Okay, we admit it: Here at Co.Design, we're Tolkien geeks. Like straight up read-the-Silmarillion-grew-up-playing-the-RPG Tolkien geeks. So it's with a flutter of nerd love that we introduce today's IGOTD, created by University of Florida student JT Fridsma: A minute-by-minute plotting of the various scenes and parallel plots in Peter Jackson's film adaptation.
Despite all the conveniences of our touchphones -- despite the shortcuts and the fancy features and the endless overtures to efficiency -- we now will no longer deign to use our hands; we are Post-Hand. We are, instead, at the dawn of the Nose Age. Case in point: Dominic Wilcox's curious beaklike gadget, shown here. It's a stylus you strap on for touchphoning hands-free.
Adapting old buildings for contemporary use is one of the thorniest design problems around. Balancing the needs, both aesthetic and functional, of modern life with the labyrinthine imperatives of historic preservation can be an elaborate, protracted dance -- one to which Elding Oscarson knows all the steps.
A carefully placed mirrored wall to reflects the imperfections and ravages of time.
The Guggenheim Bilbao, San Francisco's DeYoung, New York's Whitney -- all are museums that have identities inextricably linked to their buildings and the architects who gave them shape (Frank Gehry, Herzog & deMeuron, and Marcel Breuer, respectively). You may know squat about art, but odds are you can pick Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic Guggenheim out of a lineup. Can you say the same of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston? Unless you live in Houston, probably not. That isn't stopping the CAMH from trying to remix the building, as the basis for its rebranding campaign.
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Nothing against Sim Earth, Civilization, or other blockbuster "god games," but my idea of playing god involves a lot less wonky project-management and a lot more 2012-style cataclysms. What would happen if you blew up the Moon" Or ripped up Saturn's rings with a hail of rogue planets" Or rammed two whole galaxies together?
To me, there's something about a modern, high-end kitchen that seems unobtainable. It's not that I think I'll never be able to afford one (OK, it's a little bit of that) but rather the complete absence of stuff -- the long stretches of countertop, unmarred by mismatched appliances and tangled cords running from a single, crowded outlet.
![X-Rays Of Origami Animals That Highlight Japan’s Pollution Problem [Slideshow]](/multisite_files/codesign/imagecache/642x368/article_feature/_MG_5696.JPG "X-Rays Of Origami Animals That Highlight Japan’s Pollution Problem [Slideshow]")
Cute animals are the first things any beginner learns to make. Japanese artist Takayuki Hori takes his origami menagerie one step further, by imagining his paper animals as victims of urban pollution and exposing their garbage-tainted guts in X-ray-like detail. Cheerful!
Who knew the iPhone would spur an entire industry of dongles, stands, cases and converters -- most of them dashed off in plastic, many overpriced, nearly all crap? The Oona is one antidote. It's a moderately priced piece of machined aluminum with three screw-on suction cups, configurable in all sorts of clever ways to hold your iPhone to any smooth surface around (and still allow comfortable typing). Better yet, it's downright handsome compared to its competitors like, ahem, this thing.
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