Vivian Doumpa

The more humanity becomes portable, the more work gets flexible. Two years ago we claimed that the new office is no office. Following that idea, a group of students at Hyper Island decided to tour the world and pop up as a creative agency where needed.

“A DIY low-budget high-quality community-run luxury-hotel and ‘university as a marketplace’ in the neighborhood”? Many trending keywords in a raw, one great crowd-funded peer-to-peer project! Four years ago the Urban Design department of the HCU-Hamburg took the initiative to turn an old, abandoned building in Hamburg’s Wilhelmsburg district into a Neighbourhood’s University.

Taiwan-based industrial designer Shu-Chun Hsiao created a series of urban birdhouses that are inspired by the Google Maps marker symbol. It is interesting to realize how tightly this simple pinpoint marker is cognitively related to the services of Google Maps and how it has actually developed into a landmark symbol.

Yes, they did it again! Studio Weave, the British architecture agency that was also featured in our review of Create GB, managed to amaze us again with another amazing intervention, called the Lullaby Factory.

Virgin Atlantic has recently announced to open art galleries on airplanes. Teaming up with British street artist Eine (Ben Flynn), the ‘Gallery in the Air’ collaboration aims to bring art at 35,000 feet. The passengers of the first class (Upper Class) will have the chance to experience a pop-up gallery atmosphere while traveling between New York and London. Except for the in-plane exhibition, there will also be a series of the artists’ typography artworks presented in the lounge rooms, the exclusive ‘Clubhouses’, of London Heathrow, JFK and Newark Clubhouses airports.

Yihaodian, China’s biggest e-commerce site, is planning to launch 1,000 virtual stores all around the country. Contrary to the QR code technology that was used by other companies around the world as well as Yihaodian itself, this project is solely based on the Augmented Reality (AR) technology and is called Unlimited Yihaodian.

Finding hidden treasures in the most random places around the city is one of my favourite urban tasks! Repudo is a smartphone app that allows you to leave or pick up ‘treasures’ such as text messages, pictures, videos and generally any digital object around the city. Berlin-based street artist Sweza took this concept a bit further with his street intervention project called QRadio.

It seems that the World Wide Web and the potential generated when you mix one concept and Internet tool with another are really inexhaustible. Though it’s only been a week since map enthusiast Tre Baker launched his new Tumblr (check out the other one here), things have gone wild in the blogosphere. Google Street Scene is the perfect combination of Google Street View aesthetics, cinephile interests and challenging quizzes.

Earlier this week we presented you a this light installation in a neglected street in Athens. Today we will mentally take you to a journey to one of my favorite cities — the city of Chania, on the Greek island of Creta.