As a lover of systems

I've just been thinking over the process of adjusting to Brooklyn - not in an especially personal way, but at the same time in terms of my deep personal love of infrastructural systems. Obviously there's a prejudice here - I'll prefer an electrical grid or a signalling system or a typeface or an internetwork because of my love of communication.

But next to type and systems, postcolonial architecture and transit systems are what I grew up with in Ireland. And it's incredibly similar to where I am in brooklyn, but through the looking glass of a vast industrialised country, and one of the world's mega cities. New york is - at a nuts and bolts level - an incredible system.

Take the brownstones on my street - end to end, that's about 6 or 7 miles of houses. The frontispiece of each house has three panels of cast iron rail: some long gone, some replaced with ratty railings, most still there. Both sides of the street, times every block from atlantic avenue to marcy avenue - actually quite a small portion of the city.

These rusty pieces of iron - cast in neoclassical shapes abstracted from copies of drawings of studies of 2,000 year old roman ruins - and every wire and bolt and skirting board and chainlink fence that wraps this neighbourhood create a system for storing humans. Laid out in grids which ergonomically improve ease-of-use and furnished with corner buildings which house shops and restaurants. Because of the overlaying of systems in the area, you can make guesses as to how the system improves itself, or whether it's working or not. Generally speaking the best way t0 assess this is to examine the people who are stored there.

Like studying the footfall and user journeys in an interactive application, the urban landscape tells its own story of design mistakes and successes, shows use at key points, bottlenecks and areas of poor attention to detail. But the humans are in very good condition, so I'll take a guess that it's fulfilling its functional specification within a reasonably tolerable degree.

And if you could actually stand listening to this kind of wildly pretentious crap at work - sometimes even at meetings, to prove a point about work, for crying out loud.... well, yes you should hire a UX/UI designer with an entire mobile library of obsessions, most of them infrastructural systems.