Sometimes Making Something Leads To Nothing
With the Conflux Festival recently taking place in New York City, and the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art currently happening here in Toronto, I can’t help but note the incredible rise in popularity that location-based performance art and psychogeographic art interventions have enjoyed over the last decade. I’m also reminded of the first project […]
Welcome To Tora Bora Inn
Some of you may remember the fuzz about Manhattan’s highly contested Ground Zero Mosque a month ago. Some frustrated Tea Party types considered the Islamic community center too close to Ground Zero. To add some fuel to the fire (yeah baby), Saudi Arabian architecture firm Stealth Architects has proposed a controversial but brilliant Terrorist Motel as an […]
Nano Inside: The Supermarket Of The Future
Eatable software, liquid glass, wine of which its taste can be altered with micro waves, a Twitter implant, invisible security spray and much more. All these ‘nano inside’ products are presented today, at the debate-provoking NANO Supermarket. For the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven (23-30 October), Next Nature launches the NANO Supermarket: a mobile supermarket exploring the […]
Two Books On Mapping
The collective interest in data and diagrams of data seems to have grown enormously over the last years. The world of infographics and data porn tends to become a trendy new subculture led by blogs such as Fuck Yeah Cartography, Information Aesthetics, and Information Is Beautiful. This whole new focus on data and information seems […]
From Hardware To Artware
In the streets of Stockholm, the official Green Capital of Europe 2010, hardware is made artware. If you’re strolling along the city, you might notice there are some 30 switchboards made in graphic artworks here and there and everywhere. Fortum, one of the local electricity companies, held a competition of transforming the grey and gloomy switchboxes […]
Experience-Based Traveling With Wanderfly
Yesterday a brand new trip advisor named Wanderfly grabbed my attention. Wanderfly is a travel website, but then different. Instead of typing in the name of the place you want to go, the website says to help people discover new and exciting experiences based on their interests (what are you up to?) and budget. The […]
Creek Watch To The Rescue
A series of new crowd-mapping apps activate citizens to contribute to monitoring the urban environment. Some of them, such as the Trees Near You app in New York and the San Francisco-based Urban Forest Map, are developed in order to inform citizens about the beauty of urban nature. Both are created in order to collectively map […]
Design For The Bees
In the past five years dystopic visions of a collapsing part of our ecosystem and the DIY local food movement have combined forces to exalt the humble bee as a new urban hero – deftly navigating the city’s concrete pastures and providing free pollination service to all flowering plants in its path. Not surprisingly, design proposals […]
Poolga Turns The iPhone Into An Art Gallery
Poolga, the website which provides all kinds of artistic wallpapers for the iPhone, has launched the first edition of its app. Curated by art director Luis Mendo, it presents a high quality selection of fifteen graphic works from a range of talented designers from all over the world, including Julia Guther (left image below), Anthony Zinonos (right image […]
Volkwagen’s Car Recycling Bin
Volkswagen has a tradition of remarkable marketing campaigns. Think of DDB’s charming and honest ads for the VW Beetle, claimed as being the marketing conversation piece of the sixties. More recently, the German car brand does a pretty good job with its Fun Theory. Some days ago I stumbled upon a new urban campaign in Germany […]
The Urban Speaker: Call 1-979-997-3041
Feeling anger or love? Want to share your thoughts, or start a revolution? Call 1-979-997-3041 and speak up! The Urban Speaker is a mobile art installation by Carlos J. Gómez de Llarena, which gives everyone the opportunity to broadcast a message in public space by calling a phone number. The installation is a piece of flexible […]
Detroit’s Broken City Sister
With Johnny Knoxville strapping on Palladium Boots and descending on Detroit’s ruins to film a documentary called Detroit Lives, it’s become clear that the North American/European fascination with decaying industrial landscapes has hit a new apex.
Big Brother Is You, Watching
Trendwatching.com and Springwise claim that the ‘life caching’ trend is here to stay. Thanks to new technologies and tools such as (micro) blogging and high definition camera phones, more and more people collect, store and display their entire lives, “for private use, or for friends, family, even the entire world to peruse”. Real-time social video […]
Urban Wind-Powered Knitting Mill
London-based design studio Merel Karhof has created a brilliant knitting machine powered by the wind. The machine is a small home-based factory producing beautiful scarves with a special story. Karhof’s work is often inspired by heritage. The knitting wind mill is a product with a reference to the Dutch history and landscape. The windmill has a […]
Skylifter: The Cruise Ship Of The Future
The willingness of future cities to change will decide whether they will be successful or not. Therefore we like to speak about the soft en flexible dimensions of the modern urban landscape. General problem is the fact that most physical constructions that shape the city are heavy and not movable at all. It’s great news […]
