Core 77’s Weekly Design Roast gives our Annals of Bad Design a serious run for the money. Rain Noe deconstructs high-minded, idiotic design, channeling the hilarious design thinking behind it.
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Our FIX for the Flawed Cos Backpack
In July, we posted a compelling backpack we’d bought only to discover that its design was profoundly flawed. So we hacked the backpack to see if we could devise a fix, a lesson in trying ideas out, and flexing our own (untrained) design muscles to make things better or at the very least learn a few things.
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An Artist’s Inspired Outdoor Hacks You Can DIY
Over the last three years, an anonymous artist has wandered around the streets of New York City finding random pieces of urban infrastructure, from trash to fire hydrants to street lights and parking signs, and turning them into something useful. The 23 “interventions” are inspiring because they are great examples of innovative thinking about everyday…
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How to Navigate Improvised Life’s Redesign
Improvised Life’s new redesign is quite a SHIFT from the old vertically-scrolling one. If you’re a long-time reader and you find yourself looking for the old way of doing things, we certainly understand. We did the same thing when starting to think about a redesign. In the early mockup we did (bottom), you’ll see it’s STILL…
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design + diet lessons in an oddly-cut apple
One of the central principles of improvisation we follow is to turn things on their side, or upside-down, a simple shift that often yields unexpected results. It’s a practice you can do in your imagination just about anywhere, and in practice with everyday things. Recently, instead of the usual way of cutting an apple (slicing…
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jasper morrison’s trivet: why bad design is useful
Recently, I came across a rave about Jasper Morrison’s mesh trivet on a design blog. My instant thought was: bad design (despite the fame of the designer). Set that trivet on softish-wood table and put a heavy enough pot on it and you stand a good chance of the steel denting or scratching the wood.…
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