"Note: For the purposes of this article the gentle reader of the "London Magazine" will kindly consider himself or herself living in the year of grace 1907. The American invaders, having captured the tobacco trade, the railways, the boot and shoe market, the match factories and most other industries worth winning, found themselves feeling homesick occasionally, but rather than return to the United States they adapted London to their liking - EDITOR.

It seems odd in these days to find a man of education who is really alarmed at the rush and noise of London streets, and I was almost upon the point of calling my cousin Dave a poseur, when he arrived at Victoria Depot, and pretended to be upset by the way the porter grabbed his bag and made off before you could say "Jack Robinson." Yet I soon remembered that Dave had been in Africa since '01 and that great changes had come about since then. So I explained that the man had asked where he was going to put up, and was probably now half way there; and that by the time he got to my flat the Trades' Union Trust valet would have his clothes properly unpacked, brushed and put away.

"A cab," I replied, "why my dear boy, only back-number people do that sort of thing now-a-days. Here you are, home from an all-night journey, hungry and wanting a bath, and yet you talk of cabs. What you really want is a toilet and a breakfast, if you are anything like the old Dave of 'Varsity days."

"Oh, well, go ahead," he sighed, "shew me your Yankeefied London, if you like, only get me out of this before we are mobbed."

"Very well, come along," said I, and led the way through the crowd of yelling porters and touts, each crying the virtues of his own particular method of transmitting baggage, or extolling the merits of the hotel for which he had been sent to solicit patrons. Outside, Dave seemed surprised, but said nothing. Evidently he was wondering what had become of the cabs and omnibuses that used to fill the open space in front of the station, before the new street cars had killed their trade. But it seemed best not to explain matters, so we had reached the electric car-track before the temptation proved too strong, and I remarked, quite casually, that Buckingham Palace Road had been renamed Fifth Avenue, and that the thoroughfare once known as Piccadilly had suffered a similar fate. Dave said never a word ..."

Again, Much more at Forgotten Futures

Forgotten Futures is Marcus Rowland's table-top role playing game based on scientific romances, the predecessors of science fiction that were published in the late 19th and early 20th century - anyone fancy a game? It comes with three hundred megabytes of additional Victorian and Edwardian source material, which can't be bad.

"Geologists say that the land upon which London is built has subsided 68 feet during the last 500 years. This doubtless is traceable to substratiform deposits, lunar attraction, or causes equally occult; but whatever it is, the figures 68 disarm suspicion. Assuming that the subsidence is still going on, one can imagine the metropolis some day sinking below Thames level and becoming a second Venice" -- Daily Paper.

BUT didn't you know?" asked my travelling companion.

"No!" I answered. "You see, I left England away back in '99, and I have been virtually cut off from civilisation ever since. In Siberia the reading of newspapers is not encouraged, and letters, even if you have friends at home to write them, have a way of going astray unrivalled in any other country. Until I landed in Hull this morning, I had not had occasion to use the English language for years. So it is little wonder that what you say is surprising news to me."

" Quite so," continued the affable gentleman with whom I shared the first-class carriage, " though we have grown so used to it by this time that we almost forget London ever existed in any other form. Let me see, it must have been in 1910 -- the year of the floods -- that the last subsidence occurred. It would have come about naturally in time, geologists said, but the climax was certainly precipitated by the Government's action in allowing London to be undermined to such an extent when the new coal fields were discovered under the city in 1900.

We had been steadily raising the embankments of the Thames, but the floods swept these away, and one morning we awoke to find our streets converted into waterways. All manner of remedies were tried, including a Royal Commission, which, by the way, decided only last week that nothing could be done, thus endorsing the public opinion of fifteen years ago.

Of course the lower stories of all houses had to be abandoned, save as diving baths, but it was a simple matter to add others. Naturally the old street traffic almost vanished, cabs, 'buses, and carts giving place to gondolas and steamboats.

To begin with, we had to import gondoliers from Venice, to instruct our late cabdrivers in their new craft, at the same time adopting many other features peculiar to the Bride of the Adriatic. These, as you can imagine, have had considerable influence on our customs, our architecture, and even our language."

There is much more here.

Super Colossal posts some CCTV footage of a man who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. As Marcus writes, it's 'a little like watching a bug in a jar'. I'd like to see the unedited footage to experience the ful extent of architectures horrifying, motionless boredom.

Maybe it's the kind of detail you might get if you zoomed in to Warhols 8 hour film of the Empire State.

Related (in a round about way):

StrangeHarvests miniature re-make of Warhols 'Empire'

How to Hack your Elevator

I've always like the inverted idea expressed through Gilbert and Georges 'Souvenir Hyde Park Walk' from 1969. Coinciding with Neil Armstongs historic first steps onto the moon, the two artists strolled through the Rhodedendrums of Hyde Park - somehow conflating the two very different kinds of promenades by overlaying them in time.

Instead of helping us to do things, post-Salif design is a way of helping us understand things. Design helps us to navigate our relationship to contemporary context. It allows us to explore complexities through mute, wordless sensations of touch, texture and form - through materials and technologies of production. Design allows us to feel qualities of the contemporary before they are fully formed articulate ideas - like finding your way in the dark.

Design is a language of whose building blocks are how things are made what they are made out of as much as what they look like. Encoded within these choices are cultural attitudes and ideas to the mechanisms that shape society: to technology and its implications.

It is most obvious in the proto modernism of the arts and crafts movement. Designers such as William Morris played out a dramatic opposition to the cultural effects of the Industrial Revolution through the design of household furniture. Morris revived medieval manufacturing techniques that re-instated the role of the craftsman over the machine. To understand Morris, it is important to recognise that floral patterned wallpaper was actually a radical manifesto.

William Morris - Acanthus Leaf Wallpaper

Contemporary design and architecture are currently benefiting from new waves of digital fabrication techniques. Their impact can be categorised into three tendencies: The Graphic Cut; the Complex Surface; and Nu-Craft.

Klein Dythams Leaf Chapel

The 'Graphic Cut' takes advantage of the ability to computer control devices such as lasers and water jets and thus cut elaborate and intricate patterns into varied materials. The technique itself is two dimensional, and makes objects which are more like a branch of illustration or graphic design. The tendency within this field is to refer to a world of pre-existing objects which are used as quotations squashed flat: elks heads, elaborate baroque furniture, arts and crafts wallpaper. In this way, designers can easily reference history and tradition - though these references are rendered immediately contemporary by the precision of the cut and the flatness of the material. Sometimes the patterns created are wrapped around the overtly three dimensional spaces produced by complex surfaces. In order to create a doubly-complex surface. The CNC technology allows surface elaboration that has been impossible to mass-produce over the last 100 years or so due to labour costs. Though the graphic cut is often references history, it seems oblivious to its most recent forebear, Postmodernism which used historical reference, pattern and flatness as a polemical attack on Modernism. This lack of engagement with by sidestepping the polemics and politics of postmodernism, designers using these techniques. Its effect can be an overwhelmingly rich visual field, or a reduced abstraction close to a childs cartoon depending upon how it is deployed. It uses either richness or abstraction as a way of demonstrating it status as representational design - the too-muchness or not-enough-ness act as a kind of quotation mark - a break from the objects surroundings.

Greg Lynn - Tea & Coffee Tower, Alessi

The Complex Surface is a function of the ability new software provides to design and manufacture in three dimensions. This design approach often uses technologies of rapid prototyping - if not in the final manufacture, then in the design development. Typically designs of this type are non-representational, abstract and sculptural - like 1950s abstract expressionist sculpture except super accurate and highly engineered. They use the tropes that new technology can deliver as a way of symbolising the future. In this way it is an interpretation of a particular machine-loving Modernism, though it rejects any idea of functionalism in favour of a queasy, over-powering sublime effect of form. It finds critical legitimacy in a particular strand of American architectural academia, and is linked to the earlier critical project of figures such as Peter Eisenman. An example of its cutting edge technology is that production of Greg Lynns highly sculpted Tea and Coffee set for Alessi is apparently affected by resources required for the American military presence in Iraq. Though it thrills to the super-high tech in both the way it is made and its materials, it sometimes suggests an affinity for organic form that one might associate with Art Nouveau in its intense use of parabolic curvaciousness. It also shares Art Nouveaus interest and ability to be a kind of totalizing design. It has a scale-less-ness that is seemingly consistent between condiment sets, furniture, buildings and masterplans. The complexity of the surface is beguiling - it twists and turns as though formed in an erotic vortex, attempting to seduce you with endless fascination. The finish of the object becomes important such as seamlessness (which creates the sensation that it might have been born fully formed rather than constructed) and lustre (which accentuates the play of light across its body). These help create a sense of alien-ness - lacking signals of everyday manufacture and a sense of scale that material and making often introduce.

The rise of Nu-Craft as design activity is an alternative response precipitated by the availability of technologies to designers. Rather than a Luddite rejection of technology, or a total inversion as with William Morris, it more often appears as a negotiation between high and low tech. Craft techniques or materials as a way of providing distance from the coalface of technologies novelty. They might include

What they suggest is a kind of authenticity which you could class as physical-ness - a way of manufacturing a 'real-ness' that attempts to form a fissure in the seamless quality of technological production. To do this it draws on sensations such as nostalgia and humour - moments of engagement which are not formal but cultural.

Maarten Baas

The idea of the 'Joke' as a design principle explores the difference between expectation we might have of a material, technique or object and the manner in which it is implemented. This gap is a means of recognising difference.

It also suggests a hybrid condition, sometimes embedding contradictions into objects - tradition becomes novelty, the mass produced becomes hand-crafted (or vice versa). Unlike the certainty of Complex Surface design this design mode works between established positions.

It is visible in the work of Hella Jongerius, Maarten Baas as well as aspects of Marcel Wanders and Jurgen Bey - and many other designers related to design collective Droog.

This design attitude is most closely related to fine art - indeed many of its tactics seem to have been lifted directly from a contemporary art primer to such an extent that it seems somehow too easy. It also echoes some postmodernist design concerns such as taste, value and multiple meanings.

Kieran Jones - Poang chair as Sledge

Nu-Craft includes the activities such as IKEA hacking - where the amateur culture of bedroom computer programming meets generic flatpack furniture. On websites such as Ikea Hacker posters swap tips and projects which "funked up klippan sofa, an ingenious idea for your pax wardrobe, a creative twist on your kitchen countertop, or even advice on how to finally stop forby stools from wobbling". This creative DIY-ism is visible in phenomena such as Make magazine which includes projects from electronics to knitting. These phenomena are closely related to the rise of blogging and the cult of the amateur, and posit a position where everyone can become a designer (as opposed to the specialisms and arcania of high design culture). They also suggest an existence of objects outside the machinations of consumerism.

Unlike the first two categories, Nu-Craft does not try to overwhelm its user with sensation. It is not a stylistic approach or a totalising design vision. Instead it displays wit and ingenuity in specific instances - a kind of design intelligence.

These three categories dominate contemporary design practice. Each of these techniques relates to a way of seeing. They share a commitment to the object as a cultural lodestone - whose significance is a way of describing the contemporary condition (even if they don't themselves admit it). Importantly, they do not propose design as a solution. After Starks Juicy Salif, it has been impossible to imagine design as an agent of progressive change in the old modernist sense. Designs driving aspiration is to improve the world through richness and relevance of its cultural presence. Contemporary design produces devices that are not intended to perform as advertised: as chair, table, lamp or whatever. They are devices whose function is a particular kind of cultural experience.

They do however offer different positions. The Graphic Cut and the Complex Surface - for all their intricacies exploit technology in a simplistic manner - that's to say, they do what they do because they can. Technologies have liberated aspects of design that have, until recently, been un-drawable or unmakable. Their explorations of the design possibilities is a kind of release. In their intricacies of pattern or form they aspire to a kind of technological sublime, an overpowering encounter with digitally crafted complexity. Nu-Craft however has a cooler response to technology. It is selective of how and when technologies are used - a kind of editorial or curatorial attitude to available and appropriate ways and means. Technologies are used here as a more articulate language. The possibilities offered up are more open ended. The Complex Surface for example is a kind of dead-end - a baroque endpiece to a particular history of design as formal object. Nu-Craft steps out of these vectors of design history, instead forging unexpected links and hybridisations.

These differences could be categorised as an open-ness against completeness. If design can no longer be judged by its functional utility, the terms of reference for understanding the success of a design become more complex. Equally, form, composition and other aesthetic qualities are only the means by which an effect is manifested, not ends in themselves. Effect is how the design communicates cultural content and is therefore the primary attribute of contemporary design.

Designs apparent impracticality is not failure; it is the point from which it explores possibilities of contemporary culture (for those who find this a ridiculously pretentious position, there are plenty of products that work). This is why design chairs are almost always more uncomfortable than other kinds of chairs, why design tables are a challenge to use.