Wired, in collaboration with Pitch Interactive, has a look at complaints called in over the 311 line in New York. The above is a sample from a week in September, and complaints are plotted by time of day, via the streamgraph approach. As you might expect, there's a greater proportion of noise complaints at night and early morning, along with lots of road-related complaints during the day.

The most interesting part of the story though is how the government is actually making use of this data:

Each complaint is logged, tagged, and mapped to make it available for subsequent analysis. In some cases, 311 simply helps New York respond more intelligently to needs that were obvious to begin with. Holidays, for example, spark reliable surges in call volume, with questions about government closings and parking regulations. On snow days, call volume spikes precipitously, which 311 anticipates with recorded messages about school closings and parking rules.

But the service also helps city leaders detect patterns that might otherwise have escaped notice. After the first survey of 311 complaints ranked excessive noise as the number one source of irritation among residents, the Bloomberg administration instituted a series of noise-abatement programs, going after the offenders whom callers complained about most often (that means you, Mister Softee).

We seem to always associate government data as a means to holding politicians accountable for their actions—as a way for us to point fingers at the government. And this is true and important. But data (and resulting apps) can also be used by the government to keep track of what's important to the people they're trying to help.

[Wired via @pitchinteractiv]

Whenever I'm in the 42nd Street A/C/E station, I notice that the tile number 42's along the wall look like consecutive frames of animation depicting a jumping or sinking number. There are similar tile 59's at the 59th Street A/C/E station. They may appear elsewhere, too.

Today I decided to actually animate them.

Click to start the animation:

(Note to RSS subscribers: the click-to-animate feature requires JavaScript)

The Jericho Turnpike, cutting east-west through Long Island, is pretty much a wasteland of strip malls, corporate office parks, and fast food chains…

…and the last place you’d expect to find anything of historical or cultural value is in the parking lot of a Home Depot.

I think that’s what makes this place so great.

Surrounded on all four sides by the Home Depot parking lot (also servicing the adjacent Modell’s and Old Navy), is this grouping of trees surrounded by a chain link fence…And if you actually take the time to look closer…

You’ll find what has to be the only 19th-century graveyard in the United States located in a Home Depot parking lot.

I first read about this on the excellent roadside Americana website, RoadsideAmerica.com, a few years ago, but only had the chance to see it for myself the other day…

“Surreal” is really the only word you can use to describe looking at graves of guys who died in the 1850’s…while a Home Depot shopper pushes his orange cart to his truck in the background.

This was once the family cemetery for the Burr Family, who first came to the United States in 1630 and arrived in Long Island in 1656, situating their family farm on land now owned by Home Depot. The cemetery was in use until about 1880. You can see it just below the purple dot:

It blows my mind that this has somehow survived, the only indicator that the area was once all farmland, and harkening back to a time when families might bury their dead on their own property.

This might be due to the fact that the farmland became an airfield during World War I, known as Brindley Field. Perhaps it was given special treatment during that time?

Though it’s in pretty bad shape, recent flag plantings show that someone still cares about the cemetery:

I really, really hope that Home Depot has a ghost problem.

-SCOUT

King’s Park Psychiatric Center on Long Island, New York (photograph via flickr)

The Kings Park Psychiatric Center is a former state-run psychiatric hospital on c. 400 acres of land, in Kings Park, New York. It was established in 1885.

To relieve New York City’s growing mentally ill population, Kings County set forth to build an institution where patients could be treated far away from the hectic city life. As patient populations grew throughout the early part of the 20th century, the hospital itself continued to grow, and by the late 1930s the state began to build upward instead of outward. During this time period, the famous 13-story Building 93 was built. Designed by state architect William E. Haugaard the building, often dubbed “the most famous asylum building on Long Island,” was used as an infirmary for the facility’s geriatric patients, as well as for patients with chronic physical ailments.

Kings Park was one of the first places on Long Island to use experimental treatments - such as electric shock treatment and lobotomies - on its patients. After World War II Kings Park and the other Long Island asylums would see their patient populations soar. In 1954, the patient census at Kings Park topped 9,303, but would begin a steady decline afterwards.

As medication made it possible for patients to live normal lives outside of a mental institution, the need for large facilities like Kings Park diminished, and the patient population began to drop. By the early 1990s the Kings Park Psychiatric Center was operating as a ghost of its former self, with many buildings being shut down or reduced in usage (including the massive Building 93, only the first few floors of the building were in use).

In the early 1990s, with patient populations at increasingly low levels, the New York State Office of Mental Health (formerly the Department of Mental Hygiene) began to plan for the closure of Kings Park as well as the nearby Central Islip Psychiatric Center. Any remaining patients from both facilities were to be transferred to Pilgrim Psychiatric Center, which was at one time the world’s largest hospital, or be discharged. In the fall of 1996, the plans were implemented, and the few remaining patients from Kings Park and Central Islip were transferred to Pilgrim, ending Kings Park’s 111-year run.

After the closing, part of the hospital facility was re-opened with the opening of Nissequogue River State Park in 1999. But most of it lies abandoned. Since closing its doors in 1996, Kings Park has developed a major issue with trespassing. This problem is two-fold, as both enthusiasts of the paranormal and teenage vandals visit the grounds. Additonally, the area has developed a reputation on Long Island as a haunted location. Vandalism has increased dramatically in recent years, with the interior of Building 93 being the focus of heavy graffiti. Since entering the abandoned buildings is illegal, Suffolk County Police Department has a heavy presence in the area.

Suggested by Talia

Back in December of 1998, a friend handed me a role of 35mm color film and asked me to take photos of anything at all, and then give the roll back for her to develop. She wouldn't tell me why, or what she planned to do with the photos. (I eventually learned that she planned to use the images as creative inspiration for a short story project, with me as her unwitting collaborator).

Not knowing her plans for the photos, and having no direction for what to shoot, I thought about the experience she would have picking up the mystery photos from the lab and seeing them for the first time. I wanted to take photos that would make her anticipation worthwhile.

These are the photos I took (click any photo to enlarge):

Photo by Delcio G.P.Filho.

The big apple.

Many say it’s the greatest city in the world. Whether or not you agree, there’s no denying it’s an incredibly dense place with an overwhelming amount of people and things to do. Not only are there over 40 million tourists annually, jostling to see the sights and get a taste of the cultural capital but there are also over 8 million people living here − struggling to manage the tasks of daily living amongst all the tourists. That’s a lot of people with very different goals. How do they all figure it out?

(For those of you not in New York, you might want to consider pressing play for some mood music.)

The usability of cities

I’ve been on the road for the past few weeks and am struck by how some cities are easier to use than others. Since I’m in the business of interfaces I’ve been thinking about it in those terms. Just like software, smaller cities with few features are generally (but not always) fairly easy to use. Once you have a large, complex city with many features − like NYC − it gets much more challenging to maintain that ease of use.

New York City is an incredibly powerful interface with multiple entry points and endless features. One might say it has feature bloat. It overloads the senses and it’s not always easy to navigate and understand, yet people learn to use it effectively and often grow to love it.

In that way it’s like Adobe Photoshop - optimized for expert users, perfect for their needs once they have taken the time to learn how it works, but very intimidating to novice users. Over 40 million of tourists enter the city each year and have to navigate the New York City ‘interface.’ How do they figure it out?
Navigating New York

From a physical standpoint New York is pretty easy to navigate. The basic grid structure is consistent, except for the villages, and numbered streets helps one stay oriented.

There are many ways to get around: the metro, cabs, buses, bicycles and your own two feet. For the most part these are all pretty easy to use, but there are a few codes that can be confusing to figure out at first - for example you can’t just hail any old cab. Well you can, but only a select few will stop. The trick is to know what the various lighting configurations of the taxi sign mean: no light mean the taxi already has a fare; just the middle light means it’s available; if both the side lights are on too, then the cab driver is off duty.

The system doesn’t break if you’re unaware of this code but it can go more smoothly if you know which cabs to wave at and it’s not so frustrating when you know why four cabs speed past you before one stops. This lighting code may be documented somewhere, but who ever reads the user manual anyway? Like many of my favorite product features, the only reason I know about it is because someone told me. That’s how I discovered my most frequently used Web browser shortcuts - F5 to refresh the page, and F6 to place the cursor in the address bar. Similarly, they’re not critical to basic usage but they make me more efficient and improve my experience.

Getting around NYC is not too difficult, even for first timers. There are lots of wayfinding cues and breadcrumbs to keep you on track and indicate where you are.


It’ll be easy to get there, once you figure out where to go. And that is where the NYC interface can get complicated - especially for power users.

New York for newbies

An interface optimized for novice users is very different from one designed to meet the needs of power users. The interesting thing about NYC is has to offer both, overlaid with one another. The goals of first time visitors are typically very different from residents’ goals. They don’t need to work out the logistics of daily life like shopping for groceries in a city where it’s not practical to own a car. Tourists are typically more interested in seeing the major sights and enjoying some quintessentially New York experiences - like eating a hot dog from a street car, catching a show on Broadway or maybe passing by the David Letterman studio (especially in light of the current scandal.)

Since these are popular features typically used by novices, they have been made accessible with ‘big friendly buttons’ − your hotel maps or a quick “what to do in NYC” search on Google will provide details on where and how to do these things. Even the iPhone map of NYC highlights the Letterman studio as a tourist attraction.


The various aspects of the NYC interface work well together -highlighting features that new users care about and making them easy to find and use. The only problem then is to deal with all the other newbies trying to do the same things, resulting in long wait times and unavailability of certain features.

The New York power users: Daily tasks and discernment
Interfaces that optimize for power users are often very complicated; with so many features and capabilities that almost none of them are readily discoverable or intuitive, but once you learn to use them it’s a smooth and efficient experience.

Expert users in the city tend to know their way around pretty well, but since NYC is so big, they specialize in a particular area. Not unlike the way users of an incredibly complex program may specialize in a particular area. They have a working knowledge of the other areas, but stick to using the one they know best. For example, my friends who live in TriBeCa are a fountain of knowledge about anything below 14th street but once I go above that they can’t help me.

Residents' goals and tasks are very different from tourists. They avoid highly populated tourist areas, favoring things that are off the beaten path. They value the hidden features, wanting to discover something new and special -just like the super geeks looking for the tricks that developers hid away somewhere: a secret way to do something cool and special. And it’s most satisfying if they’re among the first to find it.

If you need something to eat you don’t have to go far in NYC. You can’t walk half a block without stumbling on at least two restaurants and one hotdog cart. The challenge comes when you want to be more discerning about it. In order to filter through the obvious options and get to something good you have to do some work. There are tools to help you along, for example the New York Times, Time Out, NYCgo, Yelp and many more - all serving as guides to help people discover which restaurant has the best food, or atmosphere, or prices. The problem is,once something starts to get a lot of positive reviews, the crowds aren’t far behind, and accessibility and quality often decline. What people really need is access to an expert to help them.

One common pattern I’ve noticed doing design research is that a common way for people to learn a complex interface is to work closely with someone who already knows it. This is very true for New York. The quintessential New York conversation tends to revolve around where to find the best “insert food item or service here.” Everyone is trying to learn the best tricks to make the interface work for them. It’s kind of like listening to gaming geeks talk about how they navigated a level of the latest “it” game.

Gaming NYC

The NYC interface really is most like a gaming interface which makes sense, since life is not just about achieving goals and performing tasks, it’s about having frivolous fun, being surprised and following ridiculous dreams. That is where the NYC interface performs best. It’s full of challenges, surprises and delights as you navigate through it as you attend to the day-to-day.

One I came upon recently is the High line park.


About a year ago I posted “designing time to think” encouraging us to consider how we can create pauses and moments for refection in our interfaces and this is a perfect example. It’s an old freight rail line converted into a raised natural park. The design was led by James Corner Field Operations, with Diller Scofidio + Renfro. In a city that is so dense that people are cars are now vertically stacked it makes sense to vertically layer natural spaces and pauses into this interface.

Where I’m left in my ponderings is that as an interface NYC is multi-layered, and like most games you have to start at the first level. Once you’ve seen the major sites and gotten a sense for the basic layout, then you progress to the next level - searching for attractions that are off the beaten path, although you may not get very far unless you plug into the community and enlist people’s help to find the cool features. As for becoming a true expert, it will take years of experience. It’s this challenge that attracts that special breed of people to make it their home and become true New Yorkers.