Televisions were once built more like furniture than anything else, expected to fit into a home's decor for decades. But in more recent times, the attention has shifted to the more gadgety aspects of a TV, with new models constantly being pushed as consumer upgrades based upon new tech "innovations": HD Ready. HD Capable. Full HD. 3D. 4K. LED. Plasma. OLED. IGZO. As a consequence, television design has suffered.

Samsung has been as guilty of this as anyone else, but lately, they've been trying to give something back. Following a Yves Behar collaboration earlier this year, Samsung is now teaming up with French designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec to try to bring beautiful design back to televisions. Together, they have created the Serif, an elegant new flat-screen with a beautiful I-shaped silhouette.

It's seemingly an odd collaboration, as Studio Bourollec has never designed a piece of technology before and Samsung is rarely concerned with doing something totally new. But it's impossible to argue with the design: it feels like the HDTV that the Eameses or Gropiuses would have chosen to put in their homes.

Coming in three colors—white, dark blue, and red—and ranging in size from 21- to 40-inches, the Serif looks as good off as it does on, embracing an almost sculptural quality. Thanks to a woven fabric back cover, the usual rat king of cables that tether most televisions to our media systems is deftly hidden away, which helps preserve its presence as a standalone object of design lust. But it's also flexible: it's just at home on a wall or a shelf as it is on the floor (thanks to the four screw-on legs that are included).

But the nice design touches extend to the actual television aspects of the Serif as well. The Bourollec brothers helped develop the user interface, which includes a start screen called "curtain mode": a "silent, abstract impression of the TV screen contents." In other words, when you turn it on, the Serif comes to life gently, without the loud, spinning logos of other TVs.

A quick poll amongst Co.Design's editorial bullpen quickly reached a consensus on the Serif: this is the TV we all want. It's small, self-sufficient, and impeccably minimalist, perfect for any well-designed home. And the thing is, there's no reason you shouldn't want this, because while TVs keep on getting new features and functionality, most people don't upgrade them as frequently as a smartphone. Chances are, the TV you pick is one you'll have in your house for the next ten years.

The Serif will go on sale in the U.K., France, Sweden, and Denmark starting November 2, for a still unannounced price.

Here's something that's happened to everyone. You've got a pile of books just sort of hanging out, looking like a bomb went off. So you decide to buy some shelves for them. You buy a perfectly sized shelving unit, arrange your books on the shelves with care—then fast forward three months, when your book collection has exploded again, and your perfectly sized shelving unit has proven comically inadequate.

Enter Japanese design firm Nendo, who just hit the 2015 London Design Festival with this killer shelving unit. Called the Nest (no relation), this carbon fiber shelving unit stretches like taffy to accommodate any space, and as much stuff as you can throw at it.

In essence, the Nest is a matryoshka: a nesting pair of super thin shelving units. By default, these units are folded together into a stock three-shelf configuration, but you can double or even triple the amount of shelves and storage space available to you just by pulling the Nest by the sides. Then, it folds out almost like an accordion, giving you three to six more shelves to store things on, depending on how you configure it.

It really is a clever idea, and thanks to the fact that the Nest is reinforced with carbon fiber, the shelves remain strong enough to handle a lot of weight even when they're stretched thin in a 3x3 configuration. Extended fully, the Nest is 4.25 feet wide, but can be compressed down to just half that size.

If you want to see it for yourself, the Nest will be on display at Somerset House as part of the Ten Designers In The West Wing Exhibition, taking place at the London Design Festival's Somerset House next week from September 21 to 27.

The demise of Zaha Hadid's 2020 Tokyo Olympic Stadium may have been greatly exaggerated in the past, but now we can actually call it: it's dead.

Controversy has embroiled Hadid's proposed design from the beginning, derided by critics for forcing public housing residents to relocate, and carrying a $2 billion price tag—seemingly exorbitant for a country still scraping together money to recover from Fukushima. The design was also panned by high-profile Japanese architects, who petitioned to have the project scrapped for its "outsized" scale, which would have dwarfed Kenzo Tange's 1964 Olympic Stadium.

All of this caused Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe to announce in July that the project would be restarted from scratch. Despite this, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) held tight, releasing a 20-minute video claiming its design was "the only way to achieve value for money in the market." If money was a concern, ZHA said money could be saved by removing the stadium's air conditioning, along with a bridge designed to offer the public views across the city skyline. You know, little things.

It appears, though, a few months later, that the challenge was too great for ZHA. The stated reason is due to an inability to find a construction company to work with, which was a condition under the revised bid rules for any design. Other potential roadblocks included reduced seating, and a budget capped at $1.3 billion, roughly $700 million less than ZHA's original bid.

"It is disappointing that the two years of work and investment in the existing design for a new national stadium for Japan cannot be further developed to meet the new brief through the new design competition," a spokesman for Zaha Hadid Architects in London said.

In the past, Hadid has personally railed against critics of the project, calling them "hypocrites" and saying that Japanese architects didn't want an outsider building a national stadium, even though they build abroad themselves.

Although this setback will doubtlessly be disappointing to Hadid, her stadium for the 2022 FIFA World Cup Final in Qatar is still on track, despite seemingly larger controversies, like wide scale human rights complaints ("Not my duty," Hadid said about the 500+ worker deaths to date preparing the site for the World Cup, although luckily none of those fatalities have happened working on the construction of Al Wakrah Stadium itself.)

[via the Guardian]

Edit: A previous version of this article mistakenly said that workers had died constructing Hadid's stadium in Qatar. The workers actually died in more broad preparations for the event, and not constructing Al Wakrah Stadium itself.

Do you need to have designers on staff to run a design-focused company? Not necessarily. In fact, there are some circumstances in which handing a few key designers ultimate power over a project can be worse than having no designers on staff at all.

Last week, Halfbrick Studios, the Australian game company responsible for Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride, fired its entire design department. A report by Kotaku Australia characterized the change as one that would see Halfbrick Studios stop designing games. But Halfbrick Studio's CEO Shainiel Deo denied the report, telling Kotaku that "Halfbrick remains a design-focused company..." despite the fact it had just gotten rid of its entire design department.

Since Kotaku's report, Halfbrick Studios has gotten a bit of a drubbing in the press over the reorg. The idea that a game design company could be design focused while tying off its design department seems inherently absurd, like an architecture firm firing all its architects. So we asked two developers who work at a couple of the most design-focused game companies in the industry what they thought of Halbrick's seemingly curious move: one at Bejeweled maker PopCap Games, and one at ustwo, creators of the Escher-esque iPhone puzzler Monument Valley.

Surprisingly? Neither developer thought there was anything controversial about Halfbrick Studios' decision. In fact, while not speaking directly as representatives of their companies, their personal opinion was that what's true in most businesses is especially true in game development: Giving design its own silo can be a mistake, because in a design-focused company, everyone should be thinking about design...even if they don't have the word designer in their title.

"I think the Halfbrick controversy is a big deal mostly because people are very naive about how games are actually made," says Chris Furniss, a senior UI/UX designer at PopCap Games.

He says the idea that the games you play are the result of the singular genius of a "monolithic game designer" working in a vacuum within the company doesn't really exist. And that's been true since the beginning. Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto, for example, was a pixel artist when he invented Mario as part of Donkey Kong. The arena of game design isn't unique in this: Norman Foster isn't the only architect at the firm bearing his name, and Jony Ive is widely praised for his willingness to listen to his staff. Great design ideas can come from anyone.

In game design, having "designer" in your title isn't the most important thing. Titles are fungible. As Neil McFarland, director of games for ustwo, says: "Every project needs an internal champion within the company, someone who holds the vision and pushes the team in the right direction." But that person does not necessarily have to be a designer. For Monument Valley, ustwo's "internal champion" of the project was Ken Wong, an artist by trade who had a vision for the project. He wasn't a designer, per se, yet he functioned as ustwo's internal champion for a game commonly regarded as one of the most beautiful and best designed of 2014.

That's something that's only possible when everyone in a company is thinking about design. "It seems to me that's what Halfbrick is going for," McFarland says. "They're confident they have a staff who is well-rounded enough where anyone can be a project's vision holder, and everyone can contribute to design equally."

In other words, Halfbrick is no longer interested in running design decisions through the sole purview of two people. But still, is getting rid of your design department a bit much? McFarland says not necessarily.

"One of the problems of having dedicated designers is if the rest of your employees don't feel like they can contribute ideas," he says. That's especially true is a designer feels overly protective of their role as the ultimate arbiter of all design decisions within the company. And it's not just small developers like ustwo or Halfbrick that can find having dedicated game designers disruptive on staff. PopCap has over 400 employees, but even so, Furniss says, everyone on the team is expected to own its games' design.

"No one is an island in this industry," Furniss says. "There are no singular geniuses." Making a game is a complicated amalgam of gameplay, programming, engineering, marketing, and art: they're complicated team efforts take a lot of creativity, compromise, and communication to pull off. "That's why having one guy who handles all the design is bad," he says. "You can't have a guy on a laptop typing up a 500-page game design document in some ivory tower somewhere, expecting everyone else to get it done. You're not going to get a fun game out of that."

Halfbrick Studios declined to comment on this story, but from its CEO's statement on the matter to Kotaku, it certainly seems like having a pair of dedicated designers on staff was actually interfering with the company's design process, not focusing it. "[T]his change will empower everyone in our teams to contribute to design, rather than concentrate design control in the hands of a few," Deo wrote (emphasis added). "Great ideas can come from anywhere and we want to create an environment that fosters this notion."

The truth seems to be that Halfbrick didn't fire its designers. It fired the two people who were standing in the way of everyone in the company owning design together. And even out of the realm of game design, that should be a lesson to any company: good design culture isn't a hierarchical meritocracy. It's a republic. You're only a good designer if you're working with the rest of your team to deliver something great.

Edit: This article has been edited to clarify that neither developer was commenting as a direct representative on behalf of their companies.

Colorfully laid out according to the clean, minimalist principles of electric diagrams, Henry Beck's map for the London Underground is unquestionably a design classic; one that has been updated—but never fundamentally changed—for over 80 years. The problem is, great as it may be, it's not geographically accurate. (A fact that causes up to 30% of London travelers to choose the wrong route, and occasionally inspired designers to think they can do better by "rounding the circle" of Beck's Tube diagram into a proper map.)

It turns out, though, that the London Underground has secretly maintained an easily understood, geographically accurate map of its tube routes for years. And now, thanks to a Freedom of Information Request filed by James Burbage in 2014, it looks like this more accurate Underground map will be made available to everyone.

It's called the Geographical London Connections map, and it was last updated by Transport for London (TFL) in May 2014 for internal use. The map is incredibly easy to read, clearly overlaying the Underground's routes and gridlines over London's neighborhoods, river, wharfs, and parks. It keeps a lot of the official tube map's colors and iconography, so it sort of looks like the Beck Map was stretched and distorted over a proper street map of London.

When Burbage filed his request, he politely asked: "Please supply a geographically accurate map of all the stations, platforms, lines and tracks that form the London Underground, London Overground, Docklands Light Railway and National Rail services where applicable, which is updated as of August/September 2014. Omit information which could pose a concern for health and safety." A month later—which is a shocking turn around time compared to how long it takes for an FOIA request to be processed in America—the TFL was happy to oblige.

But the story doesn't end there. According to Citymetric, response to the London Connections map has been so positive that the TFL has decided to keep an updated version published on their website. "This map was produced for engineering works planning and wasn't designed for customer use, however we are happy to make any maps available which help our customers to travel in London, wrote Gareth Powell, director of strategy & service development at London Underground. "This map will therefore be added to our website."

Now, travelers on the Tube will be able to have the best of both worlds: Beck's classic diagram, and an accurate map to consult when that diagram is confusing. You can explore the full London Connections map here.

Did you watch football on Sunday? If so, you might have caught Honda's new "Paper" ad, tracing the Japanese corporation's history through 70 years, from motorcycles to futuristic robots, all in under two minutes. But what really stuck with you was the style. It was rendered as a beautifully hand-illustrated series of cards, with engines flying out of one vehicle and tumbling into another, all seemingly animated by hands flipping the cards over.

"Seemingly," because it was. Although the "Paper" ad feels like CGI trickery, the digital posing as the analog, it actually is what it appears to be: an elaborate ad brought to life through stop-motion animation, which took four months to pull off. Featuring thousands of hand-drawn illustrations from various artists, and a dozen or so animators' hands, the ad traces Honda founder Soichiro Honda's first motorcycles to future innovations, like outboard motors, automobiles, racecars, and . . . more motorcycles.

"Paper" was directed by PES, real name Adam Pesapane. An accomplished director, PES is an Academy Award-winning animator whose first film—about two chairs humping each other—won animation's version of the Oscars in 2002. Since then, PES has found a lot of success in commercial work, as well as a number of surreal and whimsical animated shorts.

The creative concept behind the ad, PES tells me, was the idea that so many of Honda's innovations had started as little more than a sketch. As delivered, the spec was to bring to life the story behind the countless napkin sketches that Honda's engineering team had made over the years, illustrating a new project. The challenge was how to do it all in this giant motion shot, where everything weaves together. PES decided to center upon the original Honda motor, pinching it, flicking it, and rebuilding it over and over again across an entire cosmos of devices.

"One of the core points of my pitch was that the era of design surrounding each Honda innovation should be reflected in the paper and art we used to animate it," says PES. So for the earliest sequences in the film, where everything is happening in the 1930s and 1940s, all the paper is yellowed and the illustrations are simple pen drawings. As times goes on, the art evolves, into cleaner paper, more detailed drawings, and more colorful, modern palettes, not to mention the evolution of the vehicles. "I was trying to build a sense of history into not just the chronology, but the style," PES says.

One of the standout effects of the ad is, bizarrely, the hands. Throughout "Paper," hands fly out, flipping over pieces of paper and animating the piece fluidly, as if in real time. It almost looks like a Super Mario Maker effect, or some kind of CGI, but PES says it was all done by hand, no pun intended. The technique is called pixilation, in which human bodies are animated like clay models. PES says it's one of the most challenging aspects of his art, because people naturally can't stay still long enough to animate them frame by frame. The fluid motion of the hands you see in "Paper" isn't CGI, it's the fact that they were animated four frames to one with the rest of the film.

Which brings up another innovative aspect of "Paper": It was shot entirely in camera, with no computers involved at all. The only place CGI was used in producing the ad was in the initial planning phase, or pre-viz. "That's a big part of the project," says PES. "How to take something digital and make it into something physical and real, but look just as polished."

You can see the making of the Honda "Paper" ad here.

Popularly, most people think of Apple as only ever having one logo (albeit one that has come in many shades, colors, and textures), from the Apple II to the iPad Pro. But the truth is that even now, depending on context, Apple uses numerous slightly different versions of its logo. And as for the idea that the iconic Apple logo sprang fully formed into the world? Patently false, as this interesting exercise in digital paleontology by Scott McPhail shows.

The Apple logo we know today originally debuted alongside the Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977. Featuring six rainbow stripes and an apple with a bite taken out of it, this logo is immediately familiar today: It's the retro Apple logo, and even though Cupertino has since made its signature logo monochrome, the shape and colors look familiar even to this day.

But combing through the original 1977 Apple II brochure, McPhail noticed something interesting: In many of the official product shots, the Apple logo looks markedly different. Although the general idea is the same—a rainbow fruit with a bite taken out of it—the execution is markedly clumsier. So McPhail decided to recreate the logo as best he could, correcting for color balance and image distortion.

The result? A seven-color Apple logo prototype that emphasizes the cooler end of the color spectrum—purples, blues, and greens—while sticking orange and yellow in as an afterthought in the stem. It looks more OshKosh B'Gosh than Apple, somehow. As McPhail writes:

It's like we got beamed into some alternate reality where Apple was run by some guy named Rick, disco never died, and everybody has goatees. The color arrangement is a bad match for a traditional prismatic rainbow, and with emphasis on blues and green, it doesn't make an impact. "Red blue green" colors would have been a way to emphasize the Apple II's color TV capabilities. The split leaf is not a good look, either. It really washes out. There's no doubt that this color sequence and color palette lacked punch. It was taller and wider than the final product as well. But as late as the time the photos for the brochures were made, this was more or less the Apple logo.

Of course, all logos go through countless iterations before they become officially adopted. It's likely that, feeling a time crunch, Apple decided to debut their new Apple II desktop computer at the West Coast Computer Faire with a work-in-progress logo that Jobs & Woz had no intention of ever using. It wasn't until 1983 that the Apple logo sort of settled into the exact shape we know today.

The lesson? Like Steve Jobs, even iconic logos sometimes have to go through their wilderness years.

First invented by NASA in the 1960s, ferrofluid has been experiencing a kind of renaissance lately, being used in everything from high-tech lava lamps to designer alarm clocks. Now, designer Craig Ward and photographer Linden Gledhill are taking ferromagnetic fluid into the realm of typography, centrifugally spinning it to create weird Rorschach glyphs, available as both one-of-a-kind prints and a computer system font file.

Currently on Kickstarter, Fe₂O₃ Glyphs describes itself as both a transcendence and a subversion of what we commonly call a typeface. Using a little bit of ferrofluid mixed with ink and pressed between two glass plates, Craig and Gledhill were able to create unique patterns by spinning it across horizontal and vertical magnetic fields. As they did so, the fields distorted the ink into something close to a ferromagnetic snowflake: a unique pattern that Craig says calls to mind "ancient indigenous markings from science fiction."

"[Linden] has been studying ferrofluid for a while," Ward says by email. "He sent me some early images a little while back, and, as someone who works with typography and symbols on a daily basis, they immediately felt to me like some kind of a language system. . . . So I proposed the idea of creating a type system to him, and we went from there." The whole idea of the project, Ward says, is to invert the type design process: replacing a static pixel grid with magnetic fields, for example, or trading concerted aesthetic decisions for a more generative design process.

Almost as a lark, the duo decided to put Fe₂O₃ Glyphs on Kickstarter as an OTF typeface and a series of letterpress prints. According to Ward, the two thought of the project as "niche, but surprisingly, they've already collected almost four times their initial crowdsourcing goal for the ferromagnetic typeface.

"I think people are interested for some of the same reasons we were," Ward tells me. " We found the symbols quite infectious, and we wanted to see more and more to see how elaborate, convoluted, and distorted they became."

Coupled with a unique movable type set up that combines the 138 different glyphs into more possible configurations than stars in the known universe, and just as many unique prints, Ward calls Fe₂O₃ Glyphs "a kind of infinite art machine." You
can back the project on Kickstarter starting at $40 here.

Few things set a more romantic mood than moonlight. Luna is a lamp that attempts to recreate that mood by dropping a round, cratered sphere on your dining room table, bedroom nightstand, or living room floor. It's silly, a little stupid, and totally magical.

Currently seeking funding on Indiegogo, the Luna is made of fiberglass and coated in latex, and contains a 110V LED lightbulb. While not topographically accurate—you can't use this as a globe to find the South Pole-Aitken basin, or Mare Imbrium—it looks close enough.

According to its creators, the Luna was designed for city dwellers deprived of the moon thanks to crowded skylines and visual pollution. At its most massive, the 24-inch Luna is the equivalent of a lunar elephant in the room, but there's a Luna for almost anyone, progressively scaling down to the size of a jawbreaker.

The biggest Luna is the best—a gigantic, light-giving planetoid that has seemingly fallen out of the sky to roll around your living room. But if you'd like to use Luna like a more conventional lamp, no worries: It can easily be hung overhead or placed on an end table.

You can preorder the Luna here, starting at just $75.

We're not even into October yet, and competition is already fierce when it comes to recommending the best-designed calendar for 2016. Just a couple weeks ago, we were convinced that the CMYK Color Swatch Calendar had already won our 2016 calendar recommendation. Then the Typodarium 2016, and its 366 different typographic samples, came along.

Published in Germany by Verlag Hermann Schmidt Mainz, the Typodarium 2016 calendar bills itself as "a totally legal designer drug for people who have got the typography virus." Inside, the tear-off wall calendar contains 366 typefaces—2016 is a leap year!—created by 223 designers from 32 different countries. (The full list of contributing typographers is here.) Each page features one font to relay the date, and backed with a little explainer about what the typeface is called, who made it, and in what circumstances it's appropriate to use.

This isn't Typodarium's first crack at a calendar—the 2012 version of the calendar was quite nice—but now in its ninth year, the Typodarium remains one of the best ways to explore the weirder, wilder side of typefaces, throughout the year. You can preorder it here for about $40.

Thanks to humanity's endless fascination with mortality, there's no shortage of tools out there that will predict how much longer you've got to live. But according to FlowingData's Nathan Yau, all these death calculators have the same fundamental problem: they're all based on the average of everyone doing the dying. There's a lot of luck involved in whether you live another 50 years, or just five. How do you calculate that, let alone visualize it?

Called Years You Have Left To Live, Probably, Yau's latest visualization is as hypnotic as it is alternatingly depressing and uplifting. It animates your probability of dying from now until the age 110 (the age of the oldest person to ever die in America) almost like a Pachinko machine, rolling the probability of you living to next year like a pinball across the X-axis, and calculating your odds based on where the ball drops.

After receiving the requisite age and sex info, the interactive graphic then pulls data from the Social Security Administration to calculate the probability of you dying next year, the year after next, and so on. It then rolls the dice for each year of the remainder of your life. When you eventually come up snake eyes, the visualization tallies that result in one of six pools, representing how many years you have left to life: 0 to 9, 10 to 19, 20 to 29, all the way to 50 or more.

Let the graphic run long enough, and you eventually get a good picture on the Vegas odds of how many years you have left to live. After running it for a few minutes, Yau's tool says that as a 36-year-old male, I've got a 35% chance of living another four decades, compared to an only 1% chance of dying in the next 10 years. That's pretty good, but I've got to tell you, every time I fail my saving roll on Yau's visualization, it feels like death's already tapping me on the shoulder.

Check out the chart over at FlowingData.

GIFs are designed to loop short clips—generally a couple seconds long—over and over until you close your browser window. But As Long As Possible is a different kind of GIF; one rendered on a geologic time scale. Created by Helsinki-based artists Juha van Ingen and Janne Särkelä, it's designed to loop only once every thousand years.

Don't expect a millennium-long nyan cat, though. In execution, As Long As Possible is very simple: it's simply a black square that slowly counts from 1 to 48,140,288 in 10-minute intervals. Part of the reason the GIF is so simple is a file size consideration: even in its current stark, monochrome form, the finished GIF is over 12 gigabytes. But after experimenting with other versions of the GIF, including one that stretched a vintage film from the 1920s to over 48 million frames long, van Ingen says he found it only distracted from the essence of the piece.

Van Ingen says the original idea for As Long As Possible came to him a year ago while creating Plunge, another GIF-based project which explored the concept of slowing down GIFs to their maximum extent.

"It was a bit of a revelation to me to find out that in GIF animation, the maximum delay between each frame is more than 10 minutes," he says. "It made me think about making an GIF loop which would last for as long as possible. We decided to go for a 1000-year long loop, which would be very long, but still short enough that people could relate to it."

The project borrows its name, and some of its conceptual approach, from John Cage's avant-garde organ composition. Although the actual score of the composition is only eight pages long, it is currently being performed on a specially-designed organ at a church in Halberstadt, Germany, and isn't expected to finish for another 624 years.

It takes a lot of institutional support to set-up a project that is meant to go on that long . . . support that van Ingen and Särkelä are currently trying to drum up. Although the GIF has already been created, the goal is to have it permanently on display to the public, starting in 2017. Van Ingen says that ideally, the two will make a half-dozen portable units, which are synchronized to all display the GIF at the same time. The file itself is too large to actually slap up on the Internet, but van Ingen says that webcasting a video of the GIF might also be a possibility.

"What we're able to do all depends on the kind of resources we manage to get, so we're looking for people or organizations who can help us," van Ingen says. "We're talking about making it run for such a long time that the people who see it finish will have long forgotten about TV or the Internet. Isn't that mind-blowing?"

Virtual reality is getting more immersive and stimulating by the day, but if you try to feel something in VR, your hand will just pass right through the air. A new Japanese startup wants to change that with a VR armband that tricks your brain into thinking its touching onscreen objects

Created by the Tokyo-based H2L, the UnlimitedHand looks, and is worn, almost like an iPhone exercise arm band, sans iPhone. But inside this armband is a haptic sensor, as well as an array of tiny, multi-channel electronic muscle stimulators (EMS). The haptic sensor can measure how you are moving your arm, and move it accordingly within a VR world; meanwhile, the EMS array sends a series of finely tuned electronic pulses coursing through your muscles, allowing you to feel low-granular sensations like resistance, or even discomfort.

According to H2L, the UnlimitedHand can be used to simulate bodily encounters, like the sensation of touching, pinching, stroking, or grabbing onto something in a virtual world. It can also simulate pain, although one imagines without too much fidelity, since H2L calls it "occasions of being inflicted within damage within games." Either way, if you're looking forward to some VR Counter-Strike, UnlimitedHand can make the experience of being shot more immersive. (Yay?)

The best part about the UnlimitedHand, though, is that from a developer's perspective, it looks easy to integrate. To support the UnlimitedHand with your VR title all you need to do is install a plug-in for Unity, a 3-D engine very widely used in VR and 3-D games. That should help make the UnlimitedHand appealing to developers, unlike other proprietary VR peripherals.

Currently on Kickstarter, the UnlimitedHand's downside seems to be cost: they start at $188. That's fairly expensive, considering the Oculus Rift headset is believed to cost $350 when it's released, computer non-withstanding. So before you touch the world of VR, prepare yourself for the sensation of a burning wallet.

The legendary Saul Bass was one of the most influential graphic designers of the 20th century, lending his unique unique vision to everything from corporate logos to motion picture title sequences. About the only thing the man didn't design during his career was video game. Now, thanks to NotDoba, you can now get an idea of what that would be like: it's a fun, frantic indie game that plays like a Saul Bass title sequence brought to life.

According to designer Adam Curtis, the initial inspiration for NotDoba's look and feel was the opening credits to Stephen Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, which was, in itself, a pastiche of Bass's title sequences. After learning more about his work, Curtis decided to base his game's audio-visual look and feel upon some of Bass's best Hollywood design work.

"The characters themselves are an amalgamation of the Anatomy of a Murder and Man With The Golden Arm poster designs, and the menus and fonts are derivative of the broken geometrical aesthetic he's well known for across his works," Curtis says.

Featuring a peppy jazz score, NotDoba plays something like a cross between Spy vs. Spy, Dance Dance Revolution, and Street Fighter. It's a two-player game, in which a pair of colorful, cubist agents rush down a hallway towards one another, racing to claim a briefcase. Each match plays out over the course of a few seconds, moving to the blares of trumpets in a rapid fire Bass-ian montage, according to the keys you press. Each frame, you can run forward, fire a pistol, or slide; like in "Rock Paper Scissors," all three actions are weak to a specific countermove. You win when you reach the briefcase, or kill the opposing player.

If that doesn't make sense, it's okay: it only takes a few seconds of playing the game to get it. Tongue firmly in cheek, NotDoba Curtis describes the game as a "near-literal deconstruction with chess. Only with rectangles. And guns." More seriously, he says the gameplay was inspired by the game industry's increased interest in couch co-op gaming. "With titles such as Nidhogg and Samurai Gunn setting the foundations for pacing, I had a confident sense in what I wanted to start," he says.

But while NotDoba's gameplay is undeniably addictive, it's the aesthetic which really helps inspire the game. If you want to try NotDoba, you can download it for PC or Mac for just $3.49. As for the game's weird name, don't worry about it: it's supposed to be nonsensical.

Falling somewhere between an infographic, a web comic, and an animated TED talk, Neurotic Neurons, an interactive graphic by artist Nicky Case, is charming, educational, funny, sad, and strangely hopeful. It's ostensibly an interactive explainer of how neurons works, but it's so much more than that.

At its most basic, Neurotic Neurons is an interactive model that explains how the cogs of the nervous system make connections, and then explores how they can be programmed and reprogrammed. The visualization lays out neuroscientific concepts like Hebbian Learning and Anti-Hebbian Learning, core components of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). In essence, Case's visualization explains how, if a dog were to bite you, the "dog" neuron and the "pain" neuron fire next to each other, make a connection, and lead you to be afraid of dogs. Likewise, to deprogram this connection, you need to trigger the "dog" neuron without firing the "pain" neuron.

What makes Neurotic Neurons more than just an explainer on behavior hacking, though, is that it has autobiographical slant, with Case seemingly working out how his own brain works, and why he harbors the phobias and neuroses that he has. At the end, Case asks you to help him deprogram his own neurons of their negative connections with crowds, social disapproval, and densely packed holes. When you successfully deprogram Case, you feel strangely hopeful, as if, through helping Case work out some of his own issues through CBT hacking, maybe you can deal with some of your own.

This isn't Case's first interactive animation: he also teamed-up with Vi Hart for the Parable of the Polygons, a "playable post" on the destructiveness of intolerance and biased social norms, as well as the Coming Out Simulator, a semi-fictionalized account of Case "coming out as queer to [his] conservative Asian parents." But Neurotic Neurons feels like his most accomplished work to date.

If you like it, Case has a Patreon, which is sorely underfunded. Throw him a few bucks. This is a designer I'd like to see more work from.

There's no shortage of well-designed playgrounds in the world, but far rarer is the playground built squarely for designers. So London design duo Isabel + Helen decided to make one: a sculptural swing set that pays homage to the Constructivist art movement, even as it allows a couple of designers to scrape the sky with their feet.

Created for this year's London Design Festival, the Constructivist Swing Set is made up brightly colored, geometric shapes, bringing to mind he work of Constructivist graphic designers like Rodchenko or Eli Lissitzky. Two of these shapes, a triangle and a square, are actually swings, which enclose the rider and act as seats. If you've ever been a kid with a friend who pretend their swings were dogfighting airplanes, this looks like an ideal set-up.

Perhaps the most clever aspect is that the swing also functions as a subtle a critique on some of the reductive aspects of Constructivism. To ride the Constructivist Swing Set is, by design, to take a narrower view of the world around you: the swings on the set have been designed to enclose the person sitting on them, limiting their view of the horizon to a slim vertical stripe.. According to Isabel + Helen, the swing is a continuation of a previous project, called the Constructivist Playground, which allowed them to both pay homage to a sometimes oppressive art movement in a liberating and playful way.

If you'd like to take a go on the Constructivist Swing Set, it will be open to the public until the end of the month at the Chelsea College of Arts, as part of their alumni show.

[via Designboom]

Let's be fair: most lampshades are pretty hideous, and they're permanently affixed to your lamp. The Interlace, by Taiwanese design studio Viichen Design, looks to decouple the lampshade from your light source, instead allowing you to defuse your light any way you wish through the placement of three attractive, wire mesh screens.

The Interlaced screen works almost like a microphone windscreen, but for light instead of sound. By putting one or more screens in front of a light, you can gently dampen it. The light passing through the mesh projects shadows. The more screens you interlace, the more you can influence the way the light diffuses through the room, like daylight seen through a screen door.

That's not an accidental similarity. According to the designer, the Interlace screen was designed after seeing the moon through a screen window in a traditional Chinese house. But the Interlace screen allows for a lot more customization of the light coming into your room than a standard screen or lampshade. There's even a filter you can place between the light and the screen to create different colors and effects.

The Interlace comes in three configurations: a perfectly round screen, an oblong horizontal one, and an oblong vertical screen. Depending on how you place them around your light source, you can drastically alter the mood of your room's lighting. And just saying: the Interlace would look pretty spectacular around that giant moon lamp.

[via Designboom]

In Britain, Maggie's is a nonprofit charity aimed at giving cancer patients support, information, and advice. It was named after Maggie Keswick Jencks, the wife of architectural critic Charles Jencks, and as such, it's got a deep bench of designers who have worked with the charity, including Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, and Thomas Heatherwick.

The latest talent to help Maggie's is Benjamin Hubert. His agency, Layer, set out to help Maggie's design a new Change Box that wouldn't just stand out from the sea of non-descript charity coffee cans, but actually encourage people to give more than they already would.

Instead of having a can-like design, the new Maggie's change box looks almost like a silicon vase, dangling from a handle. It's soft and inviting, bowing almost humbly towards the giver. "We wanted to give it personality, without turning it into a cartoon character, so we gave it a little hint of bowing," Hubert says. And rather than opting for an array of stickers or mottos to brand the box, Layer's design limits itself to tastefully imprinting Maggie's in the inner lip of the Change Box mouth, as well as the charity's slogan across the base: "People with cancer need places like this."

Originally, Hubert tells me, Maggie's approached Layer to design a chair for their centers. "We said, sure, we could do that, but we think design can be used a lot more powerfully than just making chairs," he says. "We asked if there was anything else we could do for Maggie's that would make a bigger impact?"

Ultimately, Maggie's and Layer mutually rested upon the challenge of designing a better charity box. In the U.K. as in America, most charity boxes are tatty, plastic boxes that are placed near store counters. After hitting the streets though and photographing as many people as they could interacting with these boxes, Layer found out: people didn't. To most people, charity boxes had become essentially invisible: mere "background noise," Hubert says, "disappearing between the newspapers and Chupa Chups."

The company is just now rolling out 300 of the new Change Boxes across the U.K. After that, Layer will examine the results, and if necessary, see how the design can be altered based on how it performs. "The true test of this is measuring how the donations come in," says Hubert. "The real reason we did this was to help raise more money, not just raise brand awareness."

Marshmallow Laser Feast's VR headsets aren't meant for the living room, but rather the middle of the forest. Resembling round diving helmets with viewports of moss, they let you experience the forest through the eyes and ears of animals when placed over your head. This, it turns out, is trippier than it seems.

Dubbed "In The Eyes Of The Animal," participants are capable of experiencing the forest, just as some of the native animals do. Since the likes of foxes, birds, and forest deer see things in different wavelengths and fields of vision than we do, "In The Eyes Of The Animal" uses VR to mimic that experience. In addition to letting you see the forest through an animal's eyes, Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) also leverages binauraul sound design to put you in an animal's ears. Participants can even "feel" the sounds of the forest thanks to Subpac, a wearable subwoofer.

The project uses a combination of LiDAR, CT scanning, and aerial 360-degree drone filming. Able to successfully recreated a sizable chunk of Grizedale Forest—an area in Britain's Lake District famous for its sculptures—MLF populated its VR world with flora and fauna, either scanned using a photogrammetry rig or from the Natural History Museum's collection.

MLF co-founder Barney Steel says that the ultimate goal of "In The Eyes Of The Animal" was to leverage VR in such a way to challenge people's perceptions of the inner life of a forest. "We've always had a hunger for hacking people's senses by combining art and technology," he says. "Using VR to immerse someone in the sights and sounds of animals creates empathy by simulating the way that others sense the world. This type of first person perspective experience is—in my opinion—VR at its best."

"In The Eyes Of The Animal" was created for the Abandon Normal Devices Festival, a roaming U.K. arts festival. The virtual reality outdoor sculpture is currently on display in Grizedale Forest, but with enough interest, Marshmallow Laser Feast hopes to share it with the rest of the world in the future.

The bicycle is one of our best hopes when it comes to alleviating many of the world's transportation issues. But even though they are cleaner, healthier, and more efficient to own and ride than an automobile, bikes simply don't get the love they deserve.

That's a design problem, says Agustín Agustinoy. His company wants to change the way we think about bikes: from big, dumb, and bulky to sleek, smart, and individualistic. His alternative is the Gi Flybike, a collapsible e-bike that aims to solve many of the practical design issues with bicycle owning.

According to Agustinoy, there is a number of issues that prevent people from commuting on bikes more. First, there's the sweat factor: People don't want to get sweaty exerting themselves when they're heading in for a meeting or day at the office. Bikes are also inconvenient to lock up, pick up, or store when they're not in use. Finally, Agustinoy argues that most bikes look 20 years old: They're not modern looking, and so people don't feel as comfortable expressing their personality through them in the same way as they do, say, a car.

The Gi FlyBike aims to solve all of those problems. First, it's an electric bike, so you don't have to exert yourself nearly as much riding it as you would a normal bike: On a single charge, the Gi FlyBike can make a bike ride of up to 40 miles feel effortless. It's also got a futuristic look to it, something a little more concept car than rusty velocipede.

One of the major innovations about the Gi FlyBike, though, is that it's fully collapsible, making it easy to haul up a flight of stairs or take on a bus. Folding bikes are nothing new, of course, but they usually come with design trade-offs. Most folding bikes have very small wheels that makes them look "like clown bikes," says Agustinoy. They're also, comparatively, a bit of a pain to fold. But the Gi FlyBike is different. It not only has full-size wheels, but it collapses just by flipping a toggle and rolling the bike forward on its wheels, all in a single fluid motion that can be accomplished in less than a second.

The Gi FlyBike is also smart. It connects over Bluetooth to your smartphone, which allows you to track your ride, but also to turn on the bike's integrated lights, remind you where you parked, and unlock the FlyBike's integrated lock. This last feat can be accomplished automatically when you get close to your bike: If you lose your phone, a conventional key can also be used to unlock it. You can also do cool things with the app, like lend your bike to a friend, just by sending them an invite. Agustinoy says a major design focus of the FlyBike was to integrate as many of the accessories people need for their commute right into the chassis of the bike itself.

None of this functionality comes cheap, although the price of the FlyBike is within swinging distance of many higher-end analog bikes. Now available on Kickstarter, the FlyBike's pre-order price starts at $2,000, with an estimated July 2016 delivery date.