Wired Design

Ji Lee’s likes to bite the hand that feeds him. By day, the former Google Creative Lab Creative Director is a designer, churning out images for editorial and advertising campaigns. But by night, he’s an ad-buster. Lee turns billboards into art, adds text where it doesn’t belong, and in his latest bit of mischief, has created a plugin (with Cory Forsyth writing code) called the Wordless Web which subtracts text from any web page.

Oh, you smart Dutch people. Even your office furniture manufacturers are full of scrappy surprise. Witness the muscular Crates Cabinet by Mark van der Gronden: A simple steel frame populated by bright salvaged crates that act as drawers. Quirk doesn’t come cheap though. The model above will set you back $4,487.

Got speakers and some scrap wood? Steal this idea from Konstantin Grcic, one of seven top industrial designers commissioned by German magazine Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin to come up with useful household furnishings that anyone can build in a few simple steps.

This is a series in which I, an intrepid design reporter whose nom de plume is Fake Jony Ive, take on the world of poorly designed things one painful example at a time. This wholly unauthorized feature in no way represents the opinions of its inspiration, Jony Ive, knight of the realm and Apple’s real bad boy of industrial design. This week’s episode: Me vs. the Health Care Industry.

“Where can I find the maltodextrin?” It’s a question that’s likely to result in a blank stare from your local grocer’s stock boy. But the scarcity of such ingredients is a real problem for molecular gastronomy enthusiasts. This avant-garde cooking style combines traditional foods with obscure, technical ingredients and processes, with outlandish results. Peanut butter powder with jelly noodles, anyone?

Today only (May 7, 2012): Choose any three prints from 20×200′s public domain series of archival space images and take 30% off your purchase. Use the code LIFTWITHART.

Desktop manufacturing tools like 3-D printers have spawned a new community of amateur makers who’d like to build upon each other’s ideas. But, co-creating actual stuff is harder than it sounds. Why? Unlike open software, which has popular collaborative tools like Git (and websites built on it, like GitHub), Subversion, and Mercurial, hardware has no system for version control.

Want to sell something? The traditional route has been to set up an account at a storefront like Etsy, or to put down stakes on a whole new site. There’s a problem with that model, says Katherine Hague, co-founder of ShopLocket: “Most people already have a presence online. When we want to sell a product are we expected to setup an entirely new place for that product to live?” Enter ShopLocket.

To anyone who lives outside of the Bay Area, Brooklyn, or Boston, a hackerspace must seem a little bit like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Members seem to have an alchemical touch — turning scraps into art. We’re willing to bet that public-access workshops will one day be as common as gyms. But why wait for that day to roll around when for the cost of a new MacBook Pro, you can turn your garage into a badass workshop right now?

The Blink/Steady bike light offers the most elegant user interface experience you’ve ever seen. Steve Jobs was obsessed with one-button design. This is no-button design.