Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Bjarke Ingels Group’s latest project is a museum and visitor’s center in a subterranean bunker built by the German occupiers during World War II. The abandoned bunkers dot most of Europe’s coastlines, barnacle-covered hulks that remind us of the embattled continent of our grandparents’ childhoods. Other architects have thought to repurpose them, as temporary camping sites or even data storage centers. Denmark’s largest bunker, called Tirpitz, was left incomplete by the Germans in 1944. Right now, concerts and art shows are held within its moss-covered walls. Soon, if all goes according to plan, the bunker will be part of a 7,500-square foot development called the Blåvand Bunker Museum.

Tirpitz is embedded into sandy, coastal hills next to the coast of the North Sea. BIG proposes maintaining the continuity of the natural landscape by embedding most of the proposed exhibition space beneath the dunes. Four open-air troughs will connect the four subterranean spaces, terminating together at a square courtyard space nestled below the sand. Each of the cut-outs leads to a separate exhibition hall, which will function independently when the museum opens.

As for the hulking bunker itself, the architects imagine something more obvious: a glass-and-steel recreation of the stationary gun that might have sat on its concrete turret. Inside, the gun’s two barrels will host telescopes, rather than artillery. It’s a “ghost or reflection of the war machine it was meant to be,” write the architects, “at once critical and respectful of the bunker architecture.” More pragmatically, it’s also a skylight, flooding the bunker with light. A transparent staircase leads down into the gloom below.

Some are questioning whether the museum’s four-pronged plan could have been better chosen, suggesting that the cut-outs are reminiscent of a swastika. That seems a bit hasty, since right now in plan we see only a square courtyard with a straight line jutting from each corner. The past two years have been filled with similarly unintentional faux pas, like MVRDV’s “9/11 tower” scheme in South Korea. But in both cases, any shared likeness with symbols of tragedy seems completely unintentional. Some might argue that if contemporary architects should be condemned for anything, it’s their devotion to such unironic literalism. Someone needs to get Robert Venturi or Denise Scott Brown on the horn and ask them to weigh in on this.

H/t DesignBoom

Stairwells are built for bodies in motion. The vertical spaces are often sequestered and unadorned, offering little more than a means of getting from here to there when the elevator is broken (or a bit of indoor exercise for the ambitious souls looking to amp up their heart-rate after the morning commute). The ever-prolific Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in collaboration with Gensler, have recently unveiled plans for a new medical and graduate education building on the Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) campus, and the 14-story facility transforms landings into social hubs, uniting people and place from top to bottom while flights get the best views of uptown Manhattan.

Each ascending level of the south-facing “Study Cascade” offers a floor-to-ceiling window onto the wide world of New York. Opening up the interior with these terraces will ideally allow for a more collaborative environment between the four CUMC Schools sharing the structure: P&S, Nursing, Dental Medicine and the Mailman School of Public Health. Classrooms, collaboration areas, an auditorium, cafés, lounges, and a high-tech medical simulation center fill out the North side of the building. All of this was made possible by a staggering $50 million gift from an alumnus. Construction is set to start next year, and once it’s finished in 2016, an invitation to go spend some quiet time in the stairwell definitely won’t be as suggestive (or creepy) as it sounds.

(H/T designboom)

In today’s changing work environment, it’s important for leaders to provide clarity of direction. If they don’t, fear, frustration, and inefficiency start to creep in.

In the same way that a bicycle is wobbly when it’s standing still and becomes more stable the faster you pedal, the same is true with personnel issues at work. It’s when the organization is standing still that people start to squabble.

Three leadership strategies can help. The first is having a clear sense of where you’re going. The second is having a plan for your people so they each know their role going forward. The third is having the tenacity and stick-to-itiveness to make that plan sustainable.

Fail in any of these three areas, and the result will be lackluster financial performance and the creation of an atmosphere where negative human dynamics will begin to grow. Humans cooperate best when they are all moving toward a common goal. When an organization is standing still, the pushing and shoving starts. Parents know this. When do the kids start fighting in the car? When they are sitting still with no place to go.

Clear direction is especially important when dealing with people who’ve been with the organization for an extended period of time. Leaders and organizations generally do a good job of clarifying goals as they are getting new people up to speed. With long-time employees, however, leaders often assume that the employee instinctively knows what’s important. As a result, leaders generally don’t spend the same amount of time and energy communicating clear objectives to seasoned employees that they do with new hires. When this happens, it’s not unusual for veteran employees to lose the focus and discipline necessary to achieve their individual goals.

Three strategies for leaders

Good performance begins with clear goals. That’s job one. If you don’t know where you’re going–as the Cheshire Cat said to Alice in Wonderland–any road will get you there. Leadership is about going somewhere, and clear agreements are the first step. It’s a process of creating clarity about why we’re here, what we’re doing, and how we’re going to work together.

We did a study a number of years ago with a large petroleum company in North America that shows how rarely this clarity occurs. We asked more than 2,000 employees and their managers to share their goal expectations with us. To begin, we asked the employees to rank the top five things they felt they were responsible for. Then we asked the managers to list and prioritize the five things they were actually holding each of their direct reports accountable for. We saw only a 19% agreement across the population of 2,000 people!

After clear goals are set, leaders must use strong communication skills to make sure everyone’s eyes are on the ball. This includes regular one-on-one conversations with direct reports that include feedback and evaluation of how each person is doing against established targets. This helps employees understand how their role impacts the larger picture. It also allows people to have a say in the actions, decisions, priorities, and goals that are subsequently set. Leadership is done best when it is something you do with people instead of something you do to them.

The third step is for managers to help people notice and experience the incremental successes they are having. In the past, this was accomplished through extrinsic reward and recognition. Today we use a more intrinsic approach that focuses on discovering the incentives that are meaningful to individual employees to fuel their passion for the task or project they are working on. It’s about creating an environment that leads to sustainable performance.

A little structure goes a long way

On the surface, producing effective results can sound like it’s about driving performance and cracking the whip–but, when it’s done right, it’s more about moving people in the right direction. You can begin by answering these questions: What are we trying to accomplish mutually? What is the organization trying to accomplish? What is our department’s role in accomplishing that? And what are individual contributors being held accountable for?

Your role as a leader is to use your management skills to place a certain rigor and clarity around goals. When performance is not what it should be, first ask yourself whether goals have been made clear. Goal clarity helps reduce issues regarding relationships and personnel that plague so many organizations. Set a clear vision and show people how they can contribute to it. When folks are moving in a common direction with clear goals, most workplace struggles will take care of themselves.

Image: Flickr user Paul Joran

This year marks the third anniversary of the Rotman Design Challenge. It started out as a commendable experiment by the school’s Business Design Club to expose MBAs at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management to the value of design methods in business problem solving. This year, the competition drew teams from a few other MBA schools and some of the best design schools in North America. As a final-round judge, I had a front-row seat to the five best solutions to the competition’s challenge: To help TD Bank foster lifelong customer relationships with students and recent graduates while encouraging healthy financial behaviors.

Designers fared significantly better than MBAs because they shared real user insights.

Both this year and last–the two years that Rotman invited other schools to participate–business school students were slaughtered by the design school students. Of the 12 Rotman teams this year, not one of them made the final round. And while only seven of the 23 competing teams were from design schools (including California College of Arts, Ontario College of Art and Design, and the University of Cincinnati), design teams scooped the top three places in the competition, doing significantly better than their MBA counterparts. So what does this tell us?

It might tell us that MBAs significantly underestimate the skill and expertise a designer brings to the table. After all, about 80 MBA students volunteered their evenings and weekends, believing they had a chance of winning a design competition with minimal, if any, design training. Would you go toe-to-toe with even a purple belt in jiu jitsu having never taken a lesson? While the typical design-school competitor has (at the least) studied the design process in depth for several semesters and practiced it in co-ops and internships, for many MBA students, this was their very first exposure to the discipline. So while we should applaud the organizers’ efforts to open MBA eyes to the importance and value of design in solving business problems, it seems that even its most forward-thinking students may not have fully digested that design is a serious pursuit that requires serious training.

The competition outcome might also tell us that designers have reason to be encouraged. With only 15 minutes to convince a skeptical panel of experienced professionals about a new idea that doesn’t exist in the world today, they fared significantly better than their MBA counterparts. Why? Because they shared real user insights to engage us emotionally, used narrative and stories to compel us, drew sketches and visualizations to inspire us, and simplified the complex to focus us. It’s proof positive that numbers and bullet points, while important, aren’t necessarily what drive executive decision making.

Design should not be tacked on to business education but infused throughout it.

Finally, it tells us that we still have a long way to go to develop business professionals who both appreciate and can engage the tools of design effectively. Rotman gets kudos for taking a step in the right direction. But a few workshops and an extracurricular competition won’t produce business leaders with real design-thinking skills. Business education must be completely redefined to include the best, most appropriate principles of design in every curriculum. Marketing classes should teach a deep reverence for the user in context and the power of observational research methods. Finance classes should teach the art of storytelling and information design. Strategy classes should teach systems thinking and synthesis. If the goal is to create great “hybrid thinkers” who will have real impact, design should not be tacked on to existing business education but infused throughout it.

I’m not letting design schools off the hook either. While design students fared much better than their MBA counterparts that Saturday afternoon, I should point out that only the winning team from the Institute of Design at IIT actually charged a fee for the service they developed (a fact that was not overlooked by my final-round co-judge Ray Chun, the senior vice president of retail banking at TD). Some competitors were able to offer a vague notion that their ideas would generally create economic value, but crisp articulations of a profit model and underlying assumptions were hard to come by.

Design education needs as much of an overhaul as business education.

And I was less than impressed with the business-thinking skills of designers the following Monday morning, when I interviewed 10 of them at the Institute of Design in Chicago for jobs at Doblin. To most candidates, I asked of the ideas they presented in their portfolios, “But how does it make money? Who will pay for that? How much would you need to sell to be profitable?” and was met with far too many blank expressions when I did so. Design schools have a long way to go to integrate good business thinking into their programs. In order to make their value known to the world, designers need to speak the language of business–that’s where great ideas get funded and developed. Design education needs as much of an overhaul as business education if we are to benefit from the talents of design thinkers in the business world.

I hope that we see meaningful reinvention of both design and business education so that the business world can realize the true value of design thinking. Until that happens, Rotman’s Business Design Club would be wise to require challenge teams to comprise both designers and MBAs. At least it would level the playing field, and it may improve the educational experience for both–assuming each can decipher what the other is saying.

Image: Morphart Creations Inc., sextoacto and ueapun via Shutterstock

Photo: Courtesy Ford

Ford is at the onset of a massive push towards electrification. The Blue Oval estimates that between 10 and 25 percent of its products will be “electrified” by 2020, with a mix of traditional hybrids and plug-in versions joining a brace of new EVs. And its first all-electro-powered product is this: the 2013 Ford Focus Electric.

Ford announced plans to electrify its Focus compact at last year’s CES and the automaker has already begun handing out its EV hatch to fleets, including the delivery of the first Focus Electric to Google. Later in 2012, Ford will begin selling the Focus to consumers in 19 markets across North America, with prices starting at $39,200 – or about $4,000 more than the Nissan LEAF before taxes and any state or federal government incentives.

But do you want it?

We took to the streets of San Francisco for a brief drive in Ford’s first EV and discovered that while it might not boast the same range or bespoke body as its competition from Nissan, the Focus Electric wins on charge time and something that’s been missing from other mass-market EVs: genuine fun.

Photo: Courtesy Ford

A cursory look at the Focus Electric’s stats aren’t going to stoke the flames of enthusiasts’ hearts. The front-mounted electric motor powering the front wheels is good for 141 horsepower and 188 pound-feet of torque, the latter of which is available – as with all EVs – as soon as you tramp the throttle. That makes for a spirited sprint from a stop, despite being down some 20 lb-ft from the Nissan. But more impressive is the tractability of the brushless motor and the single-speed gearbox putting the power down.

Unlike other EVs that begin to wheeze as you pile on the speed, the Focus Electric retains a suitable amount of punch above 40 mph. Credit the extra 31 horsepower over the LEAF, which does its best to counteract the additional 300 pounds the Focus Electric has to lug around over the Nissan.

But the additional tonnage over the standard Focus (around 500 pounds) added by the liquid cooled and heated 23 kWh lithium-ion battery pack and assorted plumbing is used to good effect, with Ford claiming weight distribution is an Ultimate Driving Machine-approved 50:50 front-to-rear. It’s just too bad the overly-grabby brakes aren’t up to par with the keenly tuned electrically-assisted steering, front MacPherson struts and multi-link rear suspension.

Even mild brake application is enough to send you and your passenger hurdling towards the windshield as the seat belts strain to keep you in place. There’s sure to be a learning curve – one that we weren’t able to scale in our short time behind the wheel – but the lack of EV-tuned brake regen to slow the car as we rolled off the throttle was notable.

More notable is Ford’s claimed charge time: 4 hours to fully top up the batteries with a 240-volt outlet, or a little more than half the time of the Nissan LEAF. That boosted charge time is thanks to a 6.6 kW Leviton charger (versus the LEAF’s 3.3 kW unit) sold at Ford dealers for $1,499, rolled into the purchase price of the Focus Electric and installed by Best Buy’s Geek Squad.

The 23 kWh of juice is good for a 76-mile range – a few miles off Nissan’s hypothetical pace – but because of the liquid-cooled and heated battery packs, Ford maintains there’s no degradation in range or performance, something that can’t be said for the LEAF’s air-cooled batteries.

Photo: Courtesy Ford

And then there’s Ford’s killer app: an app.

Available for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and through a dedicated web portal, MyFord Mobile allows owners to keep tabs on charging, find 240-volt stations along their route and plan their trips accordingly, along with remote cooling and heating while the Focus Electric is plugged into the grid, boosting range in the process. The app even gives you tips on your driving style (ranging from “zippy” to “zen”) and the ability to automatically juice up during off-peak hours thanks to an exclusive partnership with Microsoft and its Value Charge program.

This all adds up to one of the most compelling EVs available from a mass-market automaker, combining a gas-free existence with a suitable entertaining driving experience. We’ve waited long enough for an automaker to deliver on both fronts, and Ford seems to have arrived there first. But we won’t make a definitive call until we can put the Focus Electric through its paces as a commuter-cum-corner-carver.

The National Transportation Safety Board has provided an update of its investigation of the crash of a highly modified North American P-51 aircraft at last year’s National Championship Air Races in Reno. The crash was the worst accident in the history of the air races, killing 10 spectators and the pilot. The NTSB found several places to improve air race safety, including ideas to redesign the course to minimize the risk to spectators.

Many in the aviation and air racing community feared last September’s crash would mean an end to the premier event in air racing. But the NTSB recommendations are for ways to improve safety, rather than shutting down the event.

“We are not here to put a stop to air racing,” said NTSB Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman in a statement. “We are here to make it safer.”

While air racing was a very popular spectator sport in the early days of aviation, peaking in the 1930s when hundreds of thousands of spectators attended races, interest in recent decades has been largely limited to aviation aficionados. The air races in Reno date back to 1964, and today stand as the only major race of the year.

The NTSB recommendations include course design, the affects of g-forces on pilots and the design and inspection of the highly modified airplanes that make up the bulk of the aircraft racing in Reno.

The Galloping Ghost, the P-51 that crashed last year, included substantial modifications including removing more than three feet from each wing and changes to the flight controls. The modifications resulted in the World War II era fighter aircraft achieving speeds well over 500 miles per hour.

A diagram shows the external changes made to the Galloping Ghost in a quest for speed. Both wingspan and tailspan were reduced.

One of the changes the NTSB would like to see is more flying time and/or testing time of the pilot and airplanes before race day.

“Our investigation revealed that this pilot, in this airplane, had never flown at this speed, on this course,” Chairman Hersman said.

This poses a big challenge for a sport where much of the work is done by teams of volunteers and crew in the weeks and months leading up to the races each September. Often teams are trying out final improvements as race week progresses, protecting the vintage V-12 Rolls Royce engines originally designed for around 1,500 horsepower, but now producing more than 3,500 horsepower. Steve Hinton Jr., the youngest ever winner in Reno told Wired in 2010 that maintenance on the old airplanes is “easily a few hundred hours per flight hour.”

The crash investigation is ongoing, but the NTSB said initial findings indicate the Galloping Ghost was flying at over 530 miles per hour when it experienced an “upset” that eventually led to it crashing into a spectator area. The upset and subsequent maneuvers exceeded the aircraft accelerometer’s 9-g limit.

The accelerometer data combined with photos suggest the pilot lost consciousness following the unanticipated high g maneuver. Seconds later, the trim tab located on the tail of the airplane broke away, aggravating an already out of control airplane.

Many of the modifications made to the vintage aircraft to prepare them for air racing include changes to the controls such as the elevator where the broken trim tab was located. The modifications and changes were noted in the Galloping Ghosts’ logbook, and the airplane was flown after the various changes in order to gain approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. But the NTSB notes it is unlikely that thorough flight testing at speeds experienced during the air races was performed. And the NTSB adds that there is little if any engineering evaluation done for the modifications.

The aircraft that compete at the air races in Reno are categorized as “experimental,” allowing pilots and crew to change them significantly from their original design. The same type of engineering isn’t required for an airplane company producing a new type of airplane. The NTSB said in its initial recommendations that aircraft participating in the National Champion Air Races should undergo more rigorous evaluations because of the proximity to spectators.

An outline of the roughly eight mile oval used by the unlimited class air racers at Reno. The accident began as the Galloping Ghost was banking around pylon 8.

Other recommendations included making changes to the large oval flown by the fastest aircraft such as the P-51s and other World War II fighters to minimize maneuvering close to spectators.

The organization also suggests g-tolerance training for air race pilots, something that is common for military pilots as well as many aerobatic pilots that perform in airshows. This type of training prepares pilots for high g-force maneuvers and teaches them how to handle such circumstances while minimizing the chance of losing consciousness. The NTSB also wants the air races to look into the feasibility of using “g-suits” such as those warn by modern fighter pilots. These suits squeeze the legs and torso during high-g maneuvers to maintain enough blood in the brain so the pilot does not pass out.

More details from the investigation can be found here.

 Images: NTSB

Cities may find it easier to upgrade their parking infrastructure thanks to a new round of financing that allows them to install a smart parking system on a “pay as you go” basis.

We first told you about Streetline back in 2010, when they were finishing pilot tests in Los Angeles. With sensors and wireless connectivity, the company’s technology turns dumb parking meters into a meshed network of smart devices that can interact with smartphones for mobile payment and reservations, and city data centers for tracking and analysis. Since then, they’ve increased their funding and installed Streetline on meters in Texas, California, North Carolina, New York, Indiana and Maryland.

Now, in partnership with IBM, they’ve announced a $25 million credit facility from Citi, which will allow interested cities worldwide to roll out a Streetline-equipped parking infrastructure with minimal upfront investment.

While Streetline’s Parker mobile app allows drivers to find, pay for and even reserve public parking spaces, the service isn’t just a benefit for consumers. With real-time access to the status of all their meters, a city’s parking department can discover exactly where it’s most cost effective to send out enforcement officers, which meters are expired and which meters are broken. In the long term, they can also see where parking is in highest demand and how long the turnover rate is for spaces, and adjust pricing accordingly — a practice known as dynamic pricing.

That’s valuable data for cities. Not only can they make money from enforcement and dynamic pricing, but they can also create a better place to work, live and shop by making parking available where and when it’s needed — an improvement that would be appreciated by anyone who has ever been late for a meeting or decided to forego a trip to a local shop or restaurant due to a lack of available parking . There’s also an environmental benefit: In Streetline’s study of a fifteen block section of Los Angeles, the company found that motorists drove an additional 950,000 miles in a year just searching for parking — an effort that wasted 47,000 gallons of gas.

Depending on volume, installing Streetline costs about $25 to $30 per meter upgrade. While that’s often cheaper than ripping out meters and installing a whole new parking infrastructure, it’s also a significant one-time cost for a city with 20,000 spaces. The new line of credit may make it a little easier for a city government to stomach the cost of installing a system that will, hopefully, lead to long-term efficiency, revenue and improved quality of life.

Photo: Flickr/sidewalk flying