Sometimes I can’t tell if technology is ruining my life or becoming my life, or if the two are ultimately inseparable. When I was growing up in Spokane, WA, I’d read the Spokesman Review every Sunday and that was that. (more…)

Humble accessory no more, the shoe has graduated into becoming any ensemble’s main focal point. Like little sculptures for the feet, this new breed of shoes escape their traditional form and construction while challenging current footwear archetypes (more…)

One of the oldest truisms in design has to be, “Don’t reinvent the wheel.” And yet, the wheel itself was a reinvention – a microscopic, electromagnetic motor, complete with hub, spokes, and axle, is fundamental machinery deep within every cell of your body. (more…)

Long, long ago President Roosevelt had fireside chats each week and people crowded around their radios to hear what the president had to say. But, now in a world when (nearly) everyone can send twitter updates from their cell phones, a weekly address from the leader of the free world seems so passé. (more…)

So, you got a Facebook account. Of course you did. And now you can’t stop spending hours checking your friends’ status updates, uploading pictures or finding out which Sex and the City character you most resemble.

But what’s the point, you moaned to your friends in your pre-Facebook days.

And now you know the secret. There is no secret.

While social networking sites (more…)

Waking up with the roosters, reaping and sowing with the family may or may not be the way of the farm and our food supply in the future.

The design of the modern farm will be smaller and interstitial – packed between cities and suburban areas or grown sky high.

Movements on both sides of the aisle are set to make changes to the current way of farming, and make changes for the better for the environment. (more…)

‘For the last 40 years, innovation in spaceflight had been stalled,’ reads the website of the Ansari X Prize. This space competition was to award a prize of $10m, essentially, to the first private manned-spaceship launch. It was modelled on the iconic Orteig Prize, won by Charles Lindbergh in 1927 for flying non-stop from New York to Paris. Almost eighty years on, (more…)

The music industry has undergone more drastic changes in the past 25 years then the previous 125 years before. In 1982, the compact disc was introduced to the public and replaced the need for LP’s and cassette tapes. With the introduction of Napster in 1999, music downloading has steadily become the recommended way to obtain music. Consumers no longer have to go to their local record store and buy music; it is now just a mouse click away. Moreover, there is no need to purchase an entire recording as you can now only purchase the tracks you want to listen to. (more…)

When one thinks of the future of architecture and design, one is inclined to think about environmentally sustainable woods such as bamboo or recycled building materials. Concrete—a substance as old as the Roman Empire—is hardly the first thing that comes to mind in envisioning the future of the developed world. And yet it is concrete, that ancient, lowly material, that is in fact making waves in future-forward circles.

Why concrete? The answer is nothing short of astounding: multiple firms, (more…)

The evolution of black-and-white cinematography has officially begun. The shadow-play and etched starkness of two-tone movie-making has always been more of an artistic statement than a reasonable field in which to play out a story told on-screen. Christian Volckman’s 2006 noir-thriller Renaissance dives head-first into the deep end of exploring, and destroying, the probable limitations of filming with 3D motion-capture animation in an exclusively black-and-white setting. The images that he and his team have created over the staggering production span of seven years help to redefine the nature of black-and-white cinema, ushering in new field on which to play.

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