Cycling should mean a fitter population and a longer life expectancy, which would take pressure off the National Health Service and bring huge economic benefits. It would of course also reduce energy consumption.

By the late 1850s the scale of the city was making things worse: London’s sewage was deposited into the River Thames, out of which the city’s drinking water was being collected. Bazalgette’s solution was to construct a series of sewers that would run parallel to the Thames, both north and south of the river, collecting the sewage and ensuring the drinking water that was drawn from the river was clean.

Joseph Bazalgette

the tabula rasa model

An Act of Parliament was passed that introduced building inspectors to ensure that buildings be built from brick and not timber (a law which predated the fire, but that hadn’t been enforced). Of course, the fire and resulting devastation meant that much of London had to be rebuilt, and that these buildings would be brick.

the Great Fire of 1666

However, the real question is: will cycling actually change the city? Will it result in new urban forms or, as the title of Australian academic Dr Steven Fleming’s new book predicts, a “Cycle Space”? Like Fleming, I believe so. I believe that cycling might just be the catalyst for a 21st Century urban renaissance.

Boris Bike

Denise Gonzales Crisp, Chair of Graphic Design at the College of Design, North Carolina State University, shared “[Look at] salary discrepancy between males and females in education. Almost every institution I’ve looked at, the women earned on average anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 less in the same positions [held by men]. So that inequality we experience generally out in the world is also reflected in education.

“Not enough women designers are given the recognition that they deserve,” says graphic designer Antonio Carusone. “Take for example Jacqueline S. Casey. She is primarily responsible for bringing the International Typographic Style to the US, and her work is just as brilliant as Muller-Brockmann’s, Crouwel’s, Ruder’s…. But for some reason, her name is left out most of the time.”

Hitchcock adds, “Why does design history still teach about male designers 80% more than women designers? Why do we have 80 % women in the student body (in our [RISD] department) and 80% men in the faculty?”

There is a line of forgotten women in our history. I argue that sexism is somewhat less obvious in our workplace today, far subtler than it might have been in the 1950s and 60s, but perhaps we still accept some mores of old, underlying currents that flow through our design culture, much like that lecture in 2011.

Forty or fifty years ago, the workforce was overwhelmingly a man’s world. In the design field, many women may have been assistants or “office girls” and so few held the top titles, such as art director or creative director. In a basic sense, women’s careers have rarely followed the same path of men’s, since there has historically been immense pressure placed on women to be solely homemakers and nurture families

three hundred and twenty-three independent designers listed — twenty-two women.

It is often discussed, academically and informally, that the presence of female designers missing from the history of graphic design is a sore oversight of the profession. And while we can claim more progressive (and equal) laws and beliefs in present day society, the disparity between male and female representation in design lingers on. But why is retrospective accreditation important? And if it is getting better, do we need to keep talking about it? Tori Hinn, of Women of Graphic Design, talks through some of the issues facing women in the past, and regrettably, in our industry today.

“The Three Girls,” which Leyland had commissioned but which Whistler never completed. (A tantalizing oil sketch and figure studies for the proposed masterpiece are among the Freer’s many Whistlers, the largest representation of his work anywhere.) The mural is both funny and gorgeous, but its expression of personal pique disrupts the room’s serenity like a street noise in the night.

Peacock Room,

Nearly all the most adventurous artists in Whistler’s generation responded avidly to Japanese aesthetics.

The Princess from the Land of Porcelain”

Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink

James McNeill Whistler

“In the mid-century, convenience was defined as a place to shop within your town, within a 5- or 10-minute drive from your house,” Wood says. “Whereas our notion of convenience now is not leaving our houses. These ideas of self-sufficiency and self-service have been pushed so far that you go on Amazon and you just say, ‘This is what I want.’ Amazon says, ‘Okay, here’s everything we have that matches that description,’ and then you choose. In actuality, I think Amazon is highly inefficient if you don’t know what you’re buying because you don’t have anyone to help you and say, ‘No, actually, this is better than that.’ Today, we shop as if we know about everything that we’re shopping for, but in the mid-century, you trusted that your department store was going to sell you something that was good.”

elf-checkout debuted in 1992, just a few years before the World Wide Web made online shopping widely accessible to everyone. Amazon and eBay, both launched in 1995, taught us to be even more self-sufficient shoppers—at this point, the two Internet giants offer everything you’d find at Wal-Mart and more. O

“In the 1950s and ’60s, you see this shift where shopping becomes a pastime and a hobby, especially in the suburbs,” Wood says. “The mall would have the grocery store, a liquor store, a pharmacy, a bakery, and then your department stores. You could drive there, take your little children around in a carriage, and spend the whole day there because there would be at least one restaurant in the department store.”

n addition to the escalators and new forms of lighting, new department stores featured another marvel of modern technology: central air. The heating, air-conditioning, and bright lights eliminated the need for windows, so in the 1950s and ’60s, stores without windows were built inside new shopping malls.

“Escalators have this weird history of being thought of as low-brow,” Wood says. “I’ve seen multiple references to the fact that women of a higher class did not want to use escalators.

For example, Loewy employed a combination of incandescent and new fluorescent lighting, as well as spotlights, to emphasize particular items for sale. Wood says, “he created an atmosphere where people’s eyes would feel relaxed, and they could be directed towards certain products.”

Because the experience of the design was such a priority, clothes and accessories were displayed in flat glass cases on rosewood stands or on live mannequins so that hanging racks wouldn’t interfere with the view.

Of course, markets and bazaars featuring different vendors selling a variety of goods existed long before the department store. The big difference was at a department store, all the individual shops belonged to the same business, so they had consistent policies. (To small-time shopkeepers, these new department stores threatened their livelihood the way Amazon upsets brick-and-mortar retail today.)

“In the mid-century, Americans were wanting and buying more,” Wood says. “In response, the department stores offered and displayed more, like the same purse in five colors.

And Loewy’s plan wasn’t just about how shoppers experienced the space, but how the stores could more efficiently sell their merchandise.”

Raymond Loewy

As the Computer Age thrusts us into the future, would-be mall rats are spending all their time on Facebook, and the breath-taking range of products, once so meticulously displayed for our delight, is being crammed into our PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

About 20 percent of the 2,000 largest U.S. malls were failing in 2008, and by 2012, only 1,513 remained in operation. Current numbers predict more than 200 existing big malls will collapse in the next 10 years.

The once-vibrant shopping mall has one foot in the grave these days.