Art
Refreshingly Designed Water Bottles
In the heavy August heat, a well-designed water bottle may be at the top of your list.
Design
Art
Rethinking the Billboard as a Home
Billboards are commanding territory all over the world, offering just a blaring message in their occupation. Some designers have been looking at how to better use this advertising infrastructure, with Slovakia's Designdevelop proposing a use for the space as small-scale residences for the homeless.
News
Victoria & Albert Museum Devotes Gallery to Buzzy Objects
For better or for worse, museums tend to be behind the times, arbitrating culture from some kind of temporal remove. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is attempting to minimize that gap with a newly announced initiative called Rapid Response Collecting.
Art
Nostalgia for the Disappearing Danger of Mid-Century Playgrounds
There's a lot of nostalgia around old playgrounds, for the burns in summer on the overheated metal slides or the nauseating spinning play on the whirl. Those brushes or hits with danger are why most of them are gone, replaced with safer, less rusty, contraptions.
Art
A Design Fair with a Sense of Play
The first thing you see when you enter Collective design fair at the Moynihan Station Skylight space is a mini-exhibition of work by Hella Jongerius, organized by Murray Moss and Franklin Getchell of design think tank Moss Bureau. The presentation includes a group of stuffed “Quilted Vases” (2006) b
Art
NASA Unveils the Strange Suit Designed for Its Mars Explorers
If NASA astronauts land on Mars, they might not look very human at all.
Books
Hundreds of Years of Data Growing on Trees
While data visualization can seem like a modern design focus, it really has its roots in the High Middle Ages when a sudden rise in information and population resulted in the need to convey ideas in an accessible way.
Opinion
Man in Bear, Birds in Coffee Shop
As Hyperallergic's self-appointed cat correspondent, I feel an occasional duty to branch out and offer you more from the always colorful intersection of art and animals. Turns out it's a good week for that. Today: a man living inside a bear carcass and a coffee shop for birds — both of which are bei
Art
Getting to Know Milton Glaser, the Godfather of Modern Design
The east-facing windows of Milton Glaser’s studio on 32nd Street overlook a school playground. Every day at 2:35 pm, a deluge of rowdy grade-schoolers surges into the courtyard as their parents float and mingle along the perimeter. Yellow buses queue up dutifully between the parked cars that line bo
Art
A Tiny Red House for the Homeless
One of the hardest steps in surmounting homelessness is in the transition from a shelter to a permanent home, and while many ideas for pop-up temporary housing are manifested in designer dreams, few of those architectural solutions have found widespread implementation.
Art
Designing Safer Antlers for Finland's Reindeers
Would this spooky reindeer that seems to have transported from some unearthly netherworld stop you in your tracks?
Art
An Underground Pool and More Proposed Uses for Paris Ghost Stations
A Parisian mayoral candidate is proposing turning the city's abandoned subway stations into public space.