Wired Design

Inspired by the first days of summer vacation, and Wes Anderson’s twee tribute to scouting in Moonrise Kingdom, we bring you this roundup of scout gear on Etsy.

Amazing things happen when designers are given a set of constraints. To celebrate makers everywhere, high-octane sponsor Red Bull is running an online contest in which contenders face off against the ultimate constraint: time. The event, called Red Bull Creation, is a 72-hour competition that will run in late July.

So, your Kickstarter project went viral and raised a cool six figures. There’s a mob of eager funders already checking their watches, demanding to know when you’ll ship. Pull it off and you’ll be a design star. Fail and you’re in for a highly public facepalm. You were only planning on making a couple dozen units, you say? The closest you’ve gotten to manufacturing in Asia is ordering take out? Whoops….

Now that Apple is ditching Google as the back end for the iOS Maps app, we’re hoping that they’ll give topography the Jony Ive treatment. While we applaud the super-hot flyover mode, we wonder if they’ve gone far enough. As the examples above show, it’s worth remembering that map tiles can look like anything.

Douglas Coupland was hanging out at Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs in New Jersey earlier this year, doing some research for an upcoming book. The Generation X author was looking into how technology reflects our softer, fuzzier attributes: the mind and the soul.

If you read Allison Arieff’s riff on hot trends in office design, you know that today’s designers and manufacturers are starting to address the physical and creative challenges facing us in our everyday working lives. But until we can get our paws on all of these slick new setups, we’re taking matters into our own hands. Sometimes our mods are cheap and dirty, other times high-end and sleek as all get-out. Now we want to see what you’ve done.

In our TED-ified world there is no shortage of conferences offering exclusive, scintillating insights on the world. But such gatherings likely require you to abandon your work for a few days, hop a plane to some dismal convention center, and shell out the equivalent of a mortgage payment for tickets. Enter Tina Roth Eisenberg, the Brooklyn designer known for her sweetly minimalist blog Swissmiss. Eisenberg wanted to create a conference that was more compact — something that offered both inspirational speakers and serendipitous interactions without eating up an entire week.

Workspaces have a lot of problems. And just as they seem to be fixed, new ones emerge with alacrity, ranging in severity from microwave popcorn smell sensitivity to the real challenge of how best to cultivate creative collaboration. The pace of technology threw a bigger wrench into all this of course, and it’s turned the design and planning of offices into a constant game of catch-up. We now work in such a dizzying variety of contexts that space planners, architects, and furniture makers speak of “future-proofing” in two- to three-year increments, where they once aspired to relevance for a decade or more.

Why do bad thing happen to good Kickstarters? It’s a timeless question that has puzzled philosophers and theologians for millennia — or at least for the last few years of our millennium. At Wired’s Disruptive by Design conference, Kickstarter cofounder Yancy Strickler reported that 56 percent of the site’s projects fail to meet their funding goals. Why? Many are silly and poorly conceived. But some of the coolest projects with the most buzz are also falling through the cracks.

Space aside, the Age of Exploration is long ended. We spend most of our lives in cities, confident that the world has been thoroughly mapped, tagged, and GPS’d. But some of the most interesting people and places in North America are found far outside of the urban core. BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh and Edible Geography’s Nicola Twilley are setting out to explore that landscape.