Works That Work Issue 7 by worksthatwork

WO R K S T H AT WO R K A M AGA Z I N E O F U N E X P E C T E D C R E AT I V I T Y I S S U E 7, 2016

VISUALISING

THE INVISIBLE.

Dodging and Dazzling: Responses to Mass Surveillance by Alice Twemlow The Chinese artist Liu Bolin being painted by his assistants in front of a wall of magazines. While most artists like to stand out from the crowd, Liu Bolin likes to blend in to his surroundings. The pioneer of camouflage art has been painted from head to foot to appear nearly invisible against a wide range of backdrops.

Another family of camouflage projects is developing around the desire to trick the facial recognition software increasingly employed by security systems. Dutch designer Simone C. Niquille’s Glamouflage project offers clothing printed with bizarre collages of celebrity impersonators and pirated faces used in fake profiles and spam ads, a technique intended to confuse machine vision algorithms by adding noise to the wearer’s image.

The Faraday cage, a construction which interferes with electromagnetic signals, is another popular technique for safeguarding privacy. During a residency with HCMA Architecture + Design in 2014, the social artist Julien Thomas created a pop-up Faraday Café in Vancouver’s Chinatown. The café contained a 2.5 × 4.9 m (8.2 × 16.1 ft) box formed out of aluminium mesh. Inside, café customers could seek refuge from Wi-Fi and mobile phone signals as well as from electronic surveillance.

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Design is commonly considered to be a surface attribute, and generally speaking, what distinguishes a ‘design’ object from an ordinary one is not necessarily its function, but its appearance (and of course the price tag that comes with it). In Works That Work we aim to present a less rare fied definition of design by focusing on the actual impact of objects and ideas on their users. Our stories are not about how designers can make their works more stylish, but about how their works can make our lives better. This issue also strives to probe beyond the visible aspect of design. We look at the invisible principles that shaped San Francisco’s informal but highly effective social commuting system, which has been used by hundreds of thousands of people since its start in the 1970s. We also look at systems that, conversely, aim to make the invisible visible, such as those documented in two pieces about innovative postal addressing in areas which the regular post considered inaccessible. The absence of objects is the subject of a story from Rwanda, one of the first countries to ban plastic bags, and thus pioneering effective environ mental protection and sustainable use of resources. These examples help us define what the word design may mean today. — Peter Biľak

Works That Work, Issue 7, Summer 2016 A Magazine of Unexpected Creativity published twice a year by Typotheque issn: 2214-0158 Edited by: Peter Biľak Copy editing: Ted Whang Proofreading: Johanna Robinson Editorial board: Jonah Goodman, Anne Miltenburg, Ed van Hinte Design: Atelier Carvalho Bernau Printing: Ando Den Haag Binding: Hexspoor Typeset in Lava (designed by the editor) and Neutral (designed by the magazine designers) Made and printed in the Netherlands. Special thanks to Johanna Biľak Printed on certified, environ mentally friendly papers: Novatech Mat and Multidesign Natural Contact: Typotheque Zwaardstraat 16 2584 TX Den Haag The Netherlands editor@worksthatwork.com worksthatwork.com @worksthatwork Subscriptions: Exclusively online at worksthatwork.com/subscribe Contributions: We are always looking for new themes and articles in various forms. Please send us your proposals and something about yourself. Try to be as specific as possible: explain what the subject is and why you want to cover it. Contributors this issue: Rachel Berger, graphic designer, Oakland Rob Boffard, writer, Vancouver Jonah Goodman, writer, Berlin Pete Guest, writer, Singapore Leticia Helena, journalist, Rio de Janeiro Caitlin Hu, news editor, Brooklyn Leandro Lima, photographer, Rio de Janeiro Damien Maloney, photographer, San Francisco Simon Menner, artist, Berlin Cyril Ndegeya, photojournalist, Kigali Leanne Prain, writer, Vancouver Anne Quito, writer, New York Jonathan W. Rosen, journalist, Kigali Alice Twemlow, writer, Amsterdam Peng Yangjun, photographer, Beijing Kenza Youfsi, writer, Rabat

Patronage: Help us make Works That Work. Become a patron, and in return get copies of the magazine, your name printed in the magazine and on the website, and a personal thank you note. Your donation is tax deductible. Together we can make a great magazine. worksthatwork.com/patrons The following people helped to make Issue 7: Wayne Ajimine The Design Office Jason Dilworth Martin Jenča Frith Kerr, Studio Frith Benjamin Listwon Konrad Glogowski Geir Goosen Jay Rutherford Brian Scott/Boon Mark Simonson Astrid Stavro Martin Tiefenthaler (tga) Clodagh Twomey Typefounding typeheaven Dana Wooley Ever seen these tiny circles? Yes, you have! They are on 52 currencies worldwide, and make the banknotes unreproducible. Although this graphic device is nearly invisible, photocopiers, scanners and Adobe Photoshop are all programmed to ignore items bearing it, (even this page). Fortunately, every article has a short URL that makes sharing with friends even easier than photocopying. (For example, wtw .co/fdb is the link to this issue’s editorial). Beyond that, if you’d like to reproduce anything from this magazine, please ask first. Physical sharing of this magazine is encouraged, of course. The whole reason we do this is to bring you great stories to discuss with your friends. Front cover: Cover image by Liu Bolin, image courtesy of Galerie Paris-Beijing Back cover: Photo by Tom Price, WTW No. 6 taken on the Kanchankanya Express, the night train from Siliguri to Kolkata. We invite our readers to take photos featuring WTW in unexpected environments. Every reader who submits a photo will receive a free copy of the magazine. w-t-w.co/q5l

In this issue:

Artefacts

by Jonah Goodman

35 Years of Mass Hitchhiking

Text by Rachel Berger Photography by Damien Maloney

Hiding in Plain Sight

by Leanne Prain

Disappearing Act Photography by Simon Menner

Where the Streets Have No Name

by Leticia Helena and Leandro Lima

The Art and Science of Military Camouflage

by Caitlin Hu

Rwanda’s War on Plastic

Text by Jonathan W. Rosen Photography by Cyril Ndegeya

Addressing the World

by Anne Quito

Ships That Dance in the Night

by Kenza Youfsi

Bells and Whistles: Giving Devices a Voice

by Rob Boffard

Bringing Clarity to the Diamond Trade 48 by Pete Guest

Hidden Beauty: The Facekinis of Qingdao Photography by Peng Yangjun

Artefacts Ideas given shape in ingenious ways by people across the world in order to solve problems big and small. Collected by Jonah Goodman

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The Blur Building Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland The Blur Building was a cloud of fog suspended above Lake Neuchatel created by design studio Diller Soficio + Renfro for the 2002 Swiss Expo. An integrated weather system fed information about wind speed and ambient temperature to 35,000 high-pressure nozzles that kept the building’s steel structure permanently hidden in a shroud of water vapour. Once inside, visitors were immersed in a total whiteout. Photo: Beat Widmer. Reproduced by permission of DS+R

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Power From the People Saint Omer, France

A Vista With Nothing to See US–Canada Border

Certain crystals react to mechanical stress by accumulating an electric charge. Piezoelectricity is commonly used to generate sparks in cigarette lighters and to regulate quartz watches, but now the phenomenon generates power from the footsteps of unsuspecting pedestrians. Tiles made by London firm Pavegen were installed outside Saint Omer train station in 2014, where they power LED lighting elements and two public USB charging ports. Photo courtesy of Pavegen.

Many of the world’s borders are invisible, but the boundary between Canada and the US is actually marked by an absence. Officially titled ‘the vista’, it is a barren strip of land 6 m (20 ft) wide, stretching through 2,171 km (1,349 mi) of forest. Although there’s nothing there to stop you from doing it, crossing the ‘slash’, as it’s informally known, is a serious offence. Photo courtesy of the International Boundary Commission.

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Blind Football Ball Spain and Brazil

Fingertip Echolocation Tsukuba, Japan

Crowds watching Paralympic Association football matches are absolutely silent, not from lack of enthusiasm, but to allow the game’s blind players to hear the tinkling of two large spherical bells inside the ball. Pioneered by Spain and Brazil in the first half of the 20th century, blind football is played worldwide and has been a Paralympic sport since 2004. Photo: Barcroft Media / Reporters

Murky water can utterly disorientate salvage or rescue divers, but the IrukaTact haptic sonar glove lets them feel how far they are from nearby objects. Sonar signals are fed to tiny motors on the diver’s fingertips, which jet water onto his or her skin. The closer the object, the stronger the jet. Photo: Aisen Caro Chacin

Artefacts

Anti-Pee Paint Hamburg, Germany

Wasabi Fire Alarm Tokyo, Japan

‘Wildpinkler’, or ‘wild pissers’, are such a problem in Hamburg’s red-light district that authorities have taken to coating its walls with Ultra-Ever Dry paint. Its superhydrophobic coating actively repels urine with a layer of air trapped along the wall’s surface, splashing it back onto the perpetrator’s clothes. Within months of the Hamburg pilot, similar schemes were set up in Cologne, London, San Francisco and Paris. Photo: Johanna Biľak

Devised for the deaf, the elderly, and very heavy sleepers, this fire alarm uses extract of wasabi instead of sound. Changes in smell can’t actually wake people up, but wasabi contains a compound, allyl isothiocyanate, that delivers a sharp stinging sensation to the inside of the nose. The effect was strong enough to wake up sleeping test subjects in ten seconds to two minutes from up to 15 m (49 ft) away.

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Rachel Berger is a graphic designer in Oakland. She rode casual carpool to get to her last job, but now, with a heavy heart, rides BART. Damien Maloney is a photographer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He never used casual carpool before this assignment, but now picks up passengers on the commute over the Bay Bridge.

Every weekday morning, Joan Sautter, a 76-yearold California attorney who lives in Oakland and works in San Francisco, walks a block-and-ahalf from her apartment to join a line of people waiting quietly under a busy highway overpass. Most mornings, she brings the day’s newspaper to pass the time. When Sautter gets to the front of the line, she and whoever is next in the queue step into a stranger’s automobile idling at the kerb. The driver and two riders—sometimes three if the line of riders is long and the line of

cars is short—wish each other good morning, fasten their seat belts, and pull away from the kerb. The car’s radio is often tuned to public radio, the volume low. They merge onto the highway. Twenty minutes later, the car is in San Francisco, pulled over at a busy intersection in the Financial District. Sautter thanks the driver and walks to her office. She has been commuting this way for 30 years. She is a casual carpooler. The Bay Area phenomenon known as casual carpool is similar to traditional carpooling in

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35 YEARS OF MASS HITCHHIKING

many ways. A carpool is regular ridesharing in which the members carefully plan their sched ules and routes to accommodate everyone’s needs. Casual carpool is ridesharing without any prearrangement between the driver and riders. During morning commute hours, riders and drivers simply line up at predetermined meeting places and create spontaneous carpools. They have made no ongoing commitment. They use no specialised technology. There are ten casual carpool pick-up spots in Oakland, 15 more in

surrounding towns. Sautter’s spot, in Oakland’s affluent Rockridge neighbourhood, is one of the most active. There aren’t many ways to get from Oakland to San Francisco. The two cities are separated by the San Francisco Bay, 6 miles (9.7 km) of water. This means that Sautter and the other 600,000 daily commuters crossing the Bay from the east, where Oakland and numerous residential suburbs are located, have three options: they can go over the water in a ferry, under the water via

Every day 280,000 commuters cross the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, the only bridge linking San Francisco

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and the East Bay. It is the eighth mostcongested thoroughfare in the US. Casual carpooling eases the congestion

BART (the Bay Area Rapid Transit system) and its Transbay Tube, or above the water across the Bay Bridge. The ferry is the oldest and most stylish way to cross the Bay, but it is too expensive, lim ited, and sluggish for most modern commuters. BART, which moves 150,000 commuters across the Bay every morning, is efficient but crushingly crowded. The third option, the Bay Bridge, is the only bridge linking San Francisco and the East Bay. The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge’s five westbound and five eastbound lanes carry more than a quarter of a million vehicles daily, moving more people than any highway in California. All westbound vehicles pay a toll to cross the bridge. The bridge approach, where several East Bay highways feed into the toll plaza, and metering lights control the volume of vehicles on the bridge, is a massive chokepoint for the 40,000 vehicles that converge there every morning.

by giving preferential treatment to vehicles with higher occupancy.

To combat this congestion HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) bypass elements were incor porated into the westbound bridge approach in 1970. Today these protected lanes enable buses and other vehicles with multiple passengers to bypass long lines at the toll plaza, saving up to 30 minutes of commuting time, not to mention more than half the regular toll fee. These changes strongly encouraged commuters to carpool, and soon after they took effect there were sporadic reports of drivers cruising AC Transit’s Transbay bus stops for enough riders to make a carpool. Tom Vitek vividly remembers when those occasional pick-ups started to become common place. ‘In the winter of 1979, there were simul taneous strikes on BART and AC Transit, which brought transit across the Bay to a complete halt.’ Desperate to find a way across, Vitek went to his usual bus stop, and ‘sure enough, there was a line of drivers waiting to pick up passengers.’ Both

strikes were eventually resolved, but ‘the after math was that a kind of system evolved of people who were used to offering rides to passengers and passengers who were used to taking rides from drivers.’ This system became known as casual carpool, and today, an estimated 10,000 people use it every day. People who are curious about casual carpool often find their way to an idiosyncratic webpage called ‘Casual Car Pool News’. A blend of official and unofficial information, the page includes a Google map of all pick-up sites (‘Thanks to Amory Schlender for putting it together!’) and a detailed explanation of the informal rules and etiquette of casual carpool. Its Lost and Found section (recent items: purple, handmade cro cheted hat; black iPhone 5) is a broad sampling of material culture in the Bay Area. The discussion board on the site has thousands of comments, questions, and harangues. Emails to the page’s

webmaster produce the following automated warning: ‘Please note: I will not answer ques tions already on FAQ, especially “Is there a casual carpool location at ______?” and “Can you start a new location at ______?” Sorry; it’s just been too much, lately. – Dan’. The Dan behind Casual Car Pool News is Dan Kirshner. Kirshner built the page when he was working as an economic analyst for the Environmental Defense Fund, which seeks to apply economic rationality to environmental problems. During his 26-year career there, Kirshner became obsessed with the promise of dynamic ridesharing, technologically enabled, on-demand carpooling. He viewed it as the economically rational answer to the problem of road congestion. Casual carpool is one of the few success stories of dynamic ridesharing. Kirshner studied it closely, asking, ‘Can you rationalise

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Casual carpool locations are identified by street signs placed by San Francisco city government, although in other places a piece of paper taped to a lamp post will do. Signs like these demonstrate the city’s passive support for the system without suggesting any responsibility for its operation.

this? Can you make it work in more than just a spontaneous, organic way?’ For years, Kirshner poured himself into building a viable dynamic ridesharing platform, but he failed to create the conditions that would motivate enough partici pation to achieve critical mass. Casual carpool, by contrast, arose spontane ously out of conditions that continue to sustain it today, and local leaders and transportation planners marvel at its self-sufficiency. Dan Kalb is a member of Oakland’s city council, representing a district which includes three casual carpool pick-up spots. As a public servant, he seems grateful that there’s something going on in his district that ‘just takes care of itself’. Michael Schwartz, a transportation planner for San Francisco County, is delighted by the pure economics of casual carpool. ‘There’s something so elegant about it. You just set up a set of incen tives. You say, “We’re going to give you a time

savings and a dollar savings,” and then you just back away and essentially let the market fill in.’ While casual carpool demonstrates the power of the laws of economics, it also requires people to disobey a fundamental law of modern society—don’t trust strangers—and a complex set of social rituals have emerged to enable people to overcome this taboo. Tim Sweetser, a data scientist at a technology company in San Francisco, has only been riding casual carpool for a year. A few months ago, he inadvertently broke one of the rules of the carpool. Early one morning, Sweetser got into a car, and while he and the driver waited for another rider to come and complete the carpool, Sweetser decided to make small talk. ‘Your coffee smells really good,’ he said. ‘I’m not sharing it,’ the driver replied coldly. Flustered, Sweetser tried to explain that he wasn’t interested in the coffee. The driver cut him off: ‘How long have you been doing casual

Mass Hitchhiking

Specific factors in the Bay Area’s situation — a large number of commuters, a traffic bottleneck, time pressures, financial incentives, and perhaps a certain openness towards the new and unusual — have made casual carpool an effective transportation system for over three decades.

carpool?’ ‘Only a few months.’ ‘I’ve been doing casual carpool for 25 years. And there are only a few basic rules. Rule number one is, don’t initiate conversation.’ According to Casual Car Pool News, Sweetser’s driver was right: only the driver should initiate conversation. The conversation rule establishes basic social norms for the carpool, as do rules prohibiting riders from con suming food and drink and drivers from playing loud music. Other rules focus on safety: cars should have functioning seat belts, which riders should use; drivers should drive cautiously and avoid using their phones. These rules don’t elim inate the awkwardness of riding with strangers; they harness it to support a system where the driver is in control, and the riders are protected. This can be a delicate balance, especially if driv ers feel they are being taken advantage of. Another important rule of the carpool is that

carpoolers have the right to refuse any driver or rider. Riders can choose to wait for the next car, and drivers can take the next passenger in line. Like a pre-technological version of Uber’s rating system, the refusal rule enables the casual car pool community to police itself, to shun drivers and riders who do not fit in or who misbehave. In 35 years of riding casual carpool, Vitek’s most memorable driver was ‘the man who drove with no hands’. The driver had a bowl of cereal on his dashboard and a thermos of coffee hanging from his window frame. He ate his breakfast all the way across the bridge, rarely putting his hands on the wheel. Vitek and his fellow rider were ter rified. The next morning, when the same driver showed up at the carpool, people in the rider line began shouting warnings to each other: ‘Don’t get in the car with that guy!’ and ‘He’s crazy!’ No one would get in the man’s car, and he eventually drove off without passengers.

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Every casual carpooler has stories from the carpool. With different drivers, different riders, different cars, and different conditions, no two trips are the same. Many carpoolers seem to get a charge out of these random, short-lived social interactions.

Occasionally, riders police other riders. Vitek remembers a young African American rider who was often ‘unshaven and looked like he’d just gotten out of bed.’ When the man got to the front of the line, female drivers would not only pass him over, they’d take off. One of the riders confronted the man, accusing him of scaring away drivers, and warning that, ‘You should get a bit better groomed and better dressed when you come to the casual carpool’. The man protested. His job as a parking attendant didn’t require professional attire. A recent government report on casual carpool noted that ‘participants share an attitude of literally watching over each other’. The casual carpool community self-regulates through collective monitoring, a powerful means of neutralising many threats, but a poor means of protecting those whose only threat is their difference. Many Bay Area casual carpoolers believe there is something unique about the ethos of the Bay that makes casual carpool successful here. Fishman says, ‘When New Yorkers hear about this, they say there’s no way. You’ve got to be crazy to let strangers into your car.’ Vitek echoes this: ‘I’m not sure you could do casual carpool in Cleveland, where I’m from. I’m not sure if the community is as open or as trusting of diversity and newcomers.’ But Lynne Wander, who has been riding casual carpool for a few years, ques tions the belief that casual carpool exists because there is something unique about Bay Area culture and society. ‘It would be nice to think it works because we’re so open to new things in

the Bay Area. There’s a lot of self-congratulation about this here, but I don’t think we’re funda mentally different culturally than everywhere else.’ Wander named cities like Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, as culturally similar but lacking other incentives to carpool. Besides the Bay Area, two other American cit ies have casual carpool systems: Washington, DC and Houston, Texas. In many ways, Washington and Houston couldn’t be more different from the Bay. Houston’s culture is conservative and fiercely individualistic. Washington’s is formal and driven. Yet all three regions share environmental and systemic factors like a dispersed workforce requiring long, congested commutes, toll savings for carpools, and HOV lanes that provide enough of a time and cost sav ing to foster the emergence of casual carpools. Houston’s casual carpool system, known as ‘slugging’, formed along two major corridors, the Katy Freeway and the Northwest Freeway. Recent changes to the Katy Freeway, however, have revealed casual carpool’s fragility. When the Texas Department of Transportation added lanes to the freeway and opened the HOV lane to toll-paying single-occupant vehicles it reduced congestion in general-purpose lanes and reduced the incentive to carpool for access to the HOV lane. Since then, Houston’s casual carpool ing activity has dropped by 50%. Even if Bay Area casual carpoolers have an incomplete understanding of why the system works, they are very clear on why it works for them. Besides the time and money savings, many

Mass Hitchhiking

Casual carpool riders lined up at the pick-up spot in Oakland’s Rockridge neighbourhood.

of them cite compelling personal reasons for participating. Wander loves that casual carpool forces her to break social taboos. ‘I think there’s something that’s good for my head about walk ing up to a strange car and opening the door and getting in, given that you’re taught not to do that. This is the thing where you can do that, and it’s good! I feel like that’s a useful thing to have in my life.’ Maggie Pickavance, a content strate gist at a technology company in San Francisco, has been a rider for ten years. She loves casual carpool because the ride gives her time to read. Jason McBriarty, an executive at the Levi Strauss Foundation, likes to play detective, guessing what his drivers do for a living based on where they go after dropping him off. ‘If somebody goes left onto Howard Street, they’re probably going out to the biotech area. Or if they’re going straight, they might be a lawyer or a banker working in the old downtown.’

Pickavance has a terrifying carpool story. In September 2013, riders waiting at a Rockridge pick-up spot were robbed at gunpoint. She was there. Three hooded men approached the line, pulled out guns, and started robbing riders of their smartphones and valuables. Pickavance was able to run away, but she had no idea what to do next. ‘I was probably slinking around for maybe ten minutes, and then I kind of slinked back to see what was happening and just got in a car and left. I really did not know what else to do with myself.’ She continues to be a loyal carpooler, but feels less safe in Oakland. In general, casual carpool is remarkably safe. The Rockridge robbery seems to be the only serious incident in memory. The robbery took place in Kalb’s district, and he emphasised its rarity: ‘By and large, when you have lots of people standing together, you’re less likely to get robbed or accosted in any way.’ Miguel Helft,

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Pickavance, a recent carpooling convert, used to take the bus across the Bay. Every morning, as she stood in line at the bus stop, she watched casual carpoolers line up at a nearby pick-up spot but had no idea what she was looking at.

Mass Hitchhiking

Joan Sautter, a 76-year-old attorney who lives in the Rockridge neighbourhood of Oakland, has been using casual carpool for the past 30 years. Every weekday she

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walks a block and a half from her apartment to a pick-up spot to wait in line for a stranger to drive her to San Francisco’s Financial District 20 minutes across the

an Argentinean journalist who has lived in the East Bay since 2000, saw the carpool through new eyes when he brought his brother along for a ride. ‘My brother was visiting at a time when even getting into a cab was not 100% safe in Argentina, and he was just amazed that some lady in a white Lexus picked the two of us up and gave us a ride and was comfortable doing that, you know, for two strangers.’ Casual carpoolers tend to bristle when comparisons are drawn between the carpool and ‘sharing economy’ products like Uber, Lyft and Airbnb. For Vitek, the difference is capitalism. Uber and Airbnb are massive corporations built on billions of dollars of venture funding. They have offices, executives, employees, and custom ers. Meanwhile, ‘There is no capital flowing

Bay. For Sautter, it is the fastest and cheapest way to commute to work.

into casual carpool. There are no executives or offices for casual carpool.’ Sweetser recognises that casual carpool and Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) are both based on economic transactions, but he believes they use different currencies. With casual carpool, ‘the currency is time, not money. Everyone has the same amount of time, whereas people have lots of dif ferent amounts of money.’ Sweetser continues: ‘Whenever I take Uber or Lyft, I feel uncomfort able with the class difference between being the passenger in the back seat and the driver in the front seat. With casual carpool, I feel that we are more equals.’ Michelle Hernandez drives casual carpool because it’s the fastest, cheapest way to get to her job as a payroll manager at a brewery in San

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Francisco. She also supplements her income by driving for Uber. For Hernandez, casual carpool feels like a ‘community-based transaction, almost like bartering’. When she’s driving for Uber, her riders are much more like clients, and the power dynamic between her and her riders is different: ‘There’s definitely more of a feeling that they’re in control, rather than me being in control.’ Lately, Hernandez has been trying out a third option, driving for a TNC called Carma. Carma is a dynamic ridesharing app, chasing the solution that eluded Kirshner for so many years. Unlike Uber and Lyft, Carma lets drivers pre define where they’re going, and pick up riders to offset the cost of that journey. It is deliberately modelled on casual carpool. Paul Steinberg is Carma’s Chief Business Officer and a convincing evangelist for its product. He sees the commuter market as a huge opportunity for Carma. ‘Lyft and Uber do millions and millions of trips a day, but less than 5% of their trips ever cross a San Francisco bridge. They’re not solving anything over ten miles.’ Carma faces several major challenges: achieving critical mass, persuading drivers to participate, and pushing for transpor tation policy reform. ‘As a government, we have incentivised people to drive, with cheap fuel, cheap parking, and an affluent society where everyone can afford their own car.’ Steinberg is a TNC entrepreneur, but he and his colleagues don’t believe that TNCs are the future of transportation. Carma is betting that owners of fleets of vehicles, like car rental companies, are more likely to succeed than networks of owner-operated vehicles, like Uber. Fleet vehicle quality is more consistent, and fleet owners don’t lose any profit to driver compensa tion. To this end, Carma recently joined forces with City CarShare, a Bay Area not-for-profit carsharing organisation with a 400-car fleet. They are now experimenting with novel ways to increase the fleet’s productivity and motivate its users to carpool. But Steinberg’s story does not end there: ‘In ten years’ time, Muni (San Francisco’s transportation agency) is not going to be buying more buses. They’re going to be buying autonomous vehicles. Those are going to be the replacements for buses and taxis and cars.’ As Steinberg’s transportation narrative moves further into the future, today’s innovations start to feel puny.

Bay Area transportation planners and advocates are also talking about the promise of autonomous vehicles. Clarrissa Cabansagan, a community planner at a Bay Area transporta tion advocacy organisation called TransForm, believes ‘we’re starting to see the demise of the auto industry’ as we know it. Like Steinberg, she can envision a world where autonomous vehicles provide transportation in a way that mass transit cannot. Today, she explains, ‘We’re in this interim phase of getting people into your car, getting strangers into your car.’ Cabansagan is optimistic about the future but cautious about foretelling it. Technology and behaviours are changing so rapidly that ‘the past couple of years have caused us to rethink our ways of predicting what happens’. For today, Cabansagan’s vision of the ideal morning commute conditions on the Bay Bridge is very concrete, even humble. ‘We want to make every day like Columbus Day.’ (Columbus Day is a minor federal holiday in the United States. Many banks and government offices close, but for most people, it’s just another day.) On Columbus Day, there is a 5% drop in drivers. That small shift in the volume of cars results in 80–95% congestion relief. On a normal workday, twothirds of bridge commuters drive alone. If just a fraction of them were to carpool, it would be Cabansagan’s Columbus Day. She believes that transportation planners often have a blind spot about Americans’ attachment to their cars, and that rather than ignoring it, they should focus on finding novel ways to fill seats in those cars. Casual carpool is the original novel solution. Carpooling is often called the invisible mode, because it is impossible to monitor or measure. Casual carpooling is even further below the radar. On the one hand, it seems to function under conditions so specific that it could vanish in an instant. Yet it is hardy, outlasting any num ber of well-funded technological ventures that lacked its essential elegance. Only if casual carpool were to disappear would its true impact finally be felt, in intoler able congestion along the Bay Bridge corridor, snaking lines at the bus stops, even more crowded commutes on BART, and the loss of a unique part of Bay Area culture. ☐

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HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT: UNLOCKING THE UNUSUAL WORLD OF DIVERSION DESIGN One way to protect valuable items is to lock them in a strongbox where thieves can’t get to them. Another way is to disguise them in a container that thieves won’t take any notice of.

‘When I first moved into the house, I thought it was a broken electrical socket,’ says Wendy, ‘but when I removed the hardware from it to paint, I discovered that it was a safe. There’s a box that hangs down inside the wall about 8 inches from the plate, and the bottom is angled to make it easy to slide the box in and out of the wall.’ ‘Because the plastic face had aged at the same rate as the other sockets in the house, it was well disguised. I was so excited to find it. I wanted to tell everyone but I couldn’t, because I wanted to use it! My ex used to store rolls of cash in it and it was probably more secure than the safe he has now. We had ten grand in the walls.’ Fake sprinkler heads, artificial rocks, a framed picture of the Mona Lisa with a false

back, underwear with secret pockets, a hollow dog food bowl—all of these seemingly ordinary objects are camouflaged hiding places, other wise known as ‘diversion safes’. ‘Canada Dry is the most popular,’ says the clerk at The Spy Zone, a boutique business devoted to nanny cams, police scanners, and night vision goggles. Located in Vancouver, Canada, it makes sense that the store has sold out of diversion safes disguised to look like a can of popular Canadian ginger ale. Only upon close inspection does a seam in the can reveal a lid that unscrews to open a storage space. Sitting in the refrigerator with other cans, a diversion can blends in seamlessly, nearly impossible to distinguish from the real thing, even if you pick it

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Leanne Prain is a writer and communications designer who lives in Vancouver, Canada. She is the author of three books on textiles and culture. She keeps her valuables in a globe-shaped tin piggy bank from the 1970s.

A diversion wall safe resembling a regular US electrical socket. Equipped with a small lock, it provides a hiding place for cash, jewellery, or other small valuables (but no electricity). There doesn’t seem to be a version for the European market, where hollow books are evidently more popular.

up, since it is weighted at the base to mimic a full can of soda. ‘Young girls, students, old people, everyone buys them,’ the clerk says. ‘Often they’ll buy four at once and cluster them. Or they’ll buy one and then keep coming for more.’ Diversion cans can be found in a wide variety of guises ranging from AquaNet hairspray to WD40 to Axe body spray. Those may seem like odd choices for security equipment, but a study by the Chicago Police Force found that the average burglar enters through a front door, and heads to the bedroom first, on the hunt for cash, jewellery, passports, or drugs. Secondary targets are the home office, the living room, and dining room. Kitchens and bathrooms are often ignored, making safes

that resemble food or personal care products appealing. Bim Bam Banana, an online retailer in Copenhagen, offers a ‘best-selling’ diversion safe that looks like a head of iceberg lettuce. More recently, the company has begun to sell a safe that resembles a round loaf of sourdough, complete with crossed knife strokes on the crust. The company’s website suggests that the bread safe could be kept in the middle of a dining room table. ‘It hides in plain sight, which makes it even more fabulous!’ Cassandra holds up a well-tooled, leather-bound book. It does not appear out of place in her Vancouver antique store, which is bursting with china teacups, old

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The average burglary takes a mere eight to 12 minutes to complete. Many burglars start with the master bedroom, then proceed to the living and dining rooms. The least attractive targets seem to be the kitchen and broom cupboard, a reason why many diversion safes are disguised as food items or cleaning supplies.

typewriters, and animal skeletons. There’s no title on the cover, but the leather is worked in an intricate Celtic pattern, with gold leaf on the spine. ‘I picked it up in a thrift shop,’ she says. ‘I thought it was a real book until I opened it…’ Cassandra opens the cover to reveal a box with a red velvet interior, containing a roll of American notes. The edges of the box are trimmed with glued stacks of paper, creating the illusion of pages. The book safe allows Cassandra’s staff to hide their earnings among the store merchandise under the glass of the oak cabinet that she uses a shop counter. ‘We haven’t had it that long,’ she says. ‘We used to have a large formal locking space in the vault, but someone broke into it. We don’t know how it happened. They must have been watching us cash out.’ She taps the counter. ‘Now we keep our money right here. It gives me a peace of mind. I don’t even think of it as a book any more,’ she says. ‘Because we use it as a safe, it is a safe. ‘Someone recently asked “How much is that old book in the cabinet?”’ Cassandra looks over her winged tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and widens her eyes to show her discomfort. ‘I didn’t know what to say, so I stuttered that it was a box, and they lost interest.’ Her smile shows her relief. While diversion safes have many legiti mate uses, The American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) cautions agents to be aware that ‘just as these products can fool thieves, they can divert police officers during a search, and dangerous items can easily be concealed’. Diversion safes offer equal opportunity for both criminals and law-abiding citizens.

‘If you can imagine it hidden in a book, it’s happened,’ says Jef Spencer. His company, Hollow Books by Refined Pallet, is based in Sacramento, California, but he sells his hand crafted, hollow books to customers throughout the world. ‘Everyone has a secret, and while I’m not in the practice of asking what customers keep in their safes, some uses have come to light. Many have been purchased for housing engagement rings or stashing items like flasks, handguns, cash and phones. They’re also a great way to smuggle snacks into a theatre.’ Each hollow book takes Spencer three days to make. He begins with an existing book and drives metal reinforcement pins into the perimeter of the pages. He then cuts a cavity in a section of pages in order to make the safe. It is a meticulous process of cutting and gluing, which ends in the pages being pressed several times in a book press as the pages are glued together and a custom die-cut is created. ‘My most requested title is Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, but the biggest sales come from hollow safes made out of the Constitution of the United States of America,’ he says. ‘They seem to be a favourite gift for teachers, law enforcement and lawyers. Members of the clergy are frequently gifted a copy of the Holy Bible with a flask inside.’ As popular as these small, portable items are, diversion safes can also be large and immobile. Tactical Walls is an American company that sells gun safes designed to look like ordinary furniture. Wall mirrors swing open to reveal rifles. A tabletop lamp hides a pistol. A sturdy wooden cabinet features not only a flatscreen television that rises through the top at the touch

A young woman stores her grandmother’s jewellery in a lockable book case disguised as The New English Dictionary. While hollow books are available in many different versions designed to

blend in with various decors, other diversion safes masquerade as functional clocks, globes and spray cans or even a head of a lettuce. Photo: Peter Biľak

A concealment shelf with two hidden locks and pneumatic opening struts. This particular model holds an automatic rifle or multiple guns for home

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defence. Tim Matter, founder of the company Tactical Walls, came up with the idea when he needed a way to store firearms out of sight while maintaining

of a button, but also a gun rack that rises on a separate lift (both controlled by the TV remote, of course). Tactical Walls’ founder Tim Matter, an industrial designer and former United States Air Force crew chief, recalls: ‘One day I went into the warehouse of the plastics company where I worked as a designer and saw all of these objects that I had designed, and I had a moment of “cool, all of this stuff has come out of my brain. These are my babies”. It was my goal to become a cus tomer of the manufacturer that I worked for.’

quick access to them. Photo courtesy of Tactical Walls.

From its first product, a safe created to hide a handgun in the empty space between the studs of a wall, the company has expanded into an international business. Each piece that Tactical Walls produces addresses the needs of firearm owners who desire to make their homes a ready arsenal, poised to deal with sudden, unexpected attacks. ‘I kept a gun under my bed for 30 years,’ says Matter, ‘but now I feel much more comfort able knowing that it is locked up in a secure, but still accessible, place.’ Early in the company’s history, Matter created

Hiding in Plain Sight

mirror units that were designed to take up little wall space, but to hold several rifles inside the wall behind the glass. The mirrors open to either side, for ready access. As popular as the mirrors were, Matter discovered that some people, such as renters, weren’t able to cut holes in their walls, so the company expanded its selection to include clock safes that can be screwed to a wall, and an easy-to-open tissue box safe, ‘the issue box’, that can sit on a side table. There is also a series of colonial-style shelves with drop-down storage

spaces (available in several wood finishes). Some of the company’s products are designed for quick release and are non-locking; others, such as those designed for homes with children, come with a lock. Tim is currently experiment ing with a catch that is controlled by a key fob via radio frequency identification. Whatever the technology, however, the technique remains the same. ‘The best diversion safes are nice but banal,’ says Tim. ‘We want our safes to be something that you don’t think twice about. You don’t take any notice of them.’ ☐

DISAPPEARING ACT Simon Menner is an artist, photographer, based in Berlin interested in the presentation of terror, fear, and surveillance in mass media.

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Snipers in the field are dangerous but vulnerable. They must be both expert sharpshooters and masters of concealment and camouflage.

In this age of cyberwarfare, unmanned attack vehicles and remote-controlled planes, on-ground soldiers delivering longrange precision fire still play an important role. Snipers in the field are not only hunters, but the hunted as well, so learning to blend in with the surrounding environment is an important part of their training. German artist Simon Menner has been photographing army snipers for the last six years. Getting access to German snipers was surprisingly easy. The German military doesn’t

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command a great deal of attention from German society at large—a fact perhaps rooted in the country’s history—and the army was happy to collaborate on Menner’s first series of photos. Encouraged by this experience, Menner contacted other armies, a lengthy process which eventually secured the collaboration of the Latvian and Lithuanian armies (as well as the frustrating silence of others). Menner accompanied groups of snipers and officers during their regular training, asking them to point their rifles directly

at the camera. Typically the distance between snipers and their targets is over 500 m (1,640 ft), at which distance the snipers are practically invisible, so Menner had to get much closer in order to capture at least some traces of their existence. Even from just 10 m (33 ft) away, spotting the sniper is very challenging. Snipers help each other to construct custom ghillie suits, using local natural elements such as dead grass and leaves to blend in to the terrain. The location of the sniper in each photo is indicated by a circle of varnish.

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WHERE THE STREETS HAVE NO NAME

Leticia Helena is a journalist from Rio de Janeiro. She believes that ideas like Friendly Mailman can have a significant positive impact on the lives of favela residents. Leandro Lima is journalist and photographer who has lived in the Rocinha favela all his life.

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In an age when communications are becoming increasingly digital it is easy to forget how much still depends on paper and postage, but amidst the chaos and violence of Brazil’s largest slum, three entrepreneurs have made a small fortune by providing a basic service—delivering mail.

In 1946 Brazilian singer Isaurinha Garcia recorded ‘Mensagem’, her biggest hit, in which she sings that she is surprised to receive a letter at her own home. In those days Rocinha was exactly what its name means: a small farm, an area where half a dozen people grew fruits and vegetables to sell in the richer districts of Rio de Janeiro. Today, it is Brazil’s largest favela, a slum neighbourhood with a population variously estimated from 63,000 (according to the 2010 census) to 120,000 (according to the number of registered electric-company customers). And still today, although Rocinha has a relatively well-developed infrastructure and even its own local television channel, its residents are pleas antly surprised to be visited by an official postal carrier. These men and women in their blue-andyellow uniforms are semi-mythical creatures: everybody knows that they exist, but few have actually seen them in the flesh. The reason for their scarcity is that Rocinha is a daunting maze of unnamed streets and unnumbered houses, impossible terrain for Correios, the state-owned postal service, but not for Carteiro Amigo, or in English, Friendly Mailman. ‘At my house, I have never seen a mailman,’ says 44-year-old co-founder of Friendly Mailman, Rocinha native Carlos Pedro. ‘For those living outside the favela this seems unbelievable, but not for us. This is not a condo minium with a 24-hour doorman. People work all day long. They cannot waste time waiting for a parcel or going to the post office to check if a let ter has arrived for them.’ Some items, however, (credit cards and official correspondence, for example) are only delivered by the post office if the addressee signs a receipt. Residents searched for a solution for years.

The first attempt to organise a delivery service consisted of improvised receiving stations where Correios postal workers would leave the mail for a certain number of streets in a cardboard box for residents to collect. The system, still in use in some remote areas, was notably insecure and did not solve the problem of deliveries that depended on signing a receipt. ‘It was really a huge problem,’ says Sila Vieira, 45, also born and raised in Rocinha and co-founder of Friendly Mailman. ‘But we only managed to measure its true dimensions when we took part-time jobs as census takers.’ Pedro agrees. ‘Every time we asked if the residents had something they wished to add to their community, they would complain about the lack of mail delivery. We decided that at the end of each interview we would place one more question about mail service. Then we real ised it really was an issue for many people.’ Where many people only saw a dilemma, Pedro, Vieira and Ramos found an opportunity. A big one. They bid their low-paid office jobs farewell and started a new life. ‘We went doorto-door, explaining what Friendly Mailman would be. To attract customers, we offered to deliver first and postpone the payment to the next month. Our first rate was 3 Brazilian reals (approximately US$5.40 or €5.85 in 2000). The residents were so enraged with our govern ment’s postal agency that they trusted us blindly,’ says Vieira. The first step in their plan was to find a way to give structure to the chaos of the favela. Unplanned and unregulated, Rocinha had no official streets, let alone an official map. Even today, many streets have three names: one given by the residents (usually the most frequently used); one assigned by the power company, and

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‘At first, we would personally talk to the residents and deliver their correspondence. One of our first customers wept with emotion as he received a document from the welfare system for which he had waited for months. It was the notice of his retirement,’ recalls Vieira.

Carlos Pedro (right) and Sila Vieira, founders of Friendly Mailman. Working as census takers, a frustrating job in a place where most people don't have an address, convinced them that Rocinha’s tens of thousands of residents were in urgent need of an effective postal delivery system. They developed a system of virtual addresses that covers Rio de Janeiro’s most populous favela in its entirety.

a third designated by the city, which appears on the street signs. House numbering is similarly unsystematic, and house number 20 may very well stand next to house number 231. But Ramos, Pedro and Vieira knew Rocinha’s streets and alleys like the backs of their hands, and they devised a new coding system, giving each house registered with Friendly Mailman an individual ID. This simple idea has become a successful business. Today, more than 4,000 houses are registered with Friendly Mailman, benefiting about 20,000 customers. ‘We have opened a franchising system. Now, Friendly Mailman is in 12 favelas,’ says Pedro. Customers pay R$18 (about US$5.10 or €4.50) a month for the delivery service. It’s not cheap—Brazilian minimum wage is around R$788 (US$225 or €198)—but it allows residents

to fulfil two dreams: to have a credit card and to make purchases over the Internet. Chinese websites that offer all sorts of merchandise at rock bottom prices are very popular all over the country, and Rocinha is no exception. More than a payment system, the credit card represents a social phenomenon: the rise of the poorest classes to the consumer market over the last ten years. It may seem like a small thing, but a new credit card opens a window of opportunity to its owner. ‘To receive parcels, I needed to use my work address because the post office does not deliver to my house. But the packages went to the mall’s general management office, and they began to complain,’ says Antony George Peres da Costa, 28, a former waiter at an upmarket shopping mall near Rocinha. Besides tending tables, Costa was learning

Where the Streets Have No Name

There are no official names for most of the streets in Rocinha, so the post office van stops by the Friendly Mailman office, and leaves all mail for the entire

community. Their employees sort out the post, and deliver it according to a proprietary code devised for the area.

to repair computers, smartphones and other electronic equipment and needed to buy com ponents over the Internet. Friendly Mailman solved his problem. ‘I didn’t have any trouble with orders any more. I was able to save money and open a store. Without the service, it would have been impossible to start my own business. Today I have my own address, but I still use Friendly Mailman because they get everything to me, anytime I need it.’ Costa’s case reveals another challenge of delivering correspondence in Rocinha: most of the residents work all day long. Nobody can afford to stay home to wait for letters, packages or other deliveries. ‘Get the picture: Rocinha, over 100 degrees in the shade,’ says Pedro. ‘Two guys climb more than 500 steps with a refrigerator on their backs. They look around here and there and finally find

the address. So they knock on the door. Nobody is there. In the past, this situation happened many times. Magazines refused to deliver goods in Rocinha, Today, customers give our address and we receive the merchandise for them.’ Having a regular mailing address is chang ing the life of 34-year-old Mirla Maria Matos Rodrigues. Since coming to Rocinha the mother of two has had half a dozen different apartments because demand for rental properties is very high, and landlords raise rents as they see fit, but she depends on reliable delivery of the beauty products that she sells door-to-door. ‘The postman only delivers to central streets. I have never seen a mail carrier in all the places I have lived in Rocinha. Even receiving the power bill is a challenge. But with Friendly Mailman, the parcel arrives at their office and is delivered to me immediately.’

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Nelson José da Silva, a Friendly Mailman delivery person brings the post of one of the company’s thousands of clients. Customers pay R$ 18 (about US$ 5.10 or € 4.50) a month for the service. The house will receive a sticker with a unique number recognised only by Friendly Mailman, part of a system that makes it possible to deliver thousands of items a day to people who have no officially recognised address.

‘State mailmen do operate to some extent in Rocinha,’ confirms Nelson José da Silva, 53, the oldest Friendly Mailman worker. ‘Unfortunately, there are some places that they can’t go.’ Silva is referring to the issue of violence in the community. In 2011, the Rio state government began the process of ‘pacification’ or reclama tion of urban areas controlled by drug gangs. Rocinha’s Pacifying Police Unit (UPP), a force of 700 men, was established the following year, but the drug war is far from over, and street violence often requires residents to lock themselves inside their houses as gang members and police clash. Silva knows these problems, but he prefers not to talk about them. Instead, he likes to tell foreigners how Rocinha is growing bigger and bigger, and how that makes some addresses difficult to find even for a native of the favela.

‘There are a lot of places here that I’ve never been. Rocinha just keeps on growing. One day, you go to a very remote area and see one little house. Three days later, you go back and you find out that there are ten new houses.’ In such condi tions Friendly’s Mailman coding system is of paramount importance. It allows Silva and other delivery boys to find anyone anywhere. Every day, four employees cover Rocinha’s hills on foot. ‘I don’t know how many miles I walk each day,’ says Silva, ‘but even on the weekends, I like to see my customers, especially the elderly. For me, it is very important to know if everything is all right.’ Customers appreciate this kindness. At Christmas, they usually give generous tips. Last year, Silva and his three co-workers received a total of R$21,000 (US$ 6,000 or €5,270) in tips. ‘We know everybody. If you miss one day, the residents will ask for you. It’s not just a delivery.

Where the Streets Have No Name

‘You do not have to worry about losing a day’s work to receive orders. They arrive at their warehouse and you come and get your parcels later. It’s perfect,’ says Maria, a native of Rio Grande do Norte living in Rocinha for the past 19 years. ‘Without Friendly Mailman, I would not be able to sell products door-to-door. The postman does not deliver at Travessa Bela Vista, the street that I live on,’ she says.

Maria do Socorro, local resident, receiving her post. Rocinha is changing constantly, with new streets, tunnels, and houses emerging almost daily. To

keep up with the change, Friendly Mailman now uses both its own addressing system and what3words, a geocoding system which assigns a three-word

It is a true friendship,’ says the friendly mailman. The family of factory worker Maria do Socorro Alves de Freitas, 36 years old, has only praise for Silva. ‘As soon as a letter arrives at the office, he runs to deliver it. Without Friendly Mailman, our life would be very complicated. Although my street has a name and my house has a number, the post office does not come here. I used to have a hard time applying for a credit card or even placing a simple order. Now we receive everything,’ she says. When she came to Rocinha 14 years ago, she was surprised by the difficulty in receiving letters. She had lived in a small town of 20,000 inhabitants in the interior of Ceará, and the service worked there regularly. ‘Rocinha is a huge world, five times larger than my city. Why wouldn’t the post office work here? It took me a long time to understand.’ Perhaps it seems strange that rural villages far

address to every location on the planet. (See ‘Addressing the World’ on page 39).

from Brazil’s great metropolises have a regular postal service while urban Rocinha doesn’t, but residents there are not surprised, and they prefer paying for Friendly Mailman to filing complaints against the post office. To retain old customers and attract new ones, Pedro, Vieira and Ramos keep innovating, and their latest project is to create a system that allows computer-illiterate customers to place online orders and receive goods at Friendly Mailman’s office. ‘Although the Internet is widespread in Brazil, that doesn’t mean everyone knows how to sit in front of a computer and place an order. We have a large number of illiterate people in Rocinha, but they are also citizens, they have the money and they want to buy things. Why not help them?’ asks Pedro. Rocinha’s residents could not be more thankful. ☐

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NYC-based design writer Anne Quito wrote a story on the branding of South Sudan in WTW4, and about her fake university degree from Manila in WTW5.

ADDRESSING THE WORLD Traditional street addresses work very well, but only in places that have streets. This ingenious system assigns unique addresses to jungle huts, shantytown shacks and seaside campsites, and indeed to every spot on the planet.

Rocinha is the largest favela in Brazil, built on a steep hillside overlooking Rio de Janeiro. Tens of thousands of people live in Rocinha but most of the streets don’t have official names, turning postal delivery into detective work. Friendly Mailman (see ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ on page 32) has created a map of the labyrinthine alleys of Rocinha. An app called what3words makes their work even easier, giving everyone a usable address. Photo: Jefferson Bernardes/ Shutterstock.com

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GPS identifies locations using latitude and longitude coordinates, long numbers that are difficult to remember and share with friends. The system behind what3words divides the planet into 57 trillion 3×3 m (9.8×9.8 ft) squares, giving each a unique address consisting of three common words. This approach

offers much greater precision than traditional addressing systems. For example, each rock at Stonehenge has its own address: 1. ranged.pounces.negotiators 2. tuned.vocals.crumple 3. hiker.roosts.exhaling

4. thrilled.willing.looms 5. prospered.input.parsnip 6. awaited.passively.landings 7. slope.most.giraffes 8. wages.robe.clasping Photo: David Goddard/Getty Images

Address ing the World

More than half the world’s population lives in uncharted territory. This statistic may seem unrealistically high, but is easily demonstrated: opening Google Maps in map view and searching for ‘Rocinha’ brings up a few thin lines snaking irregularly through a vast, seemingly empty area on the southern edge of Rio de Janeiro. Switching to earth view, how ever, reveals a dizzying grid of roofs represent ing the homes of tens of thousands of inhabitants who live without a formally established address in Brazil’s most populous urban slum. Even at maximum magnification Google Maps shows fewer than 30 roads in Rocinha, but in reality thousands of roads, alleys and footpaths traverse the Brazilian favelas where 11.5 million people live. These ‘non-existent’ settlements are common the world over. According to a 2008 report of the UN Development Programme, four billion people in 135 countries do not have an official street address. In other words, 75% of the world’s countries are home to people who can not declare a legal address on forms to apply for such basic needs as utilities and postal service (let alone bank accounts, library cards or voter registration) and thus may find getting services difficult, if not impossible. Surveying, designating and registering offi cial street addresses can be an expensive, timeconsuming, and politically contentious project. To map an area and integrate it into the city’s existing structures, governments have to involve city planners, land surveyors and tax assessors, not to mention sign makers and cartographers. While the wheels of bureaucracy grind on, those who live in new or informal settlements have to make do with rough, landmark-based descrip tions like ‘100 paces to the left of a large tree with white flowers’ or ‘the brown gate next to the big billboard’ (although those who can afford smart phones with GPS may have access to latitude and longitude coordinates as a hard-to-memorise but more precise alternative). Even in the UK, where street addresses have been used for centuries, concert producer Chris Sheldrick still encountered the same issues. Frustrated by musicians who would constantly show up at the wrong concert venue, he turned to mathematician Jack Waley-Cohen to create

a better way to pinpoint a location. In 2013, Sheldrick and Cohen launched what3words, an app-based system that replaces latitude and longitude coordinates with easy-to-remember phrases, essentially instantly assigning an address to every spot on the planet. Their system divides the entire surface of the earth into a grid of 57 trillion 3×3 m (9.8×9.8 ft) parcels and auto-generates a unique three-word name for each one. For example, the White House (1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. 20500) is at ‘engine.doors. club’ and the Eiffel Tower (Champ de Mars, 5 Avenue Anatole France, 75007 Paris) is ‘spoon. brand.harmless’. The latest version of the what3words mobile app works not only in English, but in nine other languages (French, Russian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, Swahili and Dutch). The addresses in the new languages are not translations of the English addresses, but rather completely new random combinations, giving each spot a different address in each language. The location of the White House is ‘imbriquer.bleu.acheter’ in French, ‘reojo. canasta.situado’ in Spanish, and ‘kuzoeleka. vyovyote.ilienda’ in Kiswahili. The app is useful for travellers, who often have to decipher idiosyncratic street addressing conventions around the world. In parts of Japan, for example, the street numbering is based on the chronological order in which the houses were constructed: the first one built is No. 1 and the second one—which could be at the other end of the street—is No. 2. In New York, savvy real estate developers use inaccurate ‘vanity’ addresses to allow them to charge more money per square foot. As Bloomberg reported in 2014, a new skyscraper with the main entrance on 56th Street was given a Park Avenue address, even though it was about 45 m (148 ft) from the corner of the posh Manhattan street associated with luxury. Sheldrick and Cohen’s system bypasses the traditional convention of the alphanumeric street addressing system and can in fact specify locations with greater accuracy. The White House, which occupies an area of about 5,110 m2, actually has several what3words addresses: within the Oval Office, sofa-side meetings are in the junction between ‘score.latter.loving’ and

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Developing countries that are struggling to build a consistent addressing system are not the only places where what3words is useful. Even in the Netherlands where street addresses and postal codes identify all buildings, what3words can help to identify undeveloped spots, such as location of your towel on the beach. It works on land or on water, as demonstrated by this photo from the beach in Scheveningen, just minutes away from Works That Work headquarters (rejected.defining.envy).

‘square.oath.melt’, and the President’s desk is in the vicinity of ‘rich.soup.noble’. Speaking at a conference in New York in December, Sheldrick explained that the specific ity of the what3words system makes it especially ideal for targeted deliveries. ‘If drone deliveries take off, people might want [packages] dropped on the roof. Is this going to my front garden or back garden? I think that there’s going to be a whole shift in the way people think about an address,’ said Sheldrick. In the meantime, what3words’ ability to instantly provide a shareable address tag for any location in the world has been particularly useful for reaching those ‘invisible’ residents of infor mal settlements. The service transformed the operations of Brazilian delivery service Grupo Carteiro Amigo (Friendly Mailman‑ Group), helping their carriers navigate the unmarked alleys and dirt paths of Rio de Janeiro’s sprawl ing, unmarked favelas with greater efficiency In the beginning, Carteiro Amigo relied on a complex proprietary system of maps that had to be updated daily, but switching to Portuguese addresses from what3words allowed the service to scale operations almost overnight. Now its carriers can identify customers’ homes using the mobile app and give them stickers with their three-word address. The company’s database of customer addresses allows them to pick up and deliver mail in areas where the official postal service cannot function. A similar business has started up in South

Africa, where an enterprising 24-year-old started a bike courier service delivering medicine to patients living in a large, uncharted settlement 25 km (15.5 mi) southeast of Cape Town. ‘Khayelitsha is like a maze,’ says Sizwe Nzima, the founder of Iyeza Express. ‘When we started we experienced logistics challenges. In the past courier companies weren’t able to work out the routes due to informal roads, informal addresses and informal housing.’ With the help of what3words he has streamlined his operations with better and more accurate route planning. The app is also finding its way into situations where locating people and places is liter ally a matter of life and death. The UN has incorporated it into its disaster-reporting app UN-Assign, allowing relief staff to deploy rescue teams and deliver supplies efficiently, even to off-the-map locations such as a flooded street or a dense forest. Services like the emergency call app BlueLight are using what3words addresses to monitor ski slopes and unmarked terrain. As a concept, what3words’ simple solution presents exciting possibilities for the future of mapping and navigation, as evidenced by the numerous awards it has won and the significant partnerships and start-up funding it has attracted. In reality, however, there is still significant room for improvement. The app (now on version 6.3) still crashes too often, the autolocate function is not reliable and must be adjusted manually, elevation in a building can’t be specified, and use of the system is dependent

tight.declares.speedy enlarge.offline.destiny

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on having a smartphone, which not all of the world’s poorest can afford. Another potential problem can arise from the three words randomly assigned to a location. While what3words is careful to eliminate vulgar or easily confused words (like ‘here’ and ‘hear’) from its pool of 40,000 tag components, it doesn’t necessarily screen for odd combinations. Who wants to live in an area tagged ‘door.socks. city’ as in Greytown, South Africa or would buy a flat in the ‘airless.alive.mice’ square in Paris, or advertise the address ‘loaf.profited.person’ in Kent, UK? Unfortunately what3words addresses cannot be customised or changed if users don’t like them. (Bad news for the residents of dozed. total.slump in New Jersey.)

On the other hand, perhaps the most impor tant update to what3words is that it now works with popular navigation apps like Google Maps and Waze, connecting its unique, three-word tags to locations based on traditional street addresses and routes. A new partnership with Esri, one of the world’s largest mapping software companies, is paving the way for what3words widgets to be added to a significant number of geographic information systems as well. But until more countries follow Norway in formally accepting what3words tags as legal addresses, bureaucratic procedures will probably continue to be a problem for the invisible majority. ☐

Rob Boffard is a writer based in Vancouver. He wrote about the design of mountains for WTW3.

BELLS AND WHISTLES: GIVING DEVICES A VOICE

The sounds of the natural world speak to those who can interpret them: ‘The buffalo are headed east.’ ‘Rain is just over the horizon.’ The sounds of the technological world carry different messages: ‘Your headlights are on.’ ‘The eggs are done.’ Who creates these sounds and how?

Dave Sandhu was walking across the junction of 29th Street and Lonsdale Avenue in North Vancouver when he noticed something strange: the pedestrian signals were no longer making bird noises. That was a problem. The unusual pedestrian crossing sounds, a ‘dee-doo’ cuckoo noise for north–south crossings, and a melodic chirping for east–west, had become a crucial tool to help pedestrians navigate busy streets, not only in Vancouver, but in other cities across Canada as well. Without them, blind people wouldn’t know when to cross the road, and even those

who could see might not immediately notice that it was time to walk. Fortunately, the signalling equipment was a product of Novax Industries, the company which employs Sandhu as a Business Development Manager. ‘I called the city and said we needed repairs at that corner of that intersection,’ Sandhu says. ‘We’ve got good relationships with the city and its engineers.’ Product sound designers are unsung heroes, and without them the world would be much quieter, less convenient and perhaps more dangerous. Their work and expertise permeates everyday life, buzzing, beeping and chirping

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The junction of Robson Street and Bute Street in Vancouver. Crossing signals in this city produce bird calls that tell pedestrians not only when to

walk but also whether they are travelling north–south or east–west. Photo: Nicole Simpson

from cars and computers, mobile phones and microwave ovens, televisions and traffic signals. Each of these devices comes with a set of sounds specifically designed to help us use them in the best way. Properly designed and implemented, these sounds are barely noticeable, calling atten tion more to what they mean than to themselves. As discreet and fleeting as they are, however, a staggering amount of thought goes into them. Effective product sounds have a few things in common, whether they come from a home appliance or a heart monitor: they need to be loud enough to distinguish themselves from any background noise. They need to be distinct from other sounds in the environment. They must not occur so frequently that the human brain stops paying attention to them. Short sounds are usu ally better. Lindsay McCunn, an assistant professor in environmental psychology at the University of Washington Tacoma who has spent a lot of time thinking about how humans perceive sound, offers some additional guidelines. Context, she says, is key. ‘If you think about the way we get a beep for a text, it’s all about the sound, a neutral

stimulus, being connected with something meaningful: “I have a text”, “The microwave is done”, “The coffee is ready”. And that meaning gets associated so that we respond in a predict able way.’ ‘You want something that is as streamlined and efficient as possible so that you’re not con stantly thinking, “What does that sound mean?”. Every time you get a text, you’re not going to want to look down at your phone and interpret or cognitively process what it means. You need to be able to hear it and understand automatically what it is.’ An effective product sound has to hit all those marks. If it misses even one or two, it becomes pointless. Car alarms, for example, are distinctly audible and instantly recognisable, but they’ve become so common in big cities that nobody takes any notice of them. The fact that so many of these everyday signals do hit all those marks is a testament to product sound designers and their special kind of magic. When studio engineers finish recording a piece of music, they start mixing the tracks together, and they usually do it in a specially

acoustically conditioned space. Emar Vegt works a little differently. When he finishes recording the material he needs, he climbs into a car with his laptop, shuts the door and starts mixing there. Since his company is BMW, finding a car to work in isn’t really a problem. Vegt is a senior sound designer at the com pany’s Munich headquarters. Newer models, including the i3 and i8 electric cars, feature his work (the ‘fasten seat belts’ signal, for example, or the sound when the navigation system turns on). They must be calm and soothing, rather than annoying or alarming, yet at the same time able to communicate that the driver needs to take an important action, like putting on a seat belt. Furthermore, they have to convey the quality and luxury befitting a car costing in excess of €130,000 (US$148,000). ‘We approach it like a composer would,’ Vegt explains. ‘We try out lots and lots of things, and then narrow it down to see which ones work, and iteratively improve them. At the start, with the i8 and i3, we didn’t have a clear solution for what the best sound would be, so we explored lots of different sounds, recorded them ourselves, then

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found what we liked and narrowed it down until we had the sound we liked in the car.’ Perhaps surprisingly, most of what Vegt does involves using widely available software and instruments rather than specialised equipment available only to product sound designers. If there is any magic here, it is in the way he and his colleagues process and layer the sounds to get the specific effect they want. ‘If you listen closely,’ Vegt says, ‘in the warning sounds for [the i3 and i8], there is a bit of guitar, a bit of syn thesiser, a bit of piano. All in all, there are close to 25 layers of sound.’ BMW takes its sounds seriously, and Vegt’s team also labours over the physical, mechanical sounds of the engine and fixtures, which are a little trickier to shape. Getting a nice sound from a plastic door handle means experimenting with materials and designing prototypes. Vegt says that he and his colleagues rely on existing features of previous models as a guide for what sounds good. ‘All the previous generations of car door handles are used in the design of a new one. When the first prototypes are being built, they have maybe 70 or 80% of the intended quality

Left: A BMW i8 undergoing measurement of its interior and exterior acoustics in a test facility at the company’s Munich headquarters.

Above: Emar Vegt, senior sound designer at BMW, working on sounds for the i8. Photos courtesy of BMW AG.

already. It’s then just a matter of listening, and finding out what can be even better. We change materials, fine-tune it, until it’s the way we want it to be.’ Another designer who knows how painstak ing it can be to create just the right sound is Jim McKee. Unlike Vegt, who works for one company, McKee has worked for companies as diverse as Apple, Pinterest and Pixar. The Facebook mobile app’s video call notification sound was designed by McKee and his col league Everett Katigbak, and its rising tones are the notes F, A, C and E, a happy accident that resulted in just the effect they were looking for. Dealing with clients, McKee says, is usually about narrowing things down. ‘I get a sheet that defines the look and feel that the company uses for their brand,’ he says. ‘I don’t want them to go into something that they don’t want to get into, so the first phase is just exploratory: we’re throwing them a lot of different types of sounds just to get a sense of how they react and to home in on a direction and aesthetic. That kind of shotgun approach at the beginning quickly nar rows down to two, three, four options. We can

then explore those options and build them out. Usually, they migrate towards one particular gesture.’ Dave Sandhu and Novax Industries are cur rently working with the Canadian government on a new project, one which Canadian citizens may have mixed feelings about: replacing the chirping of the pedestrian crossing signals, at least outside cities, with a cheerful four-note phrase known as the Canadian Melody. The reason was simple: the chirping wasn’t fulfilling one of the principles of product sound design. Outside urban areas, where birdlife was more prevalent, it wasn’t distinctive enough to do its job properly, creating significant difficul ties for blind and visually impaired pedestrians. ‘If you’re not in the signal industry and you walk around the city, you really don’t notice a lot of this stuff,’ Sandhu says. ‘But I stood around different intersections in Victoria [on Vancouver Island] watching people, and they still look up and respond to the signal. I guess it’s a habit now for them to listen to it, even though they don’t need to.’ ☐

BRINGING CLARITY TO THE DIAMOND TRADE

Pete Guest is a writer based in Singapore. He has previously written for WTW about the Brixton pound and about civilian efforts to explore Mars.

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The secrecy that cloaks the diamond industry serves to keep its operations secure, but also to give an aura of mystery to what are essentially rocks dug up out of the ground. Recent controversies, however, have sparked demands for greater transparency.

Previous spread: Rough diamonds await inspection at De Beers’ Global Sightholder Sales facility in Gaborone, Botswana. Photo: Pete Guest

This spread: The main pit of the Jwaneng diamond mine, owned as a joint venture between De Beers and the government of Botswana. Jwaneng is the richest diamond mine in the

world, producing about 11 million carats (2,200 kg) of diamonds a year. Photo: Pete Guest

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De Beers’ marketing is known for seeding the concept of the diamond engagement ring in the American psyche in the 1930s and 1940s; today, it is an open secret that the company is trying to repeat the feat in Asia, where the tradition has still not taken hold outside of Japan.

In late 2011, the most important man in the global diamond business landed in Botswana, the world’s biggest diamond-producing country, and couldn’t find a cab. Philippe Mellier had just taken over as CEO of the De Beers Group— arguably the most recognisable name in the trade—and although the country’s development has been inextricably linked to the diamond trade, it was clear that the benefits were not fully trickling down. ‘We had to stop a guy and ask him to take us to the city in his car,’ Mellier says. ‘The second or third guy said yes.’ Two years later, Mellier moved almost all of De Beers’ sorting and selling operations from London to Botswana’s capital Gaborone, part of a company-wide effort to demonstrate the value of the diamond business to a country that, even now, rarely catches sight of the finished product before it disappears into the secretive and opaque global supply chain. Today, the diamond caravan comes here ten

times a year for ‘Sights’—the opportunity to buy mixed boxes of rough stones. It has, Mellier acknowledges, been a major adjustment for his clients, who had for decades flown into London, with its luxury hotels, its high-class restaurants and, crucially, its airports. To get to Botswana from almost anywhere means a layover in Addis Ababa or Johannesburg, the latter entailing the added complexity of obtaining a South African transit visa. ‘I had my doubts,’ says Mellier, ‘but on day one, they were all here; it was Sight Nine, two years ago. They all came; we had a big party. They loved it.’ The diamond trade is understandably opaque. Stones slip from mine to store along international supply chains that are tightly protected, the concentrated value and ease of concealment of a diamond making it an obvious target for theft and smuggling. At the same time, the intangible value of a diamond is in part due to the buyer’s feeling that the stone is special and

Diamond Trade

KGK Diamond’s employees cut the final facets on diamonds inside its

diamond-cutting and polishing plant in Gaborone, Botswana. KGK Diamond acts

rare; the more the process by which the stone is mined, cut and marketed is laid bare, the more the customer understands that they have been sold something far from unique. That lack of transparency has been abused at times—‘blood diamonds’ were a genuine phenomenon in West and Central Africa in the earlier part of the century—but the legitimate diamond business has transformed Botswana from a backwater to one of Africa’s most prosperous nations over the last 50 years. The country is dry, landlocked and almost entirely dependent on its mining exports: circumstances that have led other countries in the region into chaos and corruption. Diamonds were discovered shortly after the country became independent in 1966, and De Beers, at that time owned by the Oppenheimer family, was there from the beginning. A quarter of the country’s economy and three-quarters of its export earnings come from the diamond trade.

as De Beers’ local Sightholder. Photo: Pete Guest

The asset that started the boom is Jwaneng, the world’s richest diamond mine, a few hours outside of Gaborone. The central pit is a vast cauldron, 2 km (1.2 mi) across at its widest point and more than 400 m (1,300 ft) deep. Baboons patrol the upper reaches of the slopes, which are deep grey and swaddled in thick dust. Down below, 200-tonne trucks shift the earth from the pit up to the waste pile: 1.2 trillion tonnes of rock and earth (a figure that will double in size over the next decade, according to Albert Milton, the mine’s managing director). Inside a vast hangar, truck parts are stacked up to be serviced, the chassis stripped back in a constant cycle of replacement. A full 13% of the mine’s operating budget is spent on tyres; its vehicles burn through 600 million tonnes of fuel a year. At the base of the pit, four ‘pipes’ of kimber lite, the diamond-rich seams, are blasted out. Two gigantic white silos make up the processing unit, called the ‘Aquarium’—the Fully Automated Sort House, or Fish, and the Completely

Automated Recovery Plant, or Carp. The two towers separate the rough diamonds from the ore that holds them. At every stage, security is tight. It is illegal for unlicensed individuals to buy or sell rough diamonds in Botswana, but the temptation remains. Workers receive a sizeable bonus for finding stones in the pit; random spot checks, including X-rays, provide a considerable disincentive for theft. From Jwaneng, the stones are sent to De Beers’ new, high-tech sorting and ‘Sightholder Sales’ facility in Gaborone. The whole building is startlingly functional and utilitarian. Sitting behind high walls on a plot of dried-up scrubland on the road between the city centre and the airport, Sightholder Sales handles millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds a day, although the actual number of stones is a closely guarded secret. Visitors pass through a maze of security airlocks and scanners; everyone in the building is under the constant gaze of CCTV. Inside, rough diamonds pass through room after room of manual inspections. On work benches, an international mix of experts sits hunched over loupes. The stones themselves lie in piles as they wait to be assessed, vast sums of money in potentia tossed almost casually on tables. In one room, ‘special’ stones of more than ten carats are separated out, along with any diamonds of rare colour or clarity. Here, on a bank of computer terminals, gemologists spin 3D models of the stones, trying to find what the head of the unit, Paul Dooney, calls ‘polished outcomes’, the cuts to the stone that will produce the most valuable finished gem or gems. By the window, the most valuable of all sit in the south ern African sun: each is estimated to be worth at least US$250,000 (€229,000). Diamonds from the company’s mines in South Africa, Canada and Namibia are brought together and aggregated for sale in this facility. De Beers’ Sightholders, cutters who must qualify by being able to prove their capacity and willing ness to buy significant quantities of diamonds on a regular basis, as well as pass a number of ethical filters, buy mixed boxes from small rooms, set along a grey, nondescript corridor on the ground floor. These 80 Sightholders purchase 90% of De Beers’ diamonds, and De Beers handles over a third of the world’s total rough diamond trade.

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Botswana diamonds are sold separately, in their own Sight boxes. The government is intent on increasing the amount of skilled processing and manufacturing work and so put in place legislation to require that any rough diamonds mined in the country are also cut there. Unemployment in Botswana is relatively high, at around 18%. Amongst young people, that figure is higher still. Mining, while capital-intensive, does not create many jobs, and those it does cre ate tend to be low-skilled and manual. Capturing even a small proportion of the global diamond-cutting business from India, where 600,000 people work in the trade, could be transformational for Botswana. As Keith Jefferis, one of the country’s leading economists, says, the entire workforce of Botswana is less than 300,000 people. Just 1 or 2% of the Indian market would make a material difference to the employment rate. ‘Our small size makes quite a lot possible,’ he says. ‘We don’t need a high proportion of those jobs to come here to make a difference.’ The government’s policy of keeping diamond processing in the country has been a qualified success. At its peak in 2014 there were 21 facto ries and 3,700 people working in the industry. Since then, a slowdown in the Chinese economy has created a glut of stones in the cutting and polishing sector, as well as at retailers. This, in turn, has pushed prices down. In Botswana, two factories shut entirely and many others scaled back, cutting nearly 1,000 jobs in the process. Only one company has bucked the trend. ‘It’s a long-term view, not a short-term view. We have been in business for over 100 years,’ says Sandeep Kothari, the managing director of KGK Diamonds, which opened its Gaborone factory in September 2015. When the current glut in the industry eases, he believes, KGK will benefit from being right next to the source. The barn-like factory is comparable to those anywhere in the world, the production manager Ravindra Ahir says, as he demonstrates the ‘Galaxy Ultra’, an Israeli-made diamond-scan ning machine whose workings are so secret that it has to be reset manually by a Galaxy engineer if it ever loses power. According to Ahir, there are only four such machines in existence. Ahir oversees an eight-stage process from planning to finishing, with each diamond’s path

Diamond Trade

Diamond producers face a dilemma— transparency and responsible sourcing help to clear their tarnished reputations, but the opacity of their operations contributes an aura of mystique that boosts the value of their wares.

through the factory written on a simple paper envelope. Workers shuttle back and forth to a bank of quality-control stations, where every cut is assessed and the stones are constantly weighed, from the moment that they arrive in orange Brinks bags to when they go into the office safe. The company has leased a second, nearly identical factory in an adjacent unit, hoping to double capacity and increase employment. Already, the company has picked up a number of the cutters let go in the last round of sackings. It may not be enough. There is a sense across the industry, from De Beers downwards, that the diamond trade needs to demonstrate its ability to contribute to Botswana beyond tax revenues. With that has come a new kind of transparency.

De Beers hosted a conference with the interna tional think tank Chatham House on the future of the economy in November, albeit one that was principally attended by those already involved in the business. ‘De Beers is disclosing a lot more than before. We were really seen as a black hole; I think that’s no longer the case,’ Mellier says. Even so, there are limits to how far that disclosure is likely to go, as the company fights to preserve the value and perception of scarcity of diamonds. ‘I normally call them a bunch of crooks, because they are selling stones,’ one senior gov ernment official says, his tone only half-joking. ‘This is something they created, so they have to guard their secrets very closely.’ ☐

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THE ART AND SCIENCE OF MILITARY CAMOUFLAGE

Caitlin Hu is a deputy news editor at Quartz, a digital news publication.

In combat the element of surprise can be a tactical advantage that makes the difference between life and death. Drawing on nature, science and practical experience, designers create camouflage that can buy soldiers precious seconds in the field.

‘In 2010, in trash-canistan, I got shot at, while walking next to guys in [MultiCam camouflage gear] (who were never targeted)!’ reads an anonymous comment at a military news site. ‘This happened three times, on two different patrols.’ This soldier was not alone. For nearly a decade, the American occupation of Afghanistan suffered from a grave case of the emperor’s new clothes. From the initial invasion in 2001 until about 2009, many US Army soldiers were sent into the country wearing a ‘protective’ camou flage pattern so ineffective that it actually seems to have attracted enemy fire.

The US Army had originally wanted to use the US Marine Corps’ camouflage pattern, but was denied permission. MARPAT (for Marine Pattern) is the intellectual property of the US Navy, the first camo pattern ever to be patented by a branch of the US military. The documentation for that patent includes the statement, ‘Camouflage is an art in the process of becoming a science’, but the story of camouflage actually starts not with art, but with nature. For Charles Darwin, camouflage in the animal kingdom was further evidence for evolutionary adaptation. ‘When we see

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A coloured etching of the Battle of Waterloo showing Prussian troops in brightly coloured uniforms. In an age of close combat, ready identification

of friends and foes was of paramount importance. The advent of longer-range infantry weapons changed battle tactics, and effective concealment on

leaf-eating insects green, and bark-feeders mottled-grey; the alpine ptarmigan white in winter, the red-grouse the colour of heather, and the black-grouse that of peaty earth, we must believe that these tints are of service to these birds and insects in preserving them from danger,’ he wrote in his 1859 blockbuster, On the Origin of Species. Inspired by Darwin’s observations, the eccentric American naturalist and painter Abbott Handerson Thayer published his own book, Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, with his son Gerald in 1909. In it, they systematically classified naturally occurring camouflage patterns according to principles such as ‘mimicry’ and ‘disruption’ that could be replicated on paper and canvas. One of the Thayers’ greatest breakthroughs, says University of Iowa camouflage scholar and professor of design history Roy Behrens, was their understanding of countershading. They observed that the undersides of many animals were lighter-coloured than their backs and heads, the reverse of the shadowing used by

the field became a priority. Anonymous artist, courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

painters to make figures appear three-dimen sional. Such countershading, they concluded, made animals look flat, helping them to blend into a busy landscape. Humans, of course, have also made creative use of concealing coloration. In the time of Julius Caesar, ships were camouflaged with sea-blue wax, and during the US Civil War they were painted fog grey. Native American hunters wore buffalo hides to approach their prey, while Irish hunters covered themselves in bits of brush and branch to blend into trees. But the great innova tion of the 20th century would be to distil all that elaborate costuming into principles that could be combined, customised and printed as a simple two-dimensional pattern. The word ‘camouflage’ is taken from camoufler, which means ‘to disguise’ in the French thieves’ cant of the early 20th century, and it was during the First World War that the French army began assembling top-secret squads of artists to disguise its troops. Dubbed camoufleurs, they created drab hooded smocks and painted screens in natural colours, to blend soldiers

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When the US entered the First World War in 1917, Abbott Handerson Thayer, one of the authors of Concealing Coloration, wrote to then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, insisting that ‘what the government lacks is a board composed of painters—experts in matters of visibility.’

and equipment into their surroundings (what the Thayers would have called ‘mimicry’). They even constructed false dead trees that concealed sentry posts, and phoney horse carcasses that hid snipers. When the UK joined the war, it followed suit. Notably, the UK marine artist and naval con script Norman Wilkinson pioneered an effort to paint navy ships in bold, abstract patterns called ‘dazzle’. These bands, stripes and dots broke up the ships’ lines, making them difficult to inter pret. (The Thayers called this ‘disruption’.) Designed largely by women at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, dazzle patterns began appearing in stunning planes of colour and stark lines on naval ships during the First World War. And despite some resistance from ship captains, by the Second World War these multiplied into hundreds of patterns and paint combinations for both UK and US ships. Although little could be done to shield a ship against sonar or to hide the tell-tale plume from its smokestack, it was hoped that the visual flash and pomp of dazzle paint would make it harder for enemy submarines to figure out the direction in which it was head ing. ‘It wasn’t a matter of making it invisible,’ says Behrens. ‘It was a matter of throwing off [U-boat] targeting, which was quite complex.’ (Some ships had fake bow waves painted on the wrong end, for the same purposes.) Did dazzle painting work? The results of some trials were positive, but Wilkinson himself was not so sure. ‘From a careful examination of the whole of the evidence, no definitive case on material grounds can be made out for any benefit in this respect from this form of camouflage,’ he wrote of his own dazzle painting technique, back in 1920. ‘At the same time the statistics do not prove that it is disadvantageous, and in view of the undoubted increase in the confidence and morale of officers and crews of the mercantile

marine resulting from the painting which is a highly important consideration, together with the small extra cost per ship, it may be found advisable to continue the system, though prob ably not under the present wholesale condition.’ Despite never having worked on camouflage, some of the era’s most avant-garde artists, including Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, eagerly embraced association with the visually engaging dazzle. ‘It was us who created that,’ famously boasted Pablo Picasso at the sight of a camouflaged cannon in Paris, towards the end of the First World War. Today, Braque and Picasso might be forgiven for thinking that they were still the inspiration for contemporary camou flage. Cutting-edge ‘digital’ prints now feature cascades of small and large right angles reminis cent of vintage Cubist and Futurist works. According to digital camouflage designer Guy Cramer, the best of these blocky patterns are the result of a unique fractal approach to camouflage that appropriates repeating mathematical pat terns found in nature. ‘The simplest example is that the smallest leaf of a fern is almost identical to the largest leaf of a fern in appearance and it’s only scale that’s the difference between the two,’ says the founder and CEO of Canadian company HyperStealth. ‘We’ll take these shapes that are found in nature and we’ll embed them into the camou flage. So your subconscious takes that one and logs it with everything it’s seen prior and says, “Okay, these are all the right shapes—ignore them all.”’ He notes that the brain will come back to that pattern and analyse it again, eventually discov ering the anomaly. But the time that it takes to do that can make a difference to an exposed soldier; in one test by the US Army, it took an average of 30 seconds for a human subject to find a figure camouflaged by a HyperStealth pattern, says

Military Camouflage

Ships during the First World War were hard to conceal because of constantly changing weather conditions and because of the smoke they produced, so instead of hiding them (‘mimicry’), the British used complex patterns of

geometric shapes in contrasting colours to make it difficult for the enemy to estimate their type, size, speed and direction of travel (‘disruption’). Each ship’s dazzle pattern was unique to avoid making classes of ships instantly

Cramer. Four to six seconds before recognition is considered excellent performance. Ever since Afghanistan, however, ‘pixelated’ patterns have inspired more scepticism than confidence among US soldiers. ‘There are no right angles in nature,’ says Ernesto Rodriguez, spokesman for Crye Precision. Crye developed MultiCam, the blotchy brand of camouflage that was distributed to soldiers in Afghanistan after it became clear that the Army’s own pixelated pattern wasn’t working. ‘You go into the jungle, you go into the desert, you’re not going to find anything that’s a square,’ he explains. ‘If you look at the entire pattern of MultiCam and how it repeats, you see a horizon, you see vertical elements that look like a tree, or what a shrub or treetop will look like at a certain distance. We knew you needed varying sizes of these shapes because the human form is easily recognisable to the human eye and these shapes disguise all that. It’s about looking at nature.’ Crye Precision and HyperStealth Technologies are two of the world’s highest-tier camouflage makers, and in some ways, they

recognisable to the enemy. On the image above, two otherwise identical ships as seen through a submarine periscope, one with dazzle painting and one painted grey.

represent the two poles of contemporary cam ouflage theory. Crye Precision favours organiclooking shapes and print sizes. It currently supplies the UK, German, and Australian mili taries, among others. (Poland has used a ‘knock off’ version of MultiCam, Rodriguez adds.) Like the US Army’s failed pattern, MultiCam is designed to camouflage in a variety of environ ments, from desert to jungle. The difference is that it actually seems to work, something Ernesto attributes to the brand’s darker colour palette and softer shapes. The secretive HyperStealth, on the other hand, creates distinctly digital patterns similar to MARPAT, on which the Army tried unsuccess fully to base its own pattern. Nearly five million military-issue uniforms across 50 countries in the world sport the Canadian company’s pattern. HyperStealth deals solely in fractal prints, and seems bent on pushing the frontiers of science as far as it can, recently announcing the crea tion of a real, working invisibility cloak. (It has, however, declined to show its invisibility cloak publicly, citing patent concerns.)

A Slovakian MiG-29 in Digital Thunder camouflage developed in 2006 by HyperStealth, a private Canadian military contractor. The three colours

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(Blue, Medium Gray, Light Blue Gray) are chosen to blend in with overcast and blue skies as well as with land and sea. Photo courtesy of HyperStealth.

Military Camouflage

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Above: The computer-generated digital camouflage pattern CADPAT used by the Canadian Forces was the first pixelated digital camouflage pattern to be issued.

The US Army soldiers walking into the line of fire in Afghanistan were wearing a sandy, Army-designed camouflage called the Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP). A digital print, it was not dissimilar to those created by HyperStealth, but it featured mostly light shades and lacked the dark, shape-disrupting streaks that have evolved throughout camouflage design since early 20thcentury dazzle. This proved to be a serious flaw. Due to an optical phenomenon called isolumi nance, lighter colours tend to blur together when viewed from a distance, appearing to lighten. In a natural world full of shades and shadows, this effectively causes anyone wearing those colours to stand out instead of blending in. As Cramer points out, that would be true even if UCP were a more organically shaped pat tern. ‘After UCP, everyone thought that digital

CADPAT is also designed to reduce the likelihood of detection by night vision devices. Use of CADPAT by civilians is illegal.

camouflage was dead, that it was a trend or a fad,’ he notes with some bitterness. ‘That was never a digital camouflage issue, that was a coloration issue.’ His arguments for digital camouflage have so far failed to gain the trust of troops on the ground. As of January, 2016 all US Army soldiers will be transitioned out of their old uniforms and into a splotchy MultiCam-based pattern. The question remains: how much protection can even the best camouflage offer in an era when technology can read faces in the dark, scan for heat signatures from continents away and identify strangers’ faces in milliseconds? And what colours and shapes can camouflage designers successfully mimic, now that danger is no longer limited to traditional and predictable battle fields, but spills out into a civilian milieu of soft targets? A new generation of artists is

Military Camouflage

Left: MultiCam is a seven-colour, multi-environment camouflage pattern designed for use by the US Army. It was developed by Crye Precision and is also sold for civilian usage.

Right: The Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP), is the military camouflage pattern used on the United States Army’s Army Combat Uniform. Its pixelated pattern is similar to the Canadian CADPAT

forging the way forward by entirely redefining what it means to blend in. In 2013, New York-based artist Adam Harvey, who gears his experiments in camouflage towards civilians, created a metal-lined burka to protect against thermal sensing, one way in which drones target victims in danger zones like Waziristan or Pakistan. ‘I think the term “camouflage” is too wrapped up in military usage. It’s something we do every day, when we fit into social settings, when we consider the way we speak, etc.,’ says Harvey. He compares camouflage to fashion, something to buy and update with each new season and technological environment. According to him, camouflage is part of staying ahead of the trend. University College London artist Yanchao Li may be doing just that by designing his

scheme. The effectiveness of the pattern was questioned, leading to replacement of UCP in 2014 by Scorpion, a pattern similar to MultiCam.

camouflage specifically for the algorithmic eye. In 2015 he introduced robotic prosthetic limbs as a way to help users sidestep gait recognition software, which identifies people based on the way they walk. Similarly, Harvey’s current pro ject, ‘CV Dazzler’, repurposes old-fashioned daz zle to foil facial recognition software, showing users how to use make-up or stickers to break up the lines of a face and to obscure the identifying ratios between nose, eyes and mouth. ‘You can invent drones. You can invent radar. But as soon as you invent a new means of detection, then there’ll be a new means of concealment or diversion,’ says Behrens of the challenges ahead for would-be camoufleurs. Then he notes matter-of-factly, ‘And if you invent a new diversion, there will be a new means of surveillance.’ ☐

Rwanda almost destroyed itself but has now become one of the top African countries in terms of enterprise and development. KN 3 Road is the main boulevard leading to the Central

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Business District of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city. Kigali has been named by various surveys as the cleanest and greenest city on the continent.

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RWANDA’S WAR ON PLASTIC

Eight years after their government banned the use of plastic bags, Rwandans—for the most part—have learned to live without them.

WTW #7

Jonathan W. Rosen is a journalist based in Kigali, Rwanda and a 2016 Alicia Patterson Foundation reporting fellow. Cyril Ndegeya is an independent Rwandan photojournalist working for the Associated Press. He also helped Rosen find contacts for this story.

A cheerful display of biodegradable plastic bags hanging in a stall in Kimironko, the largest market in Kigali. They provide a convenient and legal (but more

expensive) alternative to polyethylene bags whose sale and use were banned in 2008.

Kimironko Market, a bustling open-air plaza at the edge of the Rwandan capital, is in many ways a typical African bazaar. Seven days a week, throngs of Kigali’s 1.3 million residents file through its narrow paths flanked by mangoes, bananas and avocados. Finely milled flour is piled in mounds, and slabs of goat and cow carcasses hang from metal hooks. The smells, satisfyingly pungent, reflect the freshness of the produce. At the front entrance, the air is heavy with the aroma of fish sourced from the waters of Africa’s Great Lakes region, but farther into the market the scent gradually gives way to the smell of spices, sweat, and slowly ripening fruit, complementing the scent of rain-soaked earth that drifts in from surrounding hillsides. At Kimironko, though—and all across this tightly packed country of 12 million people—one item is conspicuously absent. Most other markets in sub-Saharan Africa are overrun with plastic, the thin translucent bags used for packing meat and spices, the heavier black bags

used for produce, and a whole lot of both drift ing through the air, clogging up the drains, and matted with mud on the ground. In Rwanda, however, the manufacture, sale, and use of polyethylene bags have been illegal since 2008, with violators facing hefty fines or even jail time. And although a lucrative black market for plastic bags persists, a majority of Rwandans have transitioned to reusable or biodegradable alternatives. At Kimironko, this means business for locals like Theoneste Vuguziga, who sells an assortment of shopping bags from a stand inside the market. Hanging on hooks are his flashier, more expensive items: brightly coloured cloth bags and oversized waxed-paper bags imported from India, adorned with pictures of elephants, big cats, and somewhat out-of-place snowcapped mountains. The biggest seller, though, is Vuguziga’s most affordable product: a simple brown paper bag that sells for 100 Rwandan francs, the rough equivalent of US$0.13 or €0.12. Although Vuguziga’s profit is modest,

Rwanda’s War on Plastic

the bags help to feed his family and contribute to what most vendors and customers agree is a more environmentally friendly, not to mention pleasant, market experience. ‘Before the ban, plastic bags were every where,’ says Rebecca Niyongabo, a customer shopping for beans at an adjacent stall. ‘The wind would blow them into the air; babies would eat them; people would burn them in their rub bish and the entire neighbourhood would smell. It was a mess.’ Although Rwanda’s ban on plastic bags has long made international headlines, the law itself is hardly unique. Since the late 1990s, various municipal, provincial and national governments have enacted similar legislation, but gener ally with mixed success. In 2002, Bangladesh became the world’s first country to institute a full ban on plastic bags, which were found to have clogged the country’s drainage system and contributed to a bout of catastrophic flood ing. Other nations, including many in Africa, eventually followed suit. As of 2013, according to the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, DC, 19 countries on the continent had enacted either full or partial bans, often targeting thinner bags that are more easily carried away by the wind. This crackdown on polyethylene has been motivated by several factors, including the bags’ contribution to flooding and soil degradation, and their often-fatal consumption by animals. In Mauritania, which banned plastic bags in 2013, 70% of sheep and cattle deaths in the country’s capital have historically been caused by plastic bag ingestion. Rwanda’s ban, however, is exceptional in one important aspect: it’s stringently enforced. Unlike in many countries with similar laws on the books, Rwanda’s law enforcement agencies and environmental stakeholders have made the campaign against plastic bags a top priority. Following the law’s enactment, the Rwanda Environmental Management Authority (REMA), an agency within the Ministry of Natural Resources, launched a nationwide campaign to create awareness of the ban and educate children and adults on its importance. Today, signs at Kigali International Airport and many border crossings warn visitors that plastic bags will be confiscated. In markets across the country, it is still possible to find hawkers selling

fruits or cakes that are wrapped in plastic, or underground polyethylene traders dealing in illicit bags from street corners or back alleyways. For the most part, though, Rwandans obey the law. In interviews, vendors at Kimironko Market spoke of visits by undercover inspectors. Those caught using non-biodegradable plastic, they said, are typically fined 50,000 francs (US$61, €67), enough to keep most traders in compliance. The ban’s success is also partly due to traditional Rwandan culture, which places an emphasis on obedience to authority and on cleanliness. Kigali, which is widely regarded as one of Africa’s cleanest cities, won a UN Habitat Scroll of Honour award in 2008 for its emergence as a ‘model modern city’, including its improved collection of rubbish and ‘zero tolerance for plastics’. Unlike Rwanda’s neigh bours, where travellers regularly toss refuse from vehicle windows, littering in the country is almost non-existent. ‘Rwandans are a proud people,’ says Rose Mukankomeje, REMA’s director general and the plastic bag ban’s self-described ‘enforcer’. ‘We don’t like things dirty. Our countryside is not a dustbin.’ As Mukankomeje explains, the bag ban is only part of a wider national conservation strategy that aims to boost resilience to climate change, combat deforestation and prevent the continued erosion of the country’s famed mist-covered hillsides. Although there is yet to be a quantifi able study that assesses the law’s specific impact, Mukankomeje says the ban has contributed to reductions in animal deaths, soil erosion, flooding and even malaria, the last by reducing the prevalence of potential mosquito breeding grounds. In addition, she argues, Rwanda’s commitment to preserving its environment has helped spawn a growing market for ecotour ism, which is buttressed by the presence of some of the world’s last remaining mountain gorillas. Slowly, Rwanda’s reputation for order, cleanliness, and natural beauty is beginning to overtake the country’s more infamous place in popular imagination as the country only 22 years removed from its 1994 genocide, in which as many as a million ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slaughtered in just 100 days. Whatever role the bag ban has played in boosting Rwanda’s image, however, it has also

Ongoing production activities inside Eco Plastic Ltd. located 15 km (9.3 mi) out of the centre of Kigali, the plant is the country’s largest manufacturing company producing plastic products through recycling of plastic waste.

Not only does Kimironko bean seller Marionne Muteteri get by without nonbiodegradable plastic bags, she also engages in a sort of personal recycling,

packaging her wares in paper sacks made out of betting sheets from local gambling parlours.

come with some unwanted consequences. For traders and customers alike, the most pertinent issue is cost. Michael Rozanski, a German baker in Kigali, says the waxed-paper bags he uses to package bread cost four to five times more than similar bags made of plastic. In Kimironko, most meat and fish, due to a lack of locally made alternatives, are packaged in biodegradable plastic bags imported from Britain, the associ ated costs being passed on to customers. In an effort to gain a competitive edge, some vendors devise creative alternatives. Rather than hike her prices, Marionne Muteteri, a Kimironko bean seller, serves her product in one-kilogram sacks made from betting sheets she buys on the cheap from local gambling houses. Customers, therefore, arrive home with an added bonus: odds on already-played football matches from the Belarus Premiere League, South Korean K-League, and German Bundesliga. The increased costs associated with the ban, however, have been hardest on local manufacturers. Because the law also applies to most forms of plastic packaging, companies

producing packaged foods, beverages, and household goods have been forced to change the way they ship their products. Due to obligations under various international trade agreements, however, the Rwandan government is unable to ban the use of plastic packaging for competing imports. This puts domestic firms at a distinct disadvantage. According to Alex Ruzibukira, an official in the Rwandan Ministry of Trade and Industry, authorities are working to address this problem. Already, he says, one investor is in the process of establishing a local facility to produce biodegradable plastic. In addition, a govern ment study will soon be underway to assess the feasibility of an integrated packaging plant; both initiatives could potentially reduce producers’ costs. Nonetheless, many Rwandan companies affected say it would have caused far fewer head aches to simply offer them exceptions to the law. ‘We’ve been lobbying the government on this for many years,’ said one local manufacturing executive who asked to remain anonymous. ‘Nothing has changed, and we don’t believe it will. So we’ve just been forced to adapt.’

Rwanda’s War on Plastic

The central covered area of Kimironko market offering fruit, vegetables, herbs, spices, dried beans, dried fish and rock salt. Shoppers usually bring their own

bags to carry the products they have purchased. The market boasts its own radio station which plays lively gospel music and also provides information

There are some local entrepreneurs, how ever, who’ve managed to exploit the country’s war on plastic to their advantage. Wenceslas Habamungu, the general director of Eco Plastic Ltd, is one of them. Back in 1999, when many of Kigali’s now-pristine boulevards were still over whelmed with rubbish, he and his brother Paulin Buregea established COPET, Rwanda’s first private waste collection company. Nine years later, after the ban came into effect, they ran into a conundrum. Although authorities had granted their company an exception to the law, which allowed them to continue to use plastic bags for waste collection, all domestic plastic producers had relocated to neighbouring countries or gone out of business entirely. After meeting with the authorities, they were given the choice of importing bags under strict conditions, or estab lishing a recycling plant to make their own. Ultimately, the brothers chose the latter. After all, while the law was tough with requirements for plastic packaging, it did allow for the use of plastic bags by hospitals, as well as certain forms of plastic sheeting for agriculture and

about the market to traders who wish to know what the wholesalers are stocking, and at what price.

construction. Meanwhile, the plastic used to package imported goods, which was typically confiscated at customs, meant there’d be a ready supply of material to recycle. Today, six years after its establishment, Eco Plastic Ltd collects more than 80 tonnes of polyethylene every year, churning out bright yellow bags for hospital waste, tubing for use in tree nurseries, sacks for post-harvest storage, and the rubbish bags used by Buregeya’s COPET. The factory, like the items it produces, is largely hidden from the public eye, set inconspicuously on a hillside next to a dirt road outside the capital. Here, just inside the gate, rows of discarded mattress sheets, mosquito net coverings and reams of bubble wrap hang drying in the afternoon sun after being washed by some of Habamungu’s 50-plus employees. Soon, the plastics will be taken inside the factory, mixed with additives and colours, and pumped through a series of machines that heat them to 180°C (356°F) and reshape them into various recycled products. This is plastic Rwandan style: orderly, lawabiding, and mostly out of sight. ☐

WTW #7

At night, the Nile is home to the extravagant floating night clubs frequented by Cairo’s wealthy elite, but also to the mahraganat boats, downscaled versions accessible to the working class.

Kenza Youfsi is a nomadic writer currently based in Rabat interested in gender, migration and other complex issues.

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SHIPS THAT DANCE IN THE NIGHT

From earliest antiquity, the Nile has been the source of Egypt’s life and the shaper of its civilisation. Fundamental to the agriculture, transportation and economy of this otherwise arid land, the river inspired early historians to call Egypt ‘the gift of the Nile’. In more recent years, specifically since the days of Anwar Sadat’s neo-liberal open-door policy, the Nile has been the setting of an explosion of bourgeois entertainment facilities in Cairo, including luxu rious ships where the Cairene elite enjoy club bing, dancing, and drinking at prices up to 1,000 Egyptian pounds (€112 or US$128) per hour.

Since the Arab Spring revolution of January 25, 2011, however, this playground of the rich has been invaded by the mahraganat boats, working-class takes on the floating night club that are clearly rough-hewn, but that offer their services for a mere five pounds (€0.55 or US$0.65). Mahraganat means ‘festival’, something lavish, loud, vibrant, joyful, and perhaps at times even messy. It is a fitting term for a musical style characterised by energetic dance beats, hypnotic, repetitive melodies and bold, sometimes coarse lyrics. Owing as much to the

WTW #7

Ahmed Salim, a worker on a mahraganat boat, says that ‘the fact that we now operate these kind of boats at night with special lighting and music has meant that we also enjoy nightlife but without the necessity of paying your entire salary for one night out.’

working-class shaa’bi music of the 1970s as to hip-hop, and produced in makeshift studios, it is a streetwise blend of heavily autotuned vocals accompanied by both traditional and electronic instrumental timbres. Its youth-driven, socially conscious texts reflect life in the ghettos where its artists were born, grew up and still live today, despite the fact that their work has blossomed into a widespread subcultural movement. The boats named after this musical genre are similarly products of the social movements and pressures of post-revolution Cairene life. Inspired by the breakdown in class barriers during the revolution, owners of small boats gave their ships a facelift, taking elements of the extravagant pleasure boats of the upper class—the flashing coloured lights, loud music and dancing girls—and combining them with the mahraganat’s working-class sensibilities. The boats’ patrons are also largely workingclass people eager to spend a night out without spending their entire salaries. They come, however, from diverse religious, ideological and political backgrounds. Less frequent, but not entirely uncommon, are men in long beards and women in burqas, equally at home in the mosque or on the mahraganat. ‘I come with my children here because I enjoy the music and the trip on the Nile. My children like to dance and make fun

of others dancing. There is nothing wrong about this,’ said one customer from behind her veil. Another patron, Salma, says she loves every thing about the concept of mahraganat: the sweeping synths and chattering cymbals of the music, as well as the vibrant, energetic atmos phere. The lyrics celebrate and give expression to the realities of her everyday life, an invitation not only to enjoy the party, but also to escape those realities, if only for one night. But Ahmed, a worker on the boat, admits that although the tracks feature politics, their function is not primarily political: ‘The songs talk about social, political and economic issues, but the main thing for these guys, really, is to get the party started.’ As another partygoer says, ‘to listen to music about your everyday life is an incentive to move every part of your body to that rhythm.’ The affluent customers of the luxury estab lishments on the river criticise the mahraganat boats, complaining about ‘noise pollution’ and arguing that the Nile should be reserved for the higher segment of society and its refined culture. Nonetheless, it appears that the rocking boats are here to stay. ‘On the Nile banks, there are dif ferent realities and possibilities of living,’ Ahmed says, ‘but here the boats float on the same water, and the same darkness covers us all. ☐

Ships That Dance in the Night

Nightlife in Cairo is not just for Egypt’s elite. Although working-class people can’t afford the city’s exclusive clubs and pleasure boats, they can dance the night

away in the mahraganat boats, loud, joyful floating nightclubs which cost a fraction of the luxury version.

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Photographer Peng Yangjun is also, together with his partner Chen Jiaojiao, creative director and editor of Outlook magazine, China’s leading creative lifestyle magazine.

HIDDEN BEAUTY: THE FACEKINIS OF QINGDAO

Facekinis—colourful, summery takes on the balaclava—are very popular among the women on the beaches of Qingdao on the east coast of China. They help to maintain the pale, white complexion considered delicate and feminine in a culture where dark skin is associated with the outdoor labour of the lower classes. They also make beachgoers feel more anonymous, especially elderly women who might otherwise be reluctant to display their bodies in revealing swimwear.

Furthermore, Qingdao’s beaches suffer from industrial pollution in the form of fertiliser runoff and sewage, which attract jellyfish and fuel algae growth, so the facekinis also serve more practical functions: protecting wearers from jelly fish stings and preventing algae from getting tangled in their hair. Originally, many women made their own facekinis out of scrap materials like old clothes or swimsuits, resulting in a kaleidoscope of different patterns, shapes and colours, each mask a

reflection of its wearer. Since then, the facekini has evolved from a DIY project into a popular fashion accessory, with mass-produced models available for sale. Photographer Peng Yangjun captured this surprising fashion trend which is credited to Zhang Shifan, a former accountant who is now owner of a swimwear store.

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