We take all kinds of dangerous activities for granted, thanks to our faith in industrial designers and engineers: we roar across the skies at 30,000 feet, wield hand-tools capable of turning us into hamburger in an instant, put slivers of plastic directly onto our eyeballs to see better. How far does this faith really go?
![Dresses Breathe And Glow In Response To Environment [Videos]](/multisite_files/codesign/imagecache/642x368/article_feature/lafond_2011.jpg "Dresses Breathe And Glow In Response To Environment [Videos]")
To an ordinary person, clothing that "interacts" with the environment sounds like a euphemism for spilling ketchup all over your pants. But fashion designer Ying Gao is no ordinary person. What she calls interactive clothes are in fact tech-rigged wearable sculptures that rustle, breathe, and glow in response to changes in their surroundings. In her hands, fashion literally comes to life.
New York City architecture firm Rogers Marvel Architects has won a landscape design competition to sex up a stretch of high-surveillance land near the White House, the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) announced yesterday.
Beirut may be the Paris of the Middle East, but it also has something in common with Miami: a vibrant nightclub scene, with superb design approaches ?- and we don't throw words like that around every day -- by the likes of Bernard Khoury to match (take a look at his Centrale or B018 if you're in doubt).
It's an unfortunate fact of outdoor concerts: The number of toilets is always in inverse proportion to the number of drunk asses who need to pee. So people -- and by people, we mean shameless dudes -- make a urinal out of the local flora.
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Millions of English ladies are wrong: Teapots are gross. Tea inevitably drips on the counter when you pour, then whatever's left over gathers around the edges of the spout creating a yucky limescale. And it's not like the stuff is easy to clean off; trying to jam a sponge in a spout is like putting a square peg in a round hole.
Let's not mince words: Twitter, like any and every social network that becomes hugely successful, can be a giant pain in the ass to use sometimes. Now that some of us follow hundreds of people for work and play, it's all too easy to miss stuff in the firehose -- especially when a handful of the folks you follow tweet so often that they push other, more infrequent (but just as valuable) tweets out of sight.
Written by: Whitney Hopkins
[This is the introduction to a new series by Smart Design. For the first post, click here. -- Ed.]
Written by: Erica Eden
[This is the first post in a series by Smart Design. Click here to read the introduction. -- Ed.]
The tagline of a Dos Equis ad reads, "Approach women like you do wild animals, with caution and a soothing voice." I have to agree. Targeting a female audience requires a delicate, nuanced approach. Whether we live on the African plain or Manhattan, finesse with the opposite sex is regarded with respect and admiration.
Are designers ignoring sex?
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