The humble bike has inspired artists ever since Marcel Duchamp put a bicycle wheel on top of a stool in 1913--even Picasso, during the bleakest period of World War II, used a pair of handlebars and a bike saddle to whimsically conjure the skull of a bull.
Los Angeles designer David Wiseman won a commission recently to erect a public art installation at a freshly built library in West Hollywood. His idea: Give the branch, well, new branches.
Platanus bibliotechalis features stark white tree trunks that climb some 60 feet up and around the library’s soaring interior stairwell.
Tight New York City apartments practically beg for multifunctional furniture (we ought to know). But finding considered, well-crafted pieces are about as hard to come by as a rent-controlled pad. Thank heavens for budding design minds, who are tackling such questions as how to comfortably accommodate 12 guests in a 100-square-foot living room.
Cat people, prepare to “awwwww” all over the place: Architects have designed cozy winter shelters for New York City’s stray felines.
The second annual Giving Shelter design competition asked architects to create paw prints, sorry, blueprints, for winter refuges that could save homeless outdoor cats from the season’s frosty temperatures.
No matter your age, there’s something wondrous in getting a kite to take flight. So imagine the buoyant delight of getting a seven-foot cubic kite off the ground (or, in this case, two of them strung together with a smaller one). That was the feat of Ivan Morison and Sash Reading, who conceived and designed, respectively, the Bucky-esque masterpiece and took it for a test flight in Jersey, England.
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Curiosity is one of the best qualities a designer can have and no doubt one of the least appreciated. If you aren’t interested in the world around you, you’ll never even begin to understand how to fix it (or just make it suck less).
So it’s refreshing to see an exhibition that celebrates inquisitiveness and all the beautiful design it can inspire.
Cuteness is one of the most powerful forces on earth. It discourages exhausted new parents from murdering their screaming infants, it makes bloggers into millionaires, and it may be more effective than fancy artificial intelligence when it comes to getting robots to interact well with humans. That’s the idea behind Boxie, a robot created by Alexander Reben at MIT Media Lab. Reben wanted to design a robot that could approach people and get them to answer interview questions on camera.
It’s a sad fact of our cultural moment that anyone can marshall their own "facts" to support just about any argument or political position imaginable. (Thanks, Internet.) What’s worse, psychology studies have shown that rebutting factually impoverished arguments with actual facts has precisely the opposite effect one would hope: it actually makes people cling even tighter to their fictions.
It is hard to pay off debt. Our better natures are constantly at war with our impulsive desires. It’s hard to feel in control and it’s all too easy to fall back into the habits that got us into trouble in the first place. Loren Baxter, Director of User Experience at ReadyForZero says that when they spoke to friends facing debt problems, there were three basic strategies in play: 1) Ignoring it (calling this a "strategy" is generous). 2) Making random payments over the minimum.
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