We've seen expandable flower pots before, but nothing this elegant. "Growth" is a pot by London-based design house Studio Ayaskan that unfolds like origami to give the roots within plenty of space to grow.

As the Typhoid Mary of horticulture, I've heard that if you successfully nurse a plant from seed to adult, you need to repot it several times along the way. The roots need room to grow, in addition to the soil being changed. Bike and Begum Ayaskan, the duo behind Studio Ayaskan, feel that this is at odd with the spirit of nature, where everything grows together. Even if it needs new soil, a pot shouldn't need three or more pots over the course of its life.

With Growth, the identical twin designers set out to design a pot that would grow alongside the plant thriving within. Unlike other unfolding pots, there's no human intervention required: as a bush, tree, or flower spreads its roots, it pushes the geometric walls of the Growth pot outwards, causing its origami-like structure to unfold up to four times the volume.

According to the designers, the idea behind Growth was to somehow channel the process of germination into a man-made object like a pot. "The life cycle of a plant is a transformation, from an early seed to its full grown size; the blooming of a flower, the unfolding of a leaf, the branching of the roots," say Studio Ayaskan. "This process is what Growth aims to capture within a plant pot."

It's a sleek design, and certainly a better approach to this sort of thing than the silicone turtleneck flower pots we've previously covered. Unfortunately, though, if you want to buy a Growth pot, you'll have to wait: Studio Ayaskan says they are only just starting to work with partners to manufacture the pot.

If you want to hear from them when the Growth pot is available for sale, you can join Studio Ayaskan's email list here.

Every day, thousands of gorgeous light cycles battle in the sky above Heathrow—at least in this video by air traffic-control company NATS, visualizing what 24 hours of flight traffic looks like as it streaks above London.

London, of course, is one of the globe's most highly trafficked transit hubs. According to the Airports Council International, all of London's airports combined account for more passengers annually than any other city. That's over 1.2 million flights every year, or 3,000 flights per day on just six runways, says NATS, who is responsible for providing technology to get all of those planes up and down out of the sky safely.

For the air traffic controllers who oversee those flights, it's stressful work, but if you overlaid Dark Side of the Moon over NATS's visual interpretation of all that flight data, you'd be forgiven for mistaking the video above for a Laser Floyd light show. In NATS's data vis, the congestion above London fades away into a fluorescent ballet of streaking lights smearing neon across the sky.

If you think that's impressive though, NATS supplies air traffic controller equipment to more than just the U.K. To see what the 26,000 European flights tracked by NATS every day look like over Europe, see our previous post here.

[Via: CityLab]

Whether he's criticizing Apple for its font choices, blaming bad design for getting "an asshole" elected president, or complaining about the fact-checking skills of contemporary design journalists, Erik Spiekermann isn't a man who minces words. But while you probably wouldn't describe him as cuddly, the famed German designer and typographer has been a life-long friend and mentor to those who share his life's passion: great design in all its forms.

After Spiekermann revealed to us some of his best productivity tips in a recent article, we wanted to know more about how he works. Here, Spiekermann answers eight questions for us about his first job, his most cherished possession, what he thinks is wrong with today's design world, and his biggest challenge as a designer.

What was the first thing you ever designed?
It was a cover for a library catalog for children's books.

What is your daily work routine like?
Electronic correspondence usually takes up the first three hours of my day (lots of unsolicited mails from students, colleagues, and so on), then I do a few domestic things like mending bikes, cleaning stuff from my desk, going through old files. After lunch, I answer more emails, which come in from the U.S. around this time because you are between six and nine hours behind me in Berlin. Then I go out for a coffee or read papers and magazines to avoid real work. I try and avoid doing more real work until after 8 p.m. After the evening news, I'll then do a last round of design work until 1 a.m. When I work in the letterpress shop, I get there around 9 a.m. and work until around 7 p.m. at night.

What is your biggest challenge as a designer?
Asking for money for my work.

What's your favorite thing you own?

My NSU Ro80 car. But I could do without it. The best thing I ever owned was my first font: a 60 point Berhold Block metal type. But that was destroyed in a fire in 1977.

What is the worst job you've ever taken, and what did it teach you?
Printing silkscreen onto plastic bottles during the night shift when I was 17. I only made it four weeks in the job because my dad made me realize that the people next to me would be doing this for the rest of their lives, while I was complaining after two nights. I still know how lucky I am to be doing my own thing.

If you weren't a designer, what would you be, and why?
I'd be an architect. Buildings are more complicated to design than pages, and I like complexity. Buildings are also more important to our state of well being than websites or printed stuff, with the possible exception of books.

What do you think the biggest challenge facing the world that design can help solve?
Helping people understand the world around them. We should be interpreters between the corporate world (which tries to make everything too complex for us to understand in order to keep us quiet and subservient) and normal consumers.

What drives you crazy about the design world in 2015?
Clients who can't make decisions.

How do you capture the subversive genius of a beloved children's author in a rebrand? Not like this.

Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and James and the Giant Peach, is loved by children and adults alike for his morbid imagination, his anarchic worlds, his acerbic wit, and his horrible-wonderful characters. But the rebrand of the Roald Dahl Literary Estate, created by East London design agency Sunshine and aiming to unite all the appendages of the estate under a single design umbrella for the first time, doesn't really capture any of that. Featuring the author's name in a series of rainbow letters that look like they came from a magnetic ABC set alongside a yellow paper airplane, the Roald Dahl rebrand is as safe and conventional as you can get: a design less about capturing the tone of Dahl's work in a logomark than about reassuring parents that Dahl is "safe" for their children to read.

Armin Vit, design critic behind the Under Consideration network of blogs, agrees, writing in an email that the new rebrand fails to really capture what made Dahl unique:

This is a fairly impossible project to solve in a way that will please the majority of people, as everyone has a different Roald Dahl favorite or a specific book they associate him with. Going with a somewhat generic wordmark that looks like jumbled children's letters is a safe route but it could apply to any number of children's books authors. The plane, which requires an explanation, is the only distinctive element particular to Dahl but I don't think it's enough. Execution-wise, it's well done and it has a bouncy playfulness to it. It looks particularly good on the covers when used big. It will take a lot of new book sales with the new logo to establish a connection between it and the author but at least it's going in the right direction.

Raul Gutierrez, founder and CEO of Tiny Bop, a Brooklyn-based company aimed at making apps for kids every bit as beautifully designed as Golden Age picture books, says that while the new rebrand is discordant with the tone and spirit of Dahl's work, it ultimately doesn't matter much:

I have no idea what motivated the new change, but it seems to be trying to do a lot. The multicolored font suggests a forced playfulness to me. It reads young. Most 10-year-olds want to be 11- or 12-year-olds, and the multicolored treatment reads to me like something for a 5-year-old. The paper airplane reads to me as forced whimsy and its realism is is at odds with Quentin's Blake's illustrations.

While the logo might work a bit better as a single color, the 3-D airplane seems like an imposition and almost an affront to Blake who in my mind is inextricably linked with Dahl. All this said, I like the simplification of the covers and the use of solid fields of color that put the artwork front and center and remove clutter. Interestingly the title is even further de-emphasized in the mocked-up book treatments to the point where one could mistake 'Roald Dahl' as the title of each book.

Ultimately at least for me, whatever the specific Dahl logo, the treatment is almost irrelevant. I'd buy Dahl's books even if the covers were typed on white paper.

I suspect Vit and Gutierrez are right. Yes, the logo has issues, but there's just no pleasing anyone trying to rebrand as complicated and unique a literary figure as Roald Dahl. And ultimately, no matter what you slap on the cover, children reading their first Dahl book can't possibly be prepared for what they're about to experience by design alone. That's what made him such a treasure.

You can read more about the Roald Dahl rebrand here

Now on Kickstarter, Febo is a new tool that lets you engrave objects by using the sun like a laser. Designed by Rosalia Galeano, Francesca Padoyan, and Paola Papetti, it's a lens that laser focuses the sun's rays, branding almost anything as cleanly as a red hot cattle iron.

It looks pretty simple to use. To brand an object, you first cut a stencil of the design you want out of white paper, then fit it into the Febo lens. Next, you place the Febo's lens over the object, tilt it at a 90° angle towards the sun, and let the Febo do its work. The white paper of the stencil effectively bounces unwanted light out, while the lens concentrates the remaining sunlight until it's hot enough to scorch leather, felt, cork, and more.

The designers of Febo say it's "fun for all ages and skill levels," but I think it's fair to say this thing's probably pretty dangerous to leave unattended on your window sill. It also appears that the designers might be a little worried about an errant laser beam blasting out a customer's eyeball, since they suggest wearing sun glasses when you're using the device.

Still, with a base made out of hand-milled walnut, the Febo looks like a fun and attractive design tool. Its creators say that passing clouds will actually impart their character to the patina of a Febo's design, meaning that along with the strength and position of the sun, no two engravings will be exactly the same. And how often do you get to draw with the sun, anyways?

You can preorder a Febo on Kickstarter now starting at just $35

[via Designboom]

When most designers want to make a splash with their portfolio, they go big. U.K.-based freelance designer Michael Lester decided to go small. To promote his work, Lester sent potential employers the world's smallest portfolio: a stamp-sized booklet about as big as your thumbnail, filled with Lester's tiniest work.

The World's Tiniest Portfolio came out of a brief from the agency Jelly London, as part of the D&AD New Blood festival held earlier this month. "They set the challenge for recent graduates and students to get people talking about their work," Lester says. "Before trying to make buzz I thought hard about what it was I actually wanted people to talk about. I realized I wanted to showcase my ideas over style, and had the idea of seeing how small I could get my portfolio while still showing the concepts of each visual."

To create his tiny portfolio, Lester looked over all of his existing work and redesigned the strongest ideas so that they were still effective on a Thumbelina scale. " It was actually a really good process to test my existing work and see which pieces were the strongest," he says. "It also meant trawling through scraps of paper on my desk, in my notebooks, anywhere I could have jotted down an idea that could work this small." For example, a campaign for promoting electric cars throughout Europe could be reduced to a clever icon, winking at the flag for the E.U.; the silhouette of a woman becomes a keyhole for a visual motif explaining female empowerment.

After identifying the work he wanted to include, Lester printed out five copies of the World's Tiniest Portfolio on his home printer to give it a nice ink-bleeding texture when magnified. He then trimmed the pages, folded them, and stitched the binding by hand, before finishing it off with a tiny strip of bookbinder's tape. Lester shared the World's Tiniest Portfolio with a few select London-based agencies, including Jelly London (which gave the World's Tiniest Portfolio a Gold Award).

A natural introvert, Lester says that the World's Tiniest Portfolio has made a bigger splash than he could have possibly imagined. After creating a great deal of buzz on Bēhance and design blogs, the World's Tiniest Portfolio has generated a healthy number of freelance opportunities, and even a few permanent position offers. Not bad for a portfolio so small a sneeze could carry it off a design recruiter's desk.

You can see more of Michael Lester's design work here.

As the weather heats up, certain furniture falls out of favor: leather couches, polyester seats, steel patio chairs left out too long in the sun. But what if your furniture could keep you cool in the summer? That's the killer app of the ZEF Climatic Table, which can help supercharge your A/C in the summer and lower your heating bill in the winter.

Crafted out of oak and aluminum, the ZEF Climatic Table doesn't generate heat or cold itself. It soaks it up like a thermal sponge. Think of it as a designer thermos in disguise. Impregnated with a phase-changing wax, the ZEF Climactic Table can store heat or cold, then release it when the temperature changes by conducting it through the table's wavy shell.

The result is that the ZEF Climactic Table can lower the energy costs of any room it's in. And those savings stack up. The designers claim that the ZEF Climactic Table can reduce air-conditioning costs by 30%, and heating costs by a whopping 60%.

The ZEF Climactic Table is the first product from French architect and engineer Raphaël Ménard and designer Jean-Sébastien Lagrange. The duo intend it to be the first of many objects in their Zero Energy Furniture initiative, an attempt to solve problems around energy usage at the furniture scale, rather than the building scale.

Sadly, as I write this on a sticky summer day, the ZEF Climactic Table is not yet available for sale. It was a one-off project. Which is too bad, since all I can think about is how nice it would be to lie on top of one of these right about now.

You can read more about Zero Energy Furniture here.

[via PSFK]

Architect Zaha Hadid's plan for Tokyo's 2020 Olympic Stadium is officially dead.

From the beginning, Hadid's proposed design was controversial. The 20-story megastructure, which resembled a futuristic robot Macross vagina from above, was derided for forcing residents of the nearby Kasumigaoka Public Housing facility to be relocated, as well as its hefty price tag, which critics said diverted money that could have been used to help clean up the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Disaster.

Today, it appears that the critics have won. According to the Guardian, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe announced that the project would be restarted from scratch due to spiraling costs: Hadid's plan for 2020 Olympic Stadium had recently breached $2 billion.

Zaha Hadid Architects tried to downplay its role in the expanding price tag. "It is not the case that the recently reported cost increases are due to the design, which uses standard materials and techniques well within the capability of Japanese contractors and meets the budget set by the Japan Sports Council," the firm said in a statement.

Whatever the story, Hadid's design was widely reviled by high-profile Japanese architects like Toyo Ito, Sou Fujimoto, Kengo Kuma and Fumihiko Maki, who petitioned to have the project scrapped for its "outsize" scale, which would have dwarfed Kenzo Tange's 1964 Olympic Stadium. And in 2014, 500 people hit the street to protest the construction.

For a graphic designer, being asked to come up for a cover for Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman (available this week) must have been like walking into a minefield.

Not only is the novel a long-delayed sequel to the beloved American classic, To Kill A Mockingbird, but its publication has been heavily criticized by some who say that of an aging, senile author who never meant for it to be published. And that's without taking into account that early reviews suggestGo Set A Watchman transforms the character of the beloved civil rights hero Atticus Finch into a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan.

No wonder it took so many tries to get right. Penguin UK designer Glenn O'Neill shares with It's Nice That many of the rejected covers to the UK version of Go Set A Watchman—as well as the design process behind the one that made the cut.

Although he was not allowed access to the text of the novel coming up with his design, O'Neill explains why the parallels between the titles, themes, characters, and worlds of To Kill A Mockingbird and its sequel required a sort of dark symmetry in the cover's design:

It plays on the similarities in the wording of the two titles, Go Set A Watchman and To Kill A Mockingbird: the four words, each of a similar length, and of a similar rhythm. One title is a reflection of the other, both historically and typographically..

However, after much discussion, it was apparent that a further visual element was required, at first a mockingbird seemed too obvious in the weight of the previous book's history. But, after implementing many other symbols and illustrations, the bird silhouette began to re-emerge as the best solution. The mockingbird chosen gives animation to the cover, the way the tail points up between the words, the way the beak is open. It sits on a branch stripped of leaves, the back cover features leaves falling, Time has passed.

Although O'Neill's design only graces the cover of Go Set A Watchman in the UK, it's worth noting how different his cover is to the HarperCollins U.S. edition. The latter similarly tries to imply a symmetry with To Kill A Mockingbird, not just through typography but through stylistic choices and arrangement of the art. But as the gallery of rejected covers for Go Set A Watchman posted over at It's Nice That shows, such an approach was hardly self-evident: Many other covers focused more on a watchman's lamp as a nod to the title, or Scout grown up into a sophisticated woman, coming home.

You can see more of Penguin UK's rejected covers for Go Set A Watchman here.

Thanks to Google's Neural Nets, we now know what computers dream of when they sleep. Next question: what do they sing when they go out for karaoke? The answer is more horrifying than you could possibly imagine: Toni Braxton, Whitney Houston, and—ack!—Celine Dion.

"What Do Machines Sing Of?" is an automated machine by Berlin-based artist, designer, hacker and DJ Martin Backes. It's a custom-designed computer that stands in front of a karaoke mic, endlessly crooning a drunken, MIDI rendition of '90s hits.

Programmed using SuperCollider, "a programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition," the machine can sing Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You", R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly", Toni Braxton's "Un-Break My Heart", Bryan Adams'"Everything I Do, I Do It For You", and Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." In other words, the kind of songs that would get you the hook at 2:30 a.m. in even the seediest Chinatown karaoke bars.

At the very least, though, it's got a wider repertoire than most people who visit karaoke bars. I'm looking at you, Mr. "It's Raining Men" five times in a row.

In 2015, if you need an operation, you go to a hospital. The Open Surgery Machine imagines a future in which getting an appendectomy is as DIY as downloading a template from Thingsverse and firing up your MakerBot: an open-source robot surgeon in a box that is capable of performing simple, low-cost operations safely and with little doctor intervention.

Frank Kolkman is a Dutch-born interaction designer who recently graduated from London's Royal College of Art. He tells me that the inspiration for the Open Surgery Machine wasn't sci-fi, but YouTube. "America has the most advanced health care industry in the world, but there is this growing group of middle-class U.S. citizens who have no access to it, and YouTube is currently filling this gap," he says. "Mainly uninsured Americans are sharing videos on how to perform hacks on yourself as an alternative to professional care." (You can see some of these videos here, although you'll want a strong stomach to click that link.)

Conceptually, Kolkman's Surgery Robot explores the idea of combining DIY medical pragmatism with the more capable innovations found in medical industries. It's designed to perform simple surgeries like laparoscopic surgery, in which three or more small keyhole incisions are made to allow a surgeon to operate inside a part of a patient's body after inflating it with CO2, reducing the risk of infection. That would allow the DIY Surgery Robot to perform (again, theoretically—the concept is non-functional) appendectomies, prostate operations, hysterectomies, and also colon and general inspections. These procedures are already often performed with the assistance of robotic surgery systems; the DIY Surgery Robot would just take those doctors out of the equation.

Ultimately, the Surgery Robot is only intended as the focus point of a thought experiment: What if there was just as robust an online community of hobbyists, engineers, and designers for alternative health care products as there are for 3-D printer and CNC milling machines? "I hope that by challenging the socioeconomic frameworks the current health care systems operate within, where health care is valued in terms of money and labor, my project raises questions about the social value of health care by showing an alternative approach," Kolkman says.

But the designer is also frank about the fact that he thinks it's unlikely that something like the DIY Surgical Robot could get off the ground. Even taking the legal and liability aspects of the project out of the equation, patents would likely kill it as a commercial product in the incubation stage: most of the base technologies relied upon for robot surgery are thoroughly patented and rigorously guarded.

You can read more about Kolkman's Open Surgery project here

A successful Kickstarter billing itself as "the ultimate Internet Connected Electronics Kit," Sam by Sam Labs aimed to be an electronics kit that made rolling your own devices for the Internet of Things as easy as snapping together a few bricks. But while it rose almost $200,000 by the time crowdfunding came to close, Sam wasn't nearly as newbie-friendly or as intuitive as it wanted to be: the software UI was convoluted, and the Sam pieces themselves looked intimidatingly techy.

Enter Map, a London-based design consultancy who had previously consulted on the Kano DIY computer assembly kit. Their job was to take an assemblage of sensors, buttons and circuit boards and make it as friendly and welcoming as a box of Lego.

"We were approached after their Kickstarter campaign, because Sam was struggling to find this correlation between the technology they had created and their desire to make something friendly to everyone," says Scott Barthwick, a designer and associate at Map. "They had invented these lovely little objects that you could combine in amazing ways, but they weren't friendly yet."

The first challenge facing Map was to make the actual Sam pieces look more friendly. Sam pieces were little more than exposed circuits, sensors, and buttons, albeit modular ones. The hardware was finished, limiting Map's options. To make the Sam toolkit feel more toy-like than pieces of PCM, Map designed simple silicone jackets to wrap each piece in. Not only do the jackets introduce a little bit of Big Hero 6 softness to the Sam toolkit, but they silicone also helps create a spongy layer that can protect the pieces from damage.

Although Pentagram did Sam's graphic and branding design, Map also helped design the retail packaging for Sam. Since there are many types of Sam kits available, varying in size and complexity, Map designed the boxes around a dichotomy of squares. The largest Family kit is a double-deckered square, the Family kit is a single-storied square, the Make kit is half a square, and so on. Each package also breaks down into a suggested project. For example, the packaging for the Learn kit can be transformed into a cardboard chassis for a simple robot, comprised of Sam sensors.

The bulk of Map's design work, though, was focused around the app UI. On Kickstarter, a major selling point of Sam was the ease with which any collection of modules could be programmed. Map spent the better part of six months helping refine this experience, introducing isometric representations of each piece so that programming a new Sam project was as easy as dragging and dropping modules on top of each other.

After missing their Kickstarter delivery date by a few months, Sam kits have now shipped to supporters, and are also available for purchase online, starting at $139. As for Map, if their experience working on Sam has any takeaways for designers, it's how much of an impact good design can have on a product, even late in the game. "We would have loved to have been involved from the beginning, but it just wasn't possible," Barthwick says. But look at the finished product, and you'd never guess they weren't involved from the start.

Ever seen WarGames? Remember at the end of the movie when Matthew Broderick's character has tricked the malfunctioning supercomputer W.O.P.R. to simulate all permutations of global thermonuclear war, and it just starts flashing up a neon-hued light and laser show of all possible armageddons, faster than the eye can comprehend?

That's a lot what looking at the Norse Attack Map is like, but the lines flashing between counties aren't ICBMs. They're cyber attacks. And at any given moment, there are more of them flying between countries than all the nukes that have ever existed.

Developed by Norse Corp., a company dedicated to monitoring and providing intelligence on global cyber warfare, the Attack Map shows in real-time all the cyber attacks currently happening on the Norse network: where the attacks originate, where they're going, what kind of attacks they are, and so on. Each shooting streak of light is color coded after a different kind of attack: telnet is green, http-proxy is aqua, unknown is purple, and so on.

Speaking to The Creator's Project, Jeff Harrell of Norse says that the map visualizes data collected from over 50 engineers in as many countries, who are collectively responsible for monitoring over eight million sensors. "These sensors mimic the favorite targets of the attacks, such as ATMs, smartphones, PCs or Macs, thus attracting the attacks," he says. Hackers aren't necessarily targeting Norse's sensors: instead, they're sending out blind barrages, feeling for weaknesses on various IP ranges which they can exploit.

Just looking at the Norse Attack Map, you might think there's a lot of cyber warfare happening in the world, and you wouldn't be wrong. But if anything, the Norse Attack Map underrepresents the number of attacks happening by (at least) three orders of magnitude: the Norse Attack Map only shows one out of 1,000 attacks that happen on their network. That, in turn, is just a drop in the ocean compared to all the computers in the world being attacked at any given moment. Even W.O.P.R. doesn't have the smarts to process all that.

[via The Creators Project]

Although it's much beloved by hackers and artists, the Kinect hasn't really caught on as a tool for photographers and filmmakers. (Or gamers, alas.) That's sort of odd when you think of it, because at heart the Kinect is a camera—and more than that, a camera with some huge, transformative possibilities when it comes to the way films are made. We're already using the Kinect to augment reality. Why not let it augment filmmaking too?

NextStage is a bit of software that begins to tap the Kinect's possibilities as a filmmaking device. It essentially hacks a Kinect so that it can be used to easily insert 3D footage in real-time scenes, separate live action subjects from the background without a green screen, quickly rotoscope actors and objects, and more.

It's not that filmmakers can't already do these things, of course. But they're time consuming. Take something we see in Hollywood movies all the time: a CGI character or background interacting with a real person or scene. In real-life, that takes laborious, expensive frame-by-frame post-processing to get right, but NextStage can make that possible for amateurs on a shoestring budget, just by tethering their Kinect to the camera. Even green screens—a staple of every small town television station—can be made better with the aid of a Kinect, by using NextStage as an edge-refining garbage matte).

NextStage isn't necessarily going to revolutionize filmmaking in its own right. Watching the videos, you can seem some rough edges around the NextStage app's effects. But for amateurs, trying to make effects-laden films on a budget, the $80 app seems like it has a lot of potential.

Ultimately, though, what's interesting to me is how it highlights the possible futue of filmmaking: one in which our film cameras record not just light, but depth as well. We might not be there quite yet, but the day is coming in which Kinect-like technology could very well let us combine physical and virtual actors, essentially in-camera.

It's late July, and if you haven't already planned your summer vacation, might we suggest taking a cross-country road-trip? The sort of classic American holiday immortalized in novels ranging from Jack Kerouac's On The Road and Ken Kesey's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to Mark Twain's Roughing It and Cheryl Strayed's Wild?

Over at Atlas Obscura, author Richard Kreitner has posted an obsessively detailed map of literature's most epic road trips, covering over 1,500 locations spread from Hawaii to Mexico, from Maine to Portland. Think of is as inspiration for a last-minute (and oh-so-bookish) vacation.

A dozen novels are represented, ranging from relatively quick jaunts (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig) to epic up-and-down-the-country treks (John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley). Great literary road trips that are either day trips (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) or "defiant of cartographical order" (Lolita) have been excluded.

Atlas Obscura does not claim total cartographical accuracy. "I beg forbearance if you, a hermit in the mountains of Wyoming, find that I have pinned Mark Twain's reference to Horse Creek in a place where it could not have been, or if you, a denizen of what Tom Wolfe rather unkindly called 'the Rat lands' of Mexico, find my estimation of the precise location of Chicalote, Aguascalientes, somewhat inexact," Kreitner writes, his tongue planted firmly in cheek. Accuracy aside, there's certainly enough here to keep a dharma bum busy for the next decade.

Check out the full map here.

When they're not in or on your ears, headphones are a pain to carry around. Wear a pair of over-the-ear cans around your neck, and you look like a dweeb; stuff a pair of earbuds in your pocket when they're not in use, and the cords get all knotted up. It goes to show that while headphone designers have long since solved the mobility problem, they still haven't addressed the portability problem: namely, how to store them easily on your body when they're not in use.

The Helix is a new design on Kickstarter from fashion company Ashley Crowe that aims to solve the portability problem of headphones. A pair of Bluetooth headphones designed by Mika Nenonen, former lead industrial designer at Nest and Nokia, the Helix allows you to store your earbuds in a sleek aluminum bracelet when they're not in use.

The bracelet, which looks like the Jawbone Up activity tracker in appearance, can fit any size wrist thanks to its adjustable magnetic design. It's is thinnest near your pulse, so it's easy to put your hand down on a flat surface when wearing it. When the headphones are out of the bracelet, one of the clasps transforms into a remote, allowing you to pause your music, pump up the volume, or answer calls.

It's an interesting approach, but not without its drawbacks. Since the headphones are wireless Bluetooth, expect only three hours of playback per charge. And to be honest, while the idea of storing your headphones in a bracelet has a lot of merit, it seems a little fiddly. Why wrap up a pair of earbuds into a bracelet when, if you embraced a more all-in-one approach, you could have the bracelet transform into a pair of wrap-around headphones instead?

You can preorder the Helix on Kickstarter for $99 in white, black, and red here.

For all their convenience, airplanes are one of the dirtiest modes of transportation out there. A fully loaded A380's CO2 output is equivalent to each passenger driving six cars an equivalent distance. But what if airplane designers in the 1940s and 1950s had worked to embrace energy sources besides petroleum? How might the history of aviation have played out?

That's the question posed by Royal College of Art graduate Tim Clark, who imagines an alt-history of aviation in which planes were designed to be powered by sonic booms and nuclear engines. Clark's project, High-Speed Horizons, hopes to jumpstart what he considers "stagnated" Earth-based aerospace innovation by proposing four Golden Age plane designs that could have been:

The Boomjet "SBT"— The Boomjet is probably Clark's most arresting design: an aircraft with the body of a Boeing 767 and a billowing skirt of a tail that contains 47 separate propellers. Inspired by the shape of a sonic boom, the Boomjet's propellers allow the Boomjet to take off vertically like a helicopter from a launchpad-like structure. And thanks to the Boomjet's shape and propellor, the power of its sonic boom can actually propel it forward. Unless there's a body of water nearby, though, emergency landings are going to be a rocky affair. In the same way that SST was the preferred aviation acronym for talking about supersonic transport planes such as the Concorde, SBT stands for "sonic boom transport."

The X-1SB— Designed in 1947, the Bell X-1 was the first plane to break the sound barrier. An insanely simple design, the X-1 was designed after the specs of a .50 caliber bullet, essentially because the engineers knew that a bullet was stable above Mach 1. In Clark's alternate history of Cold War aviation, the X-1 was followed by a sister plane, the X1-SB, which combines a .50 caliber bullet with the shock wave that results from breaking the sound barrier. The "humorously tiny wheels," Clark says, were inspired by a real-life plane: the V-173 Flying Pancake (not to be confused with the Navy's X-150 Submersible Waffle).

The B-29 Duo "Double Mama"— The original Bell X-1 couldn't take off by itself: it was designed to go really fast once airborne, but to actually get in the sky, it had to be airdropped by a Boeing B-29 Superfortress. With its even more unwieldy shape, Clark figures the X1-SB will have a similar problem, so he designed a dual-fuselage B-29, the "Double Mama," to haul it up into the stratosphere. And while a double-bodied plane might look weird, it's actually not that unconventional. This is the same family of aircraft that tows Virgin Galactic's SpaceShip Two to release altitude

The Air Laissez-Faire— In the wake of disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, it seems pretty obvious why we don't put nuclear reactors inside machines that semi-regularly come crashing out of the sky. During the Cold War, though, both the United States and Soviet Union extensively researched nuclear-powered aircraft. Air Laissez-Faire imagines what would have happened if this technology had hit the open market. Powered by a nuclear reactor, Air Laissez-Faire is a 518-foot plane that always stays airborne, mashing up design elements from the Rockwell B-1 Lancer and the Concorde. Clark imagines it as a potential meeting place for globe-trotting businessmen: instead of flying all the way to Tokyo to meet your Japanese business partners, why not meet on Air Laissez-Faire, hopping aboard as it passes by?

Although his alt-history airplane designs look weird and whimsical, Clark insists that all of them would fly, save the Boomjet. "The drag caused by the back of the Boomjet makes it hard to believe it would work," Clark says. Even so, he argues, implausible designs are all part of the history of aviation. "Every airplane design, aerodynamic or not, is an attempt to solve a problem and spark innovation," Clark says. And in a warming world, what better problem could be worth solving than the aerospace industry's addiction to fossil fuels?

We've all been getting a kick out of what artists and developers have been doing with Google's Deep Dream, the neural net powered hallucination AI. Now you can play with it for yourself, thanks to the Dreamscope web app. Just upload an image, pick one of 16 different filters, and turn that image into a hallucinogenic nightmare of infinitely repeating dog eyes for yourself.

Which probably has you wondering: what's up with all those dog eyes anyway? Why does every single image Deep Dream coughs up look to a lesser or greater extent like Seth Brundle from The Fly crammed his teleport pod full of canines then flipped the switch? As it turns out, there's a pretty simple answer for this.

As you may know, Google's Deep Dream runs off the same type of neural network that powers Google's Photos ability to identify images by their content. Essentially, the network emulates the neurons in the human brain, with a single core of the network 'firing' every time it sees a part of the image it thinks it recognizes. Deep Dream's trippy effects come from giving it an initial image, then initiating a feedback loop, so that the network begins trying to recognize what it recognizes what it recognizes. It's the equivalent of asking Deep Dream to draw a picture of what it thinks a cloud looks like, then draw a picture of what its picture looks like, ad infinitum.

Where do the dogs come in? This Reddit thread provides some insight. A neural network's ability to recognize what's in an image comes from being trained on an initial data set. In Deep Dream's case, that data set is from ImageNet, a database created by researchers at Stanford and Princeton who built a database of 14 million human-labeled images. But Google didn't use the whole database. Instead, they used a smaller subset of the ImageNet database released in 2012 for use in a contest... a subset which contained "fine-grained classification of 120 dog sub-classes."

In other words, Google's Deep Dream sees dog faces everywhere because it was literally trained to see dog faces everywhere. Just imagine how much the Internet would be freaking out about Deep Dream right now if it was trained on a database that included fine-grained classification of LOLCATS instead.

[via Rhizome]

Coders look for different things in a typeface than normal people do. While most of us choose a font for the character it imparts to our words (Baskerville for authority, Comic Sans for playfulness, and so on), programmers want a font that is clean, uniform, highly readable, and precise, just like good code. Monoid is a new font designed by Andreas Larsen that aims to do all the above, and more. An open-source font aimed at coders, Monoid has been designed, first and foremost, to be highly readable even when you're scanning through ten thousand of lines of C++, looking for that one bug-causing typo.

The guiding design principals of Monoid, according to Larsen, was that his code be legible, compact, and pretty. Like most coding fonts, Monoid is a monospaced font, meaning that all the characters take up the exact same width onscreen. This can help coders scan for syntax errors. Despite this, though, Monoid is fairly tightly spaced, largely because Larsen wanted to make sure that as much code as possible could fit on the screen when rendered in Monoid.

But where Monoid really shines compared to other coding fonts is in the distinguishability of its glyphs. In any typeface, there are going to be letters that look like each other: a lowercase 'i' and a lowercase 'l' for example, or the difference between an O and a zero. In Monoid, Larsen took great care to design characters so that they are easy to tell apart, even with glyphs you wouldn't think look a lot alike, like an R and a B. In English and other languages, the chances of you mistaking those letters for one another are nil, because the rest of the word provides clear context, but when scanning code, a programmer could easily mistake one for the other... let alone a zero, an O, a Greek theta, and a Nordic Ø. Larsen takes care in these and other glyphs to make each one unique, using differently sized curves, ascenders and descenders, and other details as subtle cues to make each character unique.

Of course, with a font like this, theory's all well and good, but the proof is in the programming: how many actual bugs will it help programmers avoid? Luckily, Larsen has made Monoid available as an open-source typeface, meaning that it can be refined over time by the coders who are using it. You can find the official Monoid community page here if you want to get involved; otherwise read about Larsen's design process on Medium here and here.

Ikea furniture that assembles itself when you add water.3-D printed, self-lacing McFlys. Modular, single-piece robots that fold like proteins The design possibilities of programmable materials seem limitless, but nothing has done a better job of getting across the beauty of such materials than this video by Dana Zelig, in which 12 plastic sheets which fold and twist themselves, as sinuously as a flatland ballet.

The video is part of Traces, Zelig's exploration of programmable materials. For her project, Zelig used the Processing programming language to design patterns that she then printed using a simple household printer on one of the oldest programmable materials there is: shrinkable pre-stressed polystyrene sheets, also known as Shrinky Dinks. These patterns worked as skeletons, causing the sheets to deform themselves along hinges formed by black lines, which absorbed heat (and consequently deformed faster) than the white unprinted sections.

In the grand scheme of the programmable materials research done by groups like MIT's Self-Assembly Lab, Zelig's work isn't terribly advanced, but the video she produced to show it off does a better job than anything else we've seen of hinting at the geometric poetry of the medium. It's a rendered animation of programmable designs that work in the real world, and that's wonderful. If the future is filled with materials that can arch, flex, and fold themselves like this, it'll be an elegant future indeed.

[via Creative Applications]