Tue, 04/26/2011 | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

April 26 2011

In Levittown, The Ur-Suburb, A Proposal To Remake Sprawl Into A Small-Biz Oasis [Slideshow]

In Levittown, The Ur-Suburb, A Proposal To Remake Sprawl Into A Small-Biz Oasis [Slideshow]

When Droog, Diller + Scofidio, and a slew of designers and artists set out to re-imagine the American suburb -- specifically Levittown, the most pre-fab of them all -- the results were as surreal as you might expect: a "domesticity museum" charged with preserving a dying way of life; a backyard farm with a take-out window, even an "Attention Clinic" catering to all your narcissistic needs.

Imagine the American suburb as a hive of bottom-up entrepreneurial activity.

The Bouroullecs’ Beautiful New Chair Packs Flat, Is Made From Solar Power

For all the talk about eco-friendly furniture -- about domestic-wood tables and Greenguard-certified shelving and guiltless hemp stacking chairs -- the industry's still got a dirty little secret: Manufacturing is a big fat drain on the environment. Think how much energy goes into dispatching a chair down the assembly line. Who cares if the upholstery is 100%-certified organic?

Nike Software Turns Runners’ Footsteps Into Loopy, Swooshy Paintings

Running is already a thing of beauty, as anyone who's watched Prefontaine float sublimely past a finish line will tell you. Here to push the sport even further into the realm of fine art is Nike, which commissioned a project recently that lets runners paint with their most cherished asset: their feet.

Making The Internet Greener, By Dunking Servers In Mineral Oil

The cloud -- that ubiquitous, invisible home to our email, our photos, our Facebook "Likes" -- is an energy-sucking behemoth the likes of which Planet Earth has never seen. Last I checked, one Google data center in Oregon was expected to consume as much power as every home in a small city combined.

Not A Joke: A New Swiss Bank That Symbolizes “Ethical Banking” [Slideshow]

Not A Joke: A New Swiss Bank That Symbolizes “Ethical Banking” [Slideshow]

The new flagship of the Raiffeisen bank in Zurich is designed as "a prototype for an open bank" -- a place where "money is not always in the foreground." Don't laugh. Okay, laugh a little. It's a Swiss bank, after all, and everyone knows that Swiss banks are the Vatican of financial secrecy. But Raiffeisen wants to portray itself differently, with its fresh digs in Zurich conceptualized as a sparkling white symbol of best practices in banking.

John Maeda Mulls RISD’s Backlash Against His Cyber-Style Leadership

In December 2007, the board of the 134-year-old Rhode Island School of Design made a bold choice, hiring as its new president John Maeda -- digital designer, former associate director of research for the MIT Media Lab, introspective iconoclast with little experience in administration or fundraising. "I was the high-risk candidate," he acknowledged the following July, as we strolled the streets of Providence's College Hill on a blistering hot day. "But I'm not worried about getting fired. I could get another job.

Infographic of the Day

Infographic of the Day: The Hilarious, Befuddling Charts Of The U.S. Congress

Innovation by Design

The Amazing Judges For Our 2013 Innovation By Design Awards

From the Editor

Thanks for stopping by Fast Company’s Co.Design. If you’ve been a reader for some time, you’ll notice that we’ve just unveiled a brand-new redesign. You can read about the thought process behind it here. Our content, of course, will be the same: Our focus is on highlighting the world’s best examples of design and innovation, working in concert.

We started this site with a few simple premises in mind. First, design is a window onto the world at large, and the culture we live in.

Continued