service – Broken City Lab

This mobile letterpress service-in-a-truck looks similar to the camper we occupied this summer at Truck Gallery in Calgary. The truck pictured is part of a touring project called Moveable Type. It is as it sounds: a truck with printing equipment installed where camping amenities used to reside. “It was originally a fleet truck for American Linens, and their logo is still faintly visible beneath the white body paint.” The truck conversion itself is a feat of ingenuity, but its touring schedule is also pretty ambitious. I counted nearly 100 stops from June to December of 2011. I hope to catch it during one of its future Canadian appearances.

Via: Eyeteeth: A Journal of Incisive Ideas

Continue reading “Moveable Type: Cross-Country Adventures in Printing”

Pay to Rest by Vinchen is a simple-enough intervention, adding a suggestive coin-operated mechanism to a city bench.

It may be a one-liner, but it caught my eye a couple days ago, the photo sat on my desktop, and now this morning upon reading Amherstburg’s idea to introduce pay-per-use fees to soccer fields, baseball diamonds, etc., it made me curious about the priorities of a city when such significant money can go into certain forms of maintenance, but then shift other services to another kind of access model.

I’ll admit I’m making a bit of a leap here, but if benches were indeed pay-per-use, would it result in better kept parks? If an entire city shifted to a pay-per-use model, would things get any better? What would be the first bit of infrastructure to collapse? If the entire city operated on a subscription service model, would there be any positive change?

[via Wooster Collective]