dimple glass's arrival heralded the triumph of lighter beers over dark mild and porter. And brewers liked the way their products shone and glittered in the new glasses. They were also tough, easy to wash and resistant to the curse of the straight glass, chipping of the lip during storage.

In the 1960s, however, the dimple's nemesis arrived in the shape of the 'nonik' (no nick) glass.

The bulge around the top kept the lips of adjacent glasses from grinding together. Cheaper to make, easier to store and pack into the new-fangled pot washing machines. Add to this the rising popularity of lager, which doesn't have the beautiful, shifting gleam of bitter through the patterns on the pot, and straight glasses have ruled the world of beer ever since. I was astonished to be given a dimple glass in a pub in Saltaire as a matter of course. It was like going back in time.

Get some! Get some!

Another Mean Motherfucker - Full Metal Jacket

 An american helicopter roars low over the vietnamese countryside.

The door gunner is sending bursts of machine gun fire at everything in sight, whilst yelling 'Get some! Get some!'

On the ground, farmers, women, and children run madly for cover.

The gunner ceases firing, looks at his passengers, grins and says, 'Anyone who runs is a  V.C. Anyone who stands still is a well disciplined V.C.!'

Full Metal Jacket is a much more humorous  take on the vietnam war. It starts with a 'Rookies  getting licked into shape by grizzled drill instruuctor' sequence. This onne is unique in having a real U.S Marines DI doing his stuff. R. Lee Ermey was hired as a technical adviser, but when Stanley Kubrick saw a tape of Ermey shouting insults at a group of marines for 15 minutes while being pelted with tennis balls and oranges, neither flinching or repeating himself, he fired the original actor and hired Ermey instead. From personal experience I know that most DI's think they're comedians, but Ermey is very, very funny, and very, very scary, It's enough to put you off volunteering, that's for sure. Check him out here. 

The rest of the film is more typical vietnam bloodletting, albeit with a higher (and blacker) humour content than most. Strangely, it was all shot in Britain. Beckton gasworks in the East End doubled for the city of Hue. You can tell, once you start looking.

Charlie don't surf!

Apocalypse now isn't a great film. Back in the late 70's the yanks were doing some serious soul searching after being ignominiously turfed out of vietnam, and this film is one of a bunch of similar horror stories inflicted on the viewers, like 'The Deer Hunter' and 'Platoon'.

Among the movie's conscript cannon fodder, however, there's one man at least enjoying his war. And he delivers one truly great scene. Enter colonel Kilgore.

You''ll have seen the U.S. Cavalry on screen at some time, galloping to see off the injuns, with bugles, yellow scarves and big floppy hats. Well by the 1960's they had been re-equiped with helicopters and tasked with seeing off charlie from vietnam instead. Kilgore's unit have to get Martin Sheen's bunch, and their patrol boat, past a coastal village held by the vietcong. He's already set the mood when, after an earlier attack, he chucks air cav personalised playing cards on the bodies to 'let charlie know who did it'.

The 15 - minute long helicopter attack is the only bit of the movie worth watching, for me. It starts with Kilgore, in floppy cavalry hat and yellow scarf, striding past lines of helicopters, jets howling and rotors spinning as they spool up to take - off. 'How you feeling, Jimmy?' he says to the door gunner. Jimmy, grinning and readying his M60, yells back 'Like a MEAN MUTHERFUCKER, sir!' Then Kilgore, boarding his chopper (with the cavalry's crossed sabres and 'death from above' painted on its nose), shouts to a bugler - a BUGLER, for god's sake - 'Ok, son, let her rip!' And the bugler sounds the charge as the camera, in one of the best shots of all time, follows the choppers as they rise behind him and sweep into the dawn sky to do battle.

The rest of the attack sequence shows Kilgore's ethos has been embraced by his men. The choppers attack with PA systems blasting out 'The Ride of the Valkyries', enthusiastically gunning down everything that moves. Kilgore, absolutely fearless and surf - mad, (the 'Charlie don't surf!' line was in an earlier scene) has his men surfing, whilst mortar bombs fall all around. And when the treeline is obliterated in a cauldron of flame, He gets to say how he loves the smell of napalm in the morning. Smells like victory, apparently.

Don't bother with the rest of the film. Apart from the waterskiing - behind - the - patrol boat scene, it's downhill all the way from here.

Oh yeah, the yanks lost the war, by the way.

Monument

202 feet tall. 311 steps. No lift. And a brilliant view from the top. That's the monument to the great fire of London, the tallest isolated stone column in the world.

I managed the climb all in one go, which left me a wheezing wreck at the top. The spiral staircase gets narrower as you climb, so descenders huddle politely against the wall as the puffing climbers squeeze past. You find youurself on a square veranda with a 360 degree view of the city, albeit inside a mesh safety cage. This replaced a victorian arrray of iron bars erected in the mid 19th century to prevent the poor from putting an end to the misery of their existence. The bars would have been easier to take photographs through.

What you see from the top is - everything. The city sprawls to the horizon, below and sometimes above you. The monumental wall of 20 Fenchurch Street looms, leans towards you, as the Gherkin and Tower 42 peer over its shoulders. Meanwhile golden weathercocks atop the ancient Wren and Hawksmoor churches, for hundreds of years the tallest things around themselves, glint amidst the grey concrete and glass.

The bizarre jumble of old and new buildings sums up, for me, my fascination for London. Other big cities try for order, with straight roads and wide boulevards. Or they preserve the old, separate it from the new. Whereas London just shoves it all together in a mad tangle. And, somehow it works. There's history lurking in every corner. Pretty much every significant player in English history has walked down the very same streets you're walking down. Suck on that, New York.

The People of the Abyss - the opposite of Downton Abbey

If you look out of the college's back windows you will see some renovated buildings. They look all cheerful now, with gilded weathervane and sandblasted brickwork. But once upon a time, not that long ago, this was a prison. And the people confined therein were guilty of being poor. This was Stockport workhouse.

Yoe see the poor in places like India today - people living on the streets, scratching a living as best they can. Well, it was worse here. Being poor was seen as god's punishment. A comforting philosophy for those who weren't poor, to be sure; we still get it today from the tory party - bedroom tax, anyone?

Jack London was a successful american author. You may have read 'The Call of the Wild' or 'White Fang' at school. These were adventure stories set in the Alaskan wilderness. But in 1902 London set out to explore another wilderness, the east end of London. He disguised himself as a poor man and sampledu the life of hunger and deprivation that was the fate of most of the population in those good old days

.I've ben reading this book for months and I'm still only two thirds through it. It's not that it's heavy going, or even boring. It is just unremittingly horrible. Read it and see what the good old days were really like, then thank the moon and the stars that you live now and not then.

No - one was allowed to sleep on the streets, for one thing. Oh you could sit on a pavement all night, and thousands did; but go to sleep and a copper would move you on. Keep on doing it and you'd be gaoled - and unlike now, no - one went to the hellish victorian gaols if they could possibly avoid it. So the homeless were expected to look for work whilst having little food and no sleep. So they signed themselves into the casual ward of the workhouse just for a night's rest. Except you were in for two nights, because you were expected to do a day's labour for your foul food and verminous bed. And if you had any money at all, you weren't allowed in.

Workhouses didn't disappear until the advent of the welfare state in 1948. They were rebranded a couple of times, but even on the eve of the second world war there were almost 100,000 people living in them. So when you see the bunch of posh, rich sociopaths in the government attempting to dismantle the welfare state by stealth, read this book and consider what the alternative used to be.