As my work based weeknotes are being catered for rather nicely both at Hubbub and KANT, I’m going to keep writing weeknotes here, but instead of making an overview of the week’s work, I’ll do some more long form reflecting on stuff that happened. A bit more casual and personal than we are used to.
I see I marked a picture of this ridge in the newly opened Park am Gleisdreieck as a cycling nuisance. I find it stunning how poorly designed that particular park is. It is a given that the location and the shape of the various pieces of land and already existing functions do not make for an easy mix, but the result should not have been quite that bad in my opinion. Especially the newly opened North Eastern part is a total jumble of functions and feels oddly cramped for a park of a reasonable size.
One of the biggest problem from my perspective is that a large park in the city is an ideal shortcut for cyclists and will be used as such. Just take a look at the myriads of people cycling through the Vondelpark on any given day. The Gleisdreieckpark has no functional separation to indicate where cyclists should cycle and pedestrians should walk. Not that pedestrians in Berlin will adhere to such indicators, but that is a different issue. The most logical cycle paths are also littered with trash cans and benches, which add to the confusion. The connections to the park from the city are also a massive inconvenience and horrible to get in or out of with no connections to major arteries in the city.
The park is a ‘success’ in so far that it is being used quite enthusiastically by a large number of people. There is also a notable shortage of drug dealers which is a nice change. This only serves to show that parks are vital to Berlin and there are not enough of them already. It is not a testament to the design of this park which is a failure like most of the urban planning happening in Berlin 1.
We released Cuppings to the app store somewhere this week which has taken some work to get going but we are at a point now that the app sells by itself (modestly) so anything we do on top of that are welcome extras. We are planning a bunch of updates to the guide app and are right now prototyping a game (more about which over at Hubbub). Coffee remains a lasting passion of ours, so working on apps and games about coffee and documenting our habits as a form of marketing cannot really be called work. Fun may be a better word for it.
I also sunk a lot of time preparing a presentation that week. Something that I’m resolved not to do anymore. I’m going to try some other ways of doing presentations that offer different min/max outcomes when it comes to the time spent giving a presentation and the eventual result. More on that later.
I have some pet theories as to why public servants in Berlin are so incompetent as to border on the corrupt. Not sure if I can share those here anytime soon however. ↩︎
