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Power to the people, abandoned parking meters

Some days ago I found this unused parking meter near a comercial area in Beijing. It was installed about 5 years ago, but for nothing. I was told that car owners didn’t know how to use it, and didn’t care about the whole thing. Now it stands as a testimony of the locals slipshod sense for authority.

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360buy.com brick and mortar branches

360buy.com brick and mortar stores

360buy.com, commonly known as the Chinese equivalent to Amazon holds several brach offices across the country where you can go to get your online purchased items. The retailer invests vasts quantities of money in logistics and customer support.

Feel odd to go someplace and get something previously purchased online. I guess solve many “last mile” things.

Seen in Beijing, Haidian district.

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Designed chaos in architecture

It’s taken for granted that order makes our life easier. And it’s also better known that shopping malls are created so that you have to walk a little bit to come across shops while you seek for the next escalators.

What really surprised me was to know that some malls are designed to get us completely lost. They talk about it in The secret life of buildings, a great series that face how building’s shape affect us. Since watching it, I’ve been quite obsessed  analyzing path routes in every shopping mall I visit. It turns up to be kind of fun to discover every trick that architects have planned to makes us walk along the building:

  • Escalators that drives you not just one floor, but accidentally two or even more without almost noticing it.
  • Lifts that works only for some floors.
  • Levels that are only accessed by some lifts and escalators.
  • Different placement of lifts and escalator, it’s a seek and find game to spot the right one that takes you where you want.
  • Solitary escalators to which you have to walk, just to check if it’s going up or down.
  • The list continues up to the infinite…

The series can be found here:

http://www.megavideo.com/?d=XWZHIMJO

http://www.megavideo.com/?d=GHIWY73L

http://www.megavideo.com/?d=ZWP5AZOP

Thanks to Dámaris for telling about this!