Many people are too busy for organized guided tours, and others don’t want to buy and lug around a thick travel guide just for a short business or family trip. And yet, most people still want to discover and learn about the cities they visit and inhabit. Scenic Route helps these individuals get more out of travel, on their own schedule.

Scenic Route is a mobile website that builds customized routes for urban walks. Given your destination and a time allowance, Scenic Route builds a meandering walking route to that destination, filling the available time with stops along the way. Each stop reveals a hidden surprise about the city: a short message left by a user or verified guide. At the end of your walk, you’ve explored new streets and uncovered a unique set of local knowledge through a fun, spontaneous activity that fits into the available moments of your day.

Visit my partner Catherine’s website at paradeofkites.

SF Chronicle: Streets give up secrets on Scenic Route app

“Le Livre Secret des Buttes Chaumont” is an interactive short story situated within Paris’s Parc des Buttes Chaumont. Every plot point in the fictional adventure, set in Rome and Tivoli, corresponds to an actual location within the park. The way you choose to navigate the story will guide you on a unique path through the park’s phantasmagorical landscapes.

The colors on the map roughly correspond to the locales in the story.
Gold: Rome Train Station / Ave. de la Cascade, Southeastern Park
Brown: Rome / Eastern Park
Blue: Tivoli / Northeastern Park
Green: Tivoli Forest / Lac des Buttes Chaumont
Red: Temple of the Tiburtine Sybil / Butte Chaumont

To start, click on book #1 (golden).

View Le Livre Secret des Buttes Chaumont in a larger map

Book icon designed by Navdeep Raj (http://dezinerfolio.com)
Translated by Annaig Combe and Daniel Levin Becker

Geofroy Tory was one in a series of scholars, architects and artists, who, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, invented the capital letter as we know it today. The serif capital letter was based on Roman inscriptions from the first century AD, which Renaissance antiquarians believed to be aesthetically superior to the scripts they were using at the time, a combination of medieval blackletter and a curving script from the ninth century called the Carolingian. But, as we can already see from Tory’s bizarre conception of the letter Y, the Renaissance reconstruction of this antique form was no straightforward imitation. By the time the form had solidified in the 1520s, calligraphy, architecture, literary criticism, biblical exegesis, mnemonic aids, Platonic philosophy, and Pythagorean number symbolism all played an essential role in its birth.

Many Renaissance scholars were tight-lipped about the sources of their thoughts, preferring to preserve the aura of mystery and awe surrounding the antique. But Tory, a Frenchman outside of the direct academic circles of Italy, in his enthusiasm to explain the perfection of these letters, reveals much about the thoughts behind the construction. And while what historian Stanley Morison called Tory’s “cabalistic abracadabra” may have quickly faded to obscurity, Tory’s work lives on through his student, Claude Garamond, whose typefaces are built into and used by every computer manufactured on the planet.

Published in Printing History, January 2008.

Download full paper: “Alphabetic Architects: Geofroy Tory and the Renaissance Reconstruction
of the Roman Capital Alphabet”

A two player cooperative game where one player, in the role of Sarah Winchester in the early 1900s, built what would become the Winchester Mystery House, while another player encounters ghosts in the house a hundred years later.

In 1884, Sarah Winchester, haunted by the victims of her family’s rifles, was cursed to build a house for the rest of her life. The whole family died shortly thereafter. But one hundred years later, a tarot dealer is told that to bring the girl he was destined to love into existence, he must rewrite the family’s past, saving Winchester and her descendents from their untimely fates. One builds a house, the other weaves a story. They meet in The Mansion of Crossed Destinies, a cooperative two-player game where you build your level as you play in it.

While I was working at The Go Game I wrote a historical narrative game — a cross between participatory theater, role-playing, and an adventure game — inspired by the history of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. I ran the three-hour game twice, with about 25 players each time. Players played as supporters, and walked around the game zone centered on Castro Street, earning the endorsements of several actors playing the roles of Harvey’s friends and competitors. Local bookstores, drugstores, and the Castro Theater were all in on the game and helped provide clues.