Design, Citizenship and the City
To some it must seem the very vision of Utopia: an elegant New England-style enclave with neatly clipped lawns, docile residents and a 9pm curfew for social housing tenants aged under 15.
This is The Hamptons — not the real ones on Long Island, New York but a housing development in the south London suburb of Worcester Park.
But as ever there is trouble in paradise, or at least the contemporary spectre we call the fear of crime and “anti-social behaviour”.
Westminster City Council has taken a bold step today towards ending the misery of thousands of London tourists each year who buy counterfeit street sign souvenirs. The forward-thinking council has purchased the copyright to the design of its signs, created by notable designer Sir Misha Black in 1967.
The council has promised zero-tolerance enforcement of its new intellectual property, threatening fly-by-night design theives with heavy fines for selling unlicensed souvenirs.
Continue reading ‘Westminster City Council privatises street sign design’
I’m still frustrated and to a degree baffled by all those otherwise-wonderful sites that are serving up RSS feeds with just headlines and summaries. Where are the rest of the articles?
Sometimes this happens through laziness, sometimes with careful thought and intent but mostly through ignorance and fallacy.
The newly-launched WordPress 2.5 (download; release notes; changelog) has got some great improvements to the WXR import feature that lets you pull a file of posts, pages and comments exported from one WordPress installation into another:
Continue reading ‘Import file attachments and tags with WXR in WordPress 2.5′
According to Westminster Council, the bulging bladders of that city’s denizens are an accident waiting to happen:
Every year 10,000 gallons of urine is at risk of ending up in the city’s streets and alleyways through irresponsible and anti-social behaviour.