Tara Ariano (q.v.): “Canada, where I remain a citizen.” (What’s her dishevelled husband doing with a “USA” sparkler-banner on his head and the joyous expression of a man who has finally arrived?)

Three years too late, TTC is hiring what it calls a “Design Architect – Wayfinding and Signage.” The reason why this job is a failure is built into the title – at impressive levels of redundancy.

1. Wayfinding is a process of the mind. You cannot “architect” an experience of wayfinding. It is not a jazzy synonym for “signage.” It is not a really special and advanced form of signage. Wayfinding is an event, experienced over time, in the distinctive psychology of every user of the system.

2. The term “design architect” is not tautological or oxymoronic; it has specific meaning in the industry (compare “structural architect”). But TTC’s signage problem is centrally due to its architects, who are not designers, a fact even more infuriating given that Ontario is the only place with a government-mandated registry of graphic designers. Architects caused the signage problem at the TTC and adding another architect won’t fix it.

3. An architect uses antitypographic computer software (AutoCAD, CorelDraw) on an antitypographic platform (Windows) and handwrites in BLOCK CAPITALS. (UPDATE: A subsequent tender [PDF] lists TTC’s software as Solidworks, Bentley Microstation, whatever that is, and AutoCAD 2010.) These facts alone make it inconceivable for an architect to design adequate signage.

   If that seems too broad, I’ll be more specific. TTC’s architects are provably unable to understand why fake Helvetica is unsuitable for signage even after having it explained to them in writing and in person, and can’t spell or proofread their own work. (Architects aren’t word people. Few designers are, either, but at least they know when to use outside copy-editing.)

4. One’s task as TTC “design architect” for signage will be to implement a failed signage system that is a second-rate copy of Massimo Vignelli’s. I know already TTC brooks no dissent on this topic.

Signage has not improved measurably since I made it an issue. I’ve been blaming TTC’s architects for it, but I can say that Ian Trites is a conscientious, informed, unsung TTC architect who is trying to maintain the integrity of the system. I believe he is being overruled by the ultimate source of the problem, Susan Reed Tanaka (Manager, Engineering). She has nearly 20 years’ experience warmly welcoming experts into the fold, only to ignore their advice and stab them in the back later. In my case it didn’t cost the public purse any money, but in Paul Arthur’s case, it did.

In the late designer’s archives at the ROM is a note dated 1991.04.30 attached to a letter dated 1991.04.05 to Susan Reed Tanaka. The note says she disagreed with everything he said during a phone call and claimed the tests of his signage system were in fact controlled (when they weren’t, I presume). Arthur’s note ends with “Keep out of this. It is a mare’s nest of trouble.” It remains thus.

(I asked TTC for a response – several times, in fact. Brad Ross claimed that “[t]he job requirements, I believe, are broader than graphic design alone,” but did not respond my request that he verify that they actually are. Susan Reed Tanaka didn’t bother to respond to the E-mail and letter I sent her. Through Vickie Drew, she stated “I took exception to the accuracy and tone of your correspondence,” though she did not correct any claimed inaccuracy. “Accordingly, I respectfully decline to comment.” A later letter dated 2010.07.26 said the same thing.)

The disturbing fact about Reed Tanaka is that she executed an impressive user test of platform-edge tiles down at Bay Lower involving everyone from wheelchair users to women in “stilettos.” She has the capacity to do reputable design work herself, but none I can see to accept the design work of others. (She won’t comment.) The nonsensical, universally criticized mishmash of signage in the Toronto transit system flourished under her tenure. Now the TTC is hiring a deputy.

What fool would apply for this job, and what fool would they actually hire?

Edmund White, in City Boy (p. 142), foresees the Twitters.

I knew I had to keep on writing or else I’d let the ambient cultural noise drown out my thoughts, which weren’t paraphrasable wisecracks or wisdom but rather a way of looking at the world or the self. French people dismiss the cultural chatter and self-cent[re]d attitudinizing of Paris as parisianisme. A similar noise is generated by hip New Yorkers, though we don’t have a word for it and perhaps we haven’t isolated it yet as a reprehensible phenomenon.

This “newyorkism” is so opinionated, so debilitating, so contagious with its knowingness, its instant formulas that replace any slow discoveries, that only people who are serious and ponderous can resist its blandishments, its quick substitutes for authenticity. No wonder the psychiatrist had said one should write first thing in the morning – before the tide of newyorkism swept over one, washing away actual honest thought and replacing it with trendy pronouncements.

(Cf. Mr. Crisp.)

Additionally:

• White describes one writer friend’s withering, unsparing mentorship to another writer friend (p. 198):

  Bitchy and disagreeable as gays are sometimes thought to be, they don’t usually play lethal games like these. They don’t try to mo[u]ld behavio[u]r – perhaps they (we) aren’t confident enough to challenge another man in his heart of hearts, the private interior place where he lives. We gays don’t want to belong, we don’t want to play ball – we’re not team players, so how could we bow before someone evaluating us? We’d rather lose, quit the playing field – be a quitter. How can our father or father’s brother bully us when we’re all too ready to cry uncle? That sort of ducking out is our way of winning.

  (Cf. Merlis; Bouldrey.)

• What does New York have that everywhere but Paris doesn’t? Cruising (p. 210):

  [In Baltimore] no one ever looked at me and I felt gr[e]y and invisible. I commuted on the Metroliner and the moment I stepped off the train in New York the swivel[l]ing eyes were all around me again, reassuringly. New York was the only place in America where everyone – young and old, straight and gay – cruised.

  People in big cities cruise; it’s no accident that in French the word cruise (draguer) is applied to straights and gays alike, since both groups do it. To put the make on someone (mater, literally “to subdue”) is also polysexual in French. In New York people check each other out to find out who they are, whereas in other cities there’s no reason to bother since no one is ever anyone.

I see it grows increasingly dangerous to allow literary types who are afraid of computers, and/or who use Windows, and/or who don’t know what markup is to discuss “formatting” of E-books. It seems a foregone conclusion that these people, raised on a Skinnerian diet of “MS Word” and its “italic” button, will never learn that “E-books” do not contain “formatting” and aren’t about to start.

Travis J. Nichols, who works for a poetry foundation with an ill-coded Web site (h4 cannot actually head a page and h3 doesn’t follow it), uses the bully pulpit of the Huffington Post to complain about “formatting” of poetry E-books. As such, he’s chosen just the right venue to air half-truths as though they amounted to something.

In a point Nichols glosses over, the actual problem is lousy semantic markup and equally lousy CSS. E-books are perfectly capable of displaying (not “formatting”) poetry. Why, just this week Dave Bonta exhaustively ran through the options, of which there is actually only one (again: semantic markup with CSS).

Nichols’s posting may give him some kind of status as a thought leader among followers who don’t think, but it hasn’t helped anything. He’s preaching to the ignorant, not the converted. Which of those is he?

Comic Sans Swash tells you all you need to know about Windows (and Ascender, which paid me a small fee for a research paper I wrote for Microsoft Typography years ago).

Autobiographical details Gary Shteyngart (q.v.) wove quasi-steganographically into his zippy, juicy profile of M.I.A., GQ, July 2010:

“And then, like many men and women stumbling headlong into middle age, I just stopped giving a shit about music.”

A. Greenfield, who may regain happiness once he leaves that godforsaken dark tundra for good, describes the transportation equivalent of the zipless fuck.

[S]omething that happened as I was saying goodbye to a friend after meeting up for an after-work beer the other day… was really just a nicely-gift-wrapped version of something I’m sure happens ten thousand times a day, in cities across the planet: We shook hands and went our separate ways at the precise moment a tram glided to a stop in front of the bar, and I had to laugh as he stepped onto it without missing a beat and was borne smoothly away.

Here you wait in the rain (or, lately, blazing sun) for up to 30 minutes, then climb stairs to show a driver with a Bluetooth in his left ear a strip of paper.

A whole lot of factors in space and time needed to come into momentary alignment for this to happen, from the dwell time and low step-up height of the tram itself to the rudimentary physical denotation of the tram stop and the precise angle at which the bar’s doorway confronted the street. Admittedly, service and interaction designers will generally only be able to speak to some of these issues. But what if we could design mobility systems, and our interfaces to them, to afford more sequences like this, more of the time?

It’s gonna take more than a Presto card.