How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games
Fairness is the unspoken promise of most video games. Controlled by an omniscient and omnipotent designer, a video game has the capacity to be ultimately just, and players expect that it will be so. And yet, when video games truly play by the rules, the player can feel cheated.
This Breathtaking ‘Tree Tower’ Is The Changing Face Of Toronto’s Cityscape
Inspired by Montreal’s renowned Habitat 67 building, this incredible proposal for an 18-story timber tower block in Toronto shows that high-rises can be built sustainably and still connect with nature, even in a hectic urban environment.
The Four-Letter Code To Selling Just About Anything
As the father of industrial design, Raymond Loewy had an uncanny sense of how to make things fashionable. He believed that consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a curiosity about new things; and neophobia, a fear of anything too new.
How We’ll Forget John Lennon
The report, “The universal decay of collective memory and attention,” concludes that people and things are kept alive through “oral communication” from about five to 30 years. They then pass into written and online records, where they experience a slower, longer decline.
XTU Architects Imagines Offshore Oil Rigs Transformed Into Radical Housing Of The Future
No stranger to an unconventional project, XTU Architects presents their latest fantastical proposal titled ‘x_lands’. The concept looks at life after oil, and in particular, what to do with all the offshore platforms that have been built in the last century to drill for the earth’s natural resources.
How Helsinki And Oslo Cut Pedestrian Deaths To Zero
They cut speed limits, changed street design, removed space for cars and generally made life harder for motorists. Now it appears the work is paying off. Oslo and Helsinki are reaping the rewards of committed action on making their roads safer, reducing pedestrian fatalities to zero last year.
Inside The Most Watched YouTube Channel In The World
India’s T-Series built an online empire from Bollywood. Now it has to survive Netflix. Bhushan Kumar argues that T-Series has no reason to fear this invasion, and not just because it sits behind a moat filled with more than 200 million YouTube subscribers.
The Beautiful Hidden Logic Of Cities
Driving around your city, you’re probably somewhat aware of Avenues and Boulevards and Streets and Roads and so on. However, it’s hard to get an overall view of how all these road designations knit together. By coloring them, we can suddenly see a new, stunning view of what we normally take for granted.
What Would Happen If Facebook Were Turned Off?
Facebook is blamed for all sorts of social horrors: from addiction and bullying to the erosion of fact-based political discourse and the enabling of genocide. New research—and there is more all the time—suggests such accusations are not entirely without merit. It may be time to consider what life without Facebook would be like.
Salvador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Will Tell Your Surreal Future
The deck was originally created for the 1970s James Bond film Live and Let Die, starring Roger Moore and Jane Seymour, but it never appeared in the picture. Now, Dalí cards are available to all in Taschen Books‘s reproduced edition of the deck.
If You’re Trying To Decide What Food To Grow Yourself, Here’s Where To Start
A lot of first-timers are making the same mistake: They’re listening to experts. Experts can make things grow that you can’t, because they are experts. What you need is a terrible gardener to tell you what anybody can grow.
Twine House Is Topped By A Twisting Continuous Concrete Slab
Designer Antony Gibbon has visualized a conceptual house called Twine, which sits under a wave-like piece of concrete within a landscape of rolling hills. The house’s living spaces are located within a series of arches beneath the upturned concrete reveals.
Beeline Smart Compass Navigation
Beeline for bicycles is a stripped back navigation device that makes finding your way by bike beautifully simple. Beeline’s intuitive navigation interface guides you with a clear arrow giving you just the information you need to find your way. Price: $125.
The Complement System, Tiny Bombs In Your Blood
One of the key players of our immune system is the complement system. An army of millions and trillions of tiny bombs, which work together in a complex and elegant dance to stop intruders in your body.
How Philadelphia Became “The First City That Bombed Itself”
In 1985, an armed standoff between Philadelphia police and members of a radical black liberation group, resulted in the deaths of eleven people. No police officers or city officials were ever charged for their role in what’s known as the MOVE bombing.
How To Control Your Emotions In Tense Moments
The ability to recognize, own, and shape your own emotions is the master skill for deepening intimacy with loved ones, magnifying influence in the workplace, and amplifying our ability to turn ideas into results.
How A Hot $100 Million Home Design Startup Collapsed Overnight
The untold story of how Homepolish’s extremely Instagrammable house of cards came tumbling down. Instead of building a design juggernaut, the founder constructed something much more precarious — a fear-based culture where sound strategy couldn’t flourish, and where the pressure to grow led to reckless decision-making.
The ‘Ocean Community’ Responds To Rising Sea Levels With Luxury Houseboats
RCA intelligent mobility graduate Wojciech Morsztyn envisions ‘Ocean Community’, a series of inter-linked luxury houseboats as the solution to rising sea levels. Connected via walkways, the floating pods make for autonomous living, with the ability to store and filter water, channel airflow for cooling and harvest energy from the sun and wind.
Why Wagyu Beef Is So Expensive
Wagyu beef is the most prized beef in the world. A single cow can be sold for up to $30,000. Part of the reason why it’s so expensive is due to its exclusivity and increasing demand.
Will The Millennial Aesthetic Ever End?
In this era, you come to understand, design was the product. Whatever else you might be buying, you were buying design, and all the design looked the same.
Before Tinder, There Was Dateline
Operation Match was a computer dating service started at Harvard in 1965 by two undergraduates, that paired students together for dates for $3 a pop. Students filled in questionnaires which were processed by an IBM 1401 before receiving the names and telephone numbers of their matches in the post.