We also, as it happens, still have a strong belief in physical retail, and especially in tightly edited stores that have a style and a stance all their own. That’s why we’re so happy to see Tokyo Blues at the awesome Rare Device on Market Street in San Francisco. Rare Device carries the sort of things you won’t have seen in very many other boutiques, if anywhere else at all, and it gives us a wonderful feeling to see the book there.

Case in point: if you happen to visit the store between now and 10th October, be sure to check out the installation featuring the incredible work of Nervous System: jewelry and houseware that’s as cutting-edge as it gets without being tainted in the slightest by precious avantgardism.

The response to the Systems/Layers walkshop we held in Wellington a few months back was tremendously gratifying, and given how much people seem to have gotten out of it we’ve been determined to set up similar events, in cities around the planet, ever since. (Previously, here on Do, and see participant CJ Wells’s writeup here.)

We’re fairly far along with plans to bring Systems/Layers to Barcelona in June (thanks Chris and Enric!), have just started getting into how we might do it in Taipei (thanks Sophie and TH!), and understand from e-mail inquiries that there’s interest in walkshops in Vancouver and Toronto as well. This is, of course, wonderfully exciting to us, and we’re hoping to learn as much from each of these as we did from Wellington.

What we’ve discovered is that the initial planning stages are significantly smoother if potential sponsors and other partners understand a little bit more about what Systems/Layers is, what it’s for and what people get out of it. The following is a brief summary designed to answer just these questions, and you are more than welcome to use it to raise interest in your part of the world. We’d love to hold walkshops in as many cities as are interested in having them.

What.
Systems/Layers is a half-day “walkshop,” held in two parts. The first portion of the activity is dedicated to a slow and considered walk through a reasonably dense and built-up section of the city at hand. What we’re looking for are appearances of the networked digital in the physical, and vice versa: apertures through which the things that happen in the real world drive the “network weather,” and contexts in which that weather affects what people see, confront and are able to do.

Participants are asked to pay particular attention to:

- Places where information is being collected by the network.
- Places where networked information is being displayed.
- Places where networked information is being acted upon, either by people directly, or by physical systems that affect the choices people have available to them.

You’ll want to bring seasonally-appropriate clothing, good comfortable shoes, and a camera. We’ll provide maps of “the box,” the area through which we’ll be walking.

This portion of the day will take around 90 minutes, after which we gather in a convenient “command post” to map, review and discuss the things we’ve encountered. We allot an hour for this, but since we’re inclined to choose a command post offering reasonably-priced food and drink, discussion can go on as long as participants feel like hanging out.

Who.
Do projects’ Nurri Kim and Adam Greenfield plan and run the workshop, with the assistance of a qualified local expert/maven/mayor. (In Wellington, Tom Beard did a splendid job of this, for which we remain grateful.)

We feel the walkshop works best if it’s limited to roughly 30 participants in total, split into two teams for the walking segment and reunited for the discussion.

How.
In order for us to bring Systems/Layers to your town, we need the sponsorship of a local arts, architecture or urbanist organization — generally, but not necessarily, a non-profit. They’ll cover the cost of our travel and accommodation, and defray these expenses by charging for participation in the walkshop. In turn, we’ll ensure both that the registration fee remains reasonable, and that one or two scholarship places are available for those who absolutely cannot afford to participate otherwise.

If you’re a representative of such an organization, and you’re interested in us putting on a Systems/Layers walkshop in your area, please get in touch. If you’re not, but you still want us to come, you could try to put together enough participants who are willing to register and pay ahead of time, so we could book flights and hotels. But really, we’ve found that the best way to do things is to approach a local gallery, community group or NGO and ask them to sponsor the event.

At least as we have it set up now, you should know that we’re not financially compensated in any way for our organization of these walkshops, beyond having our travel, accommodation and transfer expenses covered.

When.
Our schedule tends to fill up 4-6 months ahead of time, so we’re already talking about events in the (Northern Hemisphere) spring of 2011. And of course, it’s generally cheapest to book flights and hotels well in advance. If you think Systems/Layers would be a good fit for your city, please do get in touch as soon as you possibly can. As we’ve mentioned, we’d be thrilled to work with you, and look forward to hearing from you with genuine anticipation and excitement. Wellington was amazing, Barcelona is shaping up to be pretty special, and Taipei, if we can pull it off, will be awesome. It’d mean a lot to us to add your city to this list. Thanks!

Everywhere you go, there are certain things which play heroic roles in knitting the world together, and which somehow remain anonymous, even unseen. Our first book, Tokyo Blues, is the story of one of them: the common blue PVC plastic construction tarp.

Now available for purchase or free download, Tokyo Blues is a photographic record of Nurri Kim’s 2002-2003 investigation into this humble industrial material and the very wide variety of uses to which it’s put in the everyday life of Japan.

From construction sites and homeless settlements to cherry-blossom viewing parties in the park, the ubiquitous blue tarp is a constant of Japanese life and a bearer of multiple registers of meaning. In sixty-four images from the boulevards, alleys, sidestreets and interstitial spaces, Tokyo Blues explores these dramatically different contexts, returning something “we see too often, and then forget to see” to full, vivid visibility. The result is a book that provokes its readers to see the city around them with new eyes — whether that city is Tokyo, or their own.

Tokyo Blues is superb. — William Gibson

You can read more about the making of Tokyo Blues here.

It was a genuinely necessary trip, on a lot of levels. For almost two solid weeks, we soaked up Southern Hemisphere summer, ate foods it’s all but impossible to get in Finland in any season, and basked in the extraordinary generosity of the event’s hosts and participants. We also found, once again, that we were able to ship Tokyo Blues orders from the road.

But the real revelation was the response to Systems/Layers, our “walkshop” on the experience of urban space in the era of networked informatics. The feedback we got was so positive that we’re determined to do it again both here in Helsinki, and later on in New York and anywhere else we can mount it; not coincidentally, it was also a rich source of ideas for future Do initiatives.

The method, to the degree there was one, was pretty simple, and drew heavily on a similarly-themed walkabout developed by Martin Brynskov for the NordiCHI conference in Lund a couple of years back. We basically walked around the Cuba Street district of Wellington for an hour and a half with eyes wide open, looking very carefully for all of the sites in the streetscape where information is being gathered up by a networked system, or drawn back off such a system and displayed or acted upon. (You can see Nigel Parker’s video of the walkshop here and check out participants’ visual responses here.)

Then we returned to a command post we’d previously set up and provided with a map of the area, to plot our findings and consider what we’d seen in the light of a couple of fundamental questions: who owns this data? How might one get access to it? What kind of interface might be involved? Whose interests does it tend to support, or undermine? To a person, the participants all said it had raised their consciousness regarding the present-day, real-world effects of networked informatics on urban life, and we learned more about the texture of Wellington than I’d have wagered it was possible to discover in 90 minutes. Superthanks to Tom Beard for helping to plan and run the event, and endless gratitude to Mike, Natasha, Keith, Ben, and everyone else who helps to make Webstock what it is: you’ve really got something special going on. (Xtra bonus shout-out to Dr. Anne Galloway and the Snapper guys.)

Our next challenge is going to be figuring out how to do this as a regular, repeatable event, and to produce documentation (perhaps along the lines of the wonderful things Candy and James are doing with Civic Center) that helps people further unpack the dense urban systems they live in, around and between. In the meantime, we’ve got a couple more weeks yet of winter to trudge through, so wish us luck. : . )

The last seven weeks have seen us taking our fledging operation on the road. Between our last report to you on the 22nd December and mid-January, we found ourselves in Palm Beach, New York, London, Seoul and Tokyo: the price of having a far-flung family.

As you’d imagine, we spent a lot of that period in a jetlagged (but well-fed) daze, and as you also might expect, it’s been a little difficult to reintegrate fully into Helsinki life. We’ve been helped immeasurably in this effort by our dear friends Sasha and Petri — and suspect we would be by Bryan as well, if he were ever in town.

The pace of Tokyo Blues orders has slowed after its initial spike, but we’re actually happy in that this has allowed us to handle fulfillment from the road. We took a stack of books with us wherever we went and shipped them from wherever we happened to be as orders came in, which is a luxury/burden I can’t imagine too many other publishers experiencing. We don’t believe this led to any problems with delivery, but please let us know if for whatever reason your order hasn’t arrived.

Our trip to Tokyo was brief but instructive: the city’s homeless, having already been chased out of the subway tunnels at the end of the 1990s, are now being exiled from the public parks they colonized in the early part of last decade. One unexpected, minor, but very interesting consequence of this is that Tokyo Blues has acquired new value as historical documentation, as the conditions it depicts are no longer extant — at least not in the parts of Shinjuku and Shibuya we were able to reach.

The city’s parks, playgrounds and interstitial spaces have been swept clear of any sign of their former use, to the extent that I have a hard time imagining how anyone encountering them for the first time now will understand just how richly and cleverly they were inhabited. What we thought of as a more-or-less permanent feature of the cityscape turned out to be just the way things were done during a very particular interval in time. I feel very lucky to have something we can point to and say, this is the way it was.

Another nice piece of luck: after many years of poking around Seoul, obviously in the wrong places, we’ve finally touched base with something that feels to us like vibrant alternative culture. Nurri had read about a bookstore/imprint out of Itaewon called Post Poetics, and we dropped in to have a look. It turned out to be this amazing oasis of lowercase cultural production — somehow simultaneously spare/minimal but ad-hoc and funky — run by a lovely guy named Jowan; he, in turn, let us know about a sound-art opening at the brand new Space Hamilton around the corner, and that was also pretty great.

It was all a little uncanny for me personally, since this little nexus of activity lies just up the street from the place where a pleasure district (”Hooker Hill”) once huddled up against the gates of Yongsan, formerly the main US Army base on the peninsula. I spent a decent amount of time up in these alleys in the late ’90s, watching twenty-year-old Rangers kill their neurons by the millionfold with soju kettle (a concoction of 86-proof rice whiskey and Kool-Aid, served in two-liter soda bottles with the tops hacked off) before setting off to making fools of themselves by trying to bargain with the working girls.

After the turn of the century, and especially since the return of Yongsan to Korean control, the neighborhood’s lost most of this character, becoming heavily Bangla and Pakistani (and gaining some incredible hole-in-the-wall places to eat in the bargain), but my own memories of Itaewon tend to feature landmarks like Polly’s Kettle House and the supercheesy Reggae Pub. Post Poetics isn’t entirely detached from this legacy — it is, reassuringly, one floor up from a tacky little sex shop — but I have to tell you that walking into a space hereabouts and seeing shelves lined with Apartamento and Kasino A4 and Butt still strikes me as nothing short of surreal. Here again, a study in changing urban dynamics. (Congratulations to Jowan on bringing something lovely into being, and our thanks for having pointed us at some other great stuff.)

The last thing we have to report to you for now is something that makes us really happy: Nurri’s won a 2010 Finnish Arts Council grant for work on an upcoming project, of which we’ll tell you more in days to come. For now, stay warm, keep in touch, and keep sending us those pictures of you with your books.

For now, here’s wishing the happiest of holidays to you all from Do HQ here in Helsinki: cozy, healthy, relaxed, and surrounded by those you love best. See you here next week for a year-end wrapup.

Another good solid week; orders continue to come in at a pleasing pace, and we continue to bring stacks of books down to the post office for shipment on a daily basis.

Three things have come up in all of this. The first is that we’re contemplating bumping up our shipping rates to Zone B (i.e. anywhere but Europe) by about a dollar, to reflect higher-than-expected costs. We’ll come to a decision on this in the next few days, and let you know as soon as we do.

The second thing is that we’re especially curious to hear how the first shipments of Tokyo Blues have fared in the mail – if we’re packing the books adequately to protect them on their journeys, how they look when you get them, and so on. We’d appreciate it if you’d let us know when you get your books, what kind of condition they’re arriving in, and how well the packing meets your expectations.

But the last is that shipping orders – which ought to be nothing but drudgery, given that it involves delightful tasks like printing labels, stuffing envelopes, and waiting on line at the post office – unexpectedly turns out to be one of the most rewarding things I can remember doing, and infinitely more gratifying than anything I’m doing at my day job. (Maybe that’s why they call it “fulfillment.”) Every time we walk out of the Posti with another batch of orders shipped, I feel the kind of solid-but-humble, and humble-but-solid, sense of accomplishment that’s all too rare in this life.

It’s a wonderful feeling, and especially welcome in what would otherwise be the lightless and depressive depths of a Helsinki December. I recommend doing whatever you have to do to put yourself in the same position, as soon as you possibly can. The economics of small endeavors like Do will always be brutal, but this is a life-changing sensation.

Adam is hoping to grab some time to dig further in sources for The City Is Here For You To Use, primarily oddball Frei Otto’s oddball Occupying and Connecting and material on favelas and slums. Nurri’s continuing her work at Refugee Hospitality Club Punavuori, conducting resident and stakeholder interviews and collecting information about how residents sense, understand and make use of Helsinki.

Finally finally, just a quick reminder that it’s holiday season, and while we’re doing our best to get orders out within 24 hours (and in many cases, on the same day they come in), you can expect the mail to be sluggish from now through the end of the year. The people at Posti advised us that orders going out this week will probably show up no earlier than the first week of January, no matter where they’re going to, and we’ve adjusted our expectations accordingly.

Launch week, and a flurry of activity:

- Very gratifyingly, Tokyo Blues was featured on Dwell, MetaFilter, Space and Culture, Boing Boing, Jean Snow and Warren Ellis’s sites, and in too many tweets to keep track of. (Our personal favorite has to be William Gibson’s.) There’s very little more rewarding than seeing how many of you get what we’re trying to do.

- As you can see from the above picture, we’ve been making daily fulfillment runs to the Posti. The first orders went out in last Wednesday’s mail, and while things are bound to be crazy this time of year, those of you who ordered Tokyo Blues might want to start keeping an eye on your mailboxes.

- If you’ve already got your hands on the book, send us your pictures and we’ll publish them here!

- Nurri’s continuing her research at a local reception center for refugees and asylum seekers, with an eye toward developing materials that explain the city and its new residents to one another. Adam took advantage of a trip to San Francisco to discuss requirements for our forthcoming Emergency Maps project with Stamen’s Tom Carden and Michal Migurski.

That’s about it for now, with thanks always for your support, your insightful comments, and (especially) your orders. More news next week.

• For the realization of this project, Do consisted of Nurri Kim, Anne Galloway and Adam Greenfield.

• The version of Tokyo Blues we’re offering here is edition 1.0 of 1st October 2009, an edition of 500 printed in China by Asia Pacific Offset of Hong Kong, on 157 gsm Gold East Matte paper. We chose the paper and cover stock carefully, in an attempt to balance a few competing desires:

For this project, the first and most important criterion was that the paper had to reproduce color tones and values faithfully, so that the images look the way they’re supposed to. But we also understood that indulging ourselves in the super-premium stock we dreamed about would have made the per-unit price prohibitively high. (It also would have made the book a heavier object, and therefore more expensive to ship either individually or by the palletload.) These were prices we would have had to pass on to you, and we didn’t want that.

We wound up choosing a stock with an acceptably good weight, “tooth” and texture, something that feels pleasant to hold and touch. The page gives the images their due, and can be turned and turned again without crimping or bearing smudges from fingerprints, yet is of a weight that still results in an object we could afford to produce and ship and you could afford to buy. We hope you agree.

• The book’s titles and incidentals are set in DIN Mittelschrift, with captions and body copy in Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk.

• We produced the book entirely on Apple Macintosh computers, using Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator software.

• The original prints of the images seen in the book were produced by Gabe Greenberg of Greenberg Editions, New York City. All prints are originally sized 14 x 9 inches (35.56 x 22.86 cm), and are available for purchase from the artist.

Everywhere you go, there are certain things which play heroic roles in knitting the world together, and which somehow remain anonymous, even unseen. Our first book, Tokyo Blues, is the story of one of them: the common blue PVC plastic construction tarp.

Now available for purchase or free download, Tokyo Blues is a photographic record of Nurri Kim’s 2002-2003 investigation into this humble industrial material and the very wide variety of uses to which it’s put in the everyday life of Japan.

From construction sites and homeless settlements to cherry-blossom viewing parties in the park, the ubiquitous blue tarp is a constant of Japanese life and a bearer of multiple registers of meaning. In sixty-four images from the boulevards, alleys, sidestreets and interstitial spaces, Tokyo Blues explores these dramatically different contexts, returning something “we see too often, and then forget to see” to full, vivid visibility. The result is a book that provokes its readers to see the city around them with new eyes — whether that city is Tokyo, or their own.

You can read more about the making of Tokyo Blues here.