The 2007 Tour de France wrapped up with Spaniard Alberto Contador taking the yellow jersey - an amazing feet considering he’s only 24 and this was his first Tour. There was yet another round of doping scandals this year which led to the mid-race sacking of then-leader Michael Rasmussen, and yet again more hand-wringing about whether the sport of cycling can recover. When a Rasmussen or a Vinokourov gets pulled because of doping accusations it calls into question all their previous results. (The photo above, by the way, is a shot I took of last year’s <asterisk>winner</asterisk> Floyd Landis as he circles the Champs-Elysées.)

I can’t say I sympathize with doping at all, but it’s clear that riders are willing to take any chance they can to get an edge. What difference does it make? Consider this: Over the 3550 miles of this year’s tour, the difference in average speed between the winner (Alberto Contador) and the rider in last place was less than one mile per hour. That rider, Wim Vansevenant rode the same course but did so in just under four hours more time - 91 hours, 0 minutes and 20 seconds vs. 94 hours, 53 minutes and 20 seconds. (Courtesy of the Tour de France Lanterne Rouge)

I just picked up one of Moleskine’s new City Guides (Paris in my case). It’s a delightful little affair. It’s the usual small Moleskine notebook size with the trademark elastic strap and expanding note pocket in the back. But it has a lot of special features geared toward the active tourist:

• City maps in two different scales, with very refined and easy to read muted colors and gray shades. There’s also a street index. It’s not as comprehensive as a full city map (or a Paris Par Arrondissement or a London A-Z, for example), but good enough for most uses
  
• Sheets of tracing paper with adhesive at the top (like Post-It notes) to place over the maps so you can trace out an itinerary
• Metro/subway map
• Pages for planning Before Going and while-you-are-there itineraries
• Clothing size conversion charts
• Tabbed pages for noting restaurants, people, places, events etc. that you’ve experienced
• Additional blank tabbed pages that allow you to make your own categories

They also supply a couple of sheets for noting inaccuracies so that you can email Moleskine and let them know. And it has three separate cloth bookmark tags (in 3 shades of gray) to mark different pages. My only complaint, as is the case with most Moleskine books, is there’s no way to securely slot in a pen.

Finally, Moleskine has an accompanying website and blogs for each city (Paris, for example). One wonders if in the future they will open it for the general public to contribute to.

All in all a smart move for Moleskine, filling a need and making good use of their brand and legacy in multiple ways. 

(As a side note, Moleskine’s new Cahier notebooks are my favorite walkaround notebooks - small, flexible, lightweight, good paper, cheap. In kraft brown please. Sold in packs of 3.) 

Last week my wife, Leslie Speer, and I ran a workshop together at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle (Ensci, or Les Ateliers at it used to be known) in Paris. The topic we were asked to do it on was West Coast design - how design is done on the west coast of the US. We gave it a theme of “Change is Good”, with sub-themes of optimism, risk, experimentation, human-centered technology, and democratic design. Through a combination of presentations and activities we gave the students a taste of how and why things are done here the way they are, including how to do user research, brainstorming and personas.  There were 14 students who were a mix of bachelor level French students and foreign students from various parts of Europe, mostly spending a year at Ensci as part of the MEDes. (Master of European Design - a joint, nomadic program created by 7  European design schools. Our friend and host for the workshop, Liz Davis, is the Paris leader for the program) .

There were two intensive days of activities, including the students going out in the rain the afternoon of the first day for a spot of “visual anthropology” to find problems with the Metro and Parisian streets. They came back with some great photos and insights that we were able to work with the following day in a synthesis/brainstorming session. This resulted in a casual presentation of their ideas at the end. We got the students introduced to the magic of Post-it notes, and as you can see from the photos they quickly got the hang of them! At the end of the first day we got some pizza and showed Dogtown and Z-Boys, a movie which nicely captured many of the themes we had talked about earlier. Most of them were completely unfamiliar with the history of skateboarding, and they really enjoyed it. 

 The students seemed to enjoy it, and Liz was “dead chuffed” as she would say (being English, like moi). Leslie and I enjoyed running it, though we were exhausted at the end of it - we slept for 16 hours the following night/day.

Madame Davis, our host, as always on the move

And here’s a wonderful prototype in miniature of a Metro station design, made out of Post-it notes!

And lastly a full-scale mock-up of a design for preventing litter caused by freebie newspapers on the Metro: buckets on poles and various other places in the Metro cars that people can put their papers into when finished, encouraging others to read them (less likely if left on floor or seat).

Thanks to Liz for the invite to do it and making it happen, and to the students for letting us use them as ginuea pigs for the experiment! 

I’ve been really impressed with a couple of brand new museums here in Paris - the Musée de l’Orangerie which houses giant paintings by Monet, and the Musée du Quai Branly, President Jacques Chirac’s only cultural monument. They impress not just with their collections, but with the care, spirit and imagination with which the buildings themselves are done. But before talking about these a bit more, I want to touch on a couple of other museums here.

The Musée d’Orsay

This is probably my favorite museum I’ve been to anywhere. It’s been around for quite a few years now, and is a renovated train station. It has just the right mix of graneur and intimate scale, of new and old building materials, of moving you between light and shadow, and an imaginative way of partitioning spaces and creating flow that are characteristic of the newer museums also. This is what sets it above the Tate Modern in London, which is undoubtedly striking in concept (museum in an old brick power station) and in its lobby/atrium, but you soon realize that’s about all the tricks it has. It’s rather a one liner, whereas the Orsay keeps revealing new reads as you spend time in it. If you’re coming to Paris, definitely put this on your list.

The Louvre

OK, everybody knows this one and it’s been around for centuries, but there were a couple of things I appreciated this time that I thought were noteworthy. This was my first visit since the pyramid was built, so it’s been a long time. I quite like the look of the pyramid — particularly from the inside it has an intriguing effect of the old being framed by the new — but it is also used tremendously as an orienting device for the whole museum experience. The Louvre is famously sprawling and confusing, and the pyramid is effectively used throughout the museum to help you figure out where you are. I was also struck by the attention to detail of the exhibit vitrines and numbering, which so often are either bland or clear after-thoughts done as cheaply as possible. At the Louvre they are substantial looking, with just enough form expression that they interesting in themselves without being at all distracting. Lastly, if you go through the 17th/18th century French painting wing, make sure to look UP! They are housed in some of the most spectacularly decorated rooms in the whole place, yet almost no-one noticed the amazing paintings and tapestries and carving on the ceilings.

Musée de l’Orangerie

This museum recently re-opened after a very extensive, six year long remodel that corrected some problems with earlier remodels. Sighted at the end of the Tuileries Gardens at the tip of the Champs-Elysées, the museum was specifically built to house very large scale water-lily paintings of Monet, who personally directed the conversion of the building from its previous use in the 1920’s. As you can see from the picture, these are panoramic in the extreme, and curve around to create a real sense of looking out onto the Giverny landscape where Monet had his gardens. They make Jackson Pollocks look small in comparison. The daylight pours in from the ceilings, and shifts and dapples depending on the cloud cover, giving a sense of dynamism from the paintings that is true to their creation. The museum limits the flow of people in at the door, so you have relatively empty rooms (certainly compared to the Louvre!) in which you can look at these giant paintings without too much visual interruption.

You can read more about the history of the building and the new renovation here.

The Musée du Quai Branly

This is the new “statement” of President Jaques Chirac, his only significant cultural building. Jean Nouvel is the architect, who also designed the Institute du Monde Arabe (striking from the outside, mechanically unreliable, and a navigation disaster on the inside). The museum consolidates the anthropology and art collections of several smaller museums in Paris, and presentings a kaleidescopic and overwhelming vision of “non-European” art - arts of Africa, Oceania, Americas, and Asia. From the outside the building is similarly kaleidescopic and hard to grasp - it changes from every angle. Personally I liked it, and it avoids falling into any number of thematic traps that would have doomed it to being judged as paternalistic, symbolic of western colonization, or ignoring its internal subject matter entirely. (The NY Times has a good critique here.)

Inside you follow a roughly looping path that takes you through the different cultures and locations. The pieces are displayed along walls and in freestanding, 8’ high glass cabinets. The walls and ceiling are all in dark tones, and the lighting is superb, probably the most stunning I’ve ever seen in a museum. It manages to give an ambient glow at the same time it is pickout out objects with laser precision. There are also numerous cubbies and side rooms to wander into, making for an every changing experience. However, all these visual impediments do make it very difficult to keep track of even a small group! I also have my doubts about the durabiilty of some of the materials and finishes, some of which were looking worn a mere weeks after opening. Rubbing my hand against a nicely textured column, my palm came off covered in red dust.

While the loop aids in navigation, it also has the effect of blurring your sense of geography. You move seamlessly and without obvious distinction between the different cultures, one moment in Nigeria and the other in Tibet. As improbable as it may seem, the overall effect is one of consistency and commonality of cultures as expressed through colors, patterns and forms.

Is this a recanting of post-modernism? Not long ago the trend in museology was to reinforce the differences between cultures in a contextual manner, avoiding the “up with people” homogonization of classic (and popular) exhibits like the Family of Man. Branly appears to be pushing the pendulum back in the other direction and emphasizing common humanity, if not to the point of sameness. In a country recently rocked by riots by disenfranchised poor from France’s former black and muslim colonies, this is a significant message to be sending, particularly from a museum with the impramateur of the President himself.

But maybe this is what we need in our digital-binary world these days - a bit more sense of our common humanity and less emphasis on our differences, whether they be Democrat/Republican, Israeli or Palestinian.

Yesterday while in Paris we visited the wonderful Manufacture des Gobelins, a centuries old site for making tapestries and doing wool dying (though the dying is no longer done there - too much pollution!). They have terrific guided tours that are very informative (though only in French, so I was only able to catch a fraction and my wife translated for me), and you get to see the modern-day artisans at work, as well as many of their completed and in-progress tapestries, the majority of which are in a modern art style. Never have I seen such a painstaking and prolonged production process.

The pictures here are of some of the people working on a very large recreation of a tapestry originally made for King Louis XVI (late 1700’s). The tapestry measures 5.62 x 7.26m (18.4’ x 23.8’), and is done in a tufted style of manufacture that is extremely labor-intensive. How intensive? They have been working on this since 16 April, 1994. As of the end of last year, it was 88.8% done!

As you can see from the pictures, several people can work on it simultaneously as the loom is very large. In fact, the creation has been going on for the equivalent of 5 full-time people for 7293 days.

You can see the original painting that was used as the reference for the original tapestry above the artisans. As they work on a new section, a new piece of the painting is put in place. Somehow they manage to keep track of where they are, and keep everything to scale. (Click on the images for large versions.)

In this photo you can see one of the artisans doing what takes a lot of the time, trimming and arranging each individual tuft with a pair of scissors. It works like this: when then the wool is first woven in place it is left rough-cut, and then they come in and trim each tuft individually to height. This allows a thick tapestry that is soft looking, like a painting.  After this, they then go back and wiggle the individual tufts back into alignment with the very tip of the scissor blade. Here, she is working on smoothing the edges of the grapes so that they look nice and round.

Lastly, a close up of the spools of wool. There are thousands of shades that have been optimized over the centuries. Essentially tapestry making is a digital process - a finite color palette and pixels, with colors often “dithered” to create blends.

Perhaps you’ll give Microsoft a bit more flexibility with its Vista release