If every moment in human history was a single steel ball, Histography is like an 4-D Newton's Cradle, visualizing how all of these events bump up and knock up against each other on a 14-billion-year time frame. It's beautifully hypnotic—and impressively, it's all sourced from Wikipedia, which means that it keeps on updating itself.

Created by Matan Stauber, Histography is an interactive timeline spanning the Big Bang to whatever was in the news yesterday. It basically draws all historical events from Wikipedia, visualizing each as a black dot. You can click on each dot to get more information about the event it represents. These dots are then ordered chronologically from left to right, with simultaneous events being stacked vertically on top of each other. The result is that the Histography looks something like a pointillist sound wave, growing and shrinking according to how noisy a year, era, or epoch was.

There's a number of different ways you can browse Histography. The default view shows every historical event from Wikipedia's database at once, which you can then filter down by category: for example, by literature, politics, assassinations, and so on. But I think the 'Editorial Stories' view (accessible by clicking the Histography logo) is more interesting. It represents Wikipedia's database as a nearly endless spiral, which you can descend through scrolling, zooming right down to the Big Bang.

Histography is one of the best data visualizations we've seen in a while. Check it out here.

When we see a dollar bill laying around, we see buying power. But without a numeral printed on each bill, paper money isn't anything more than a proprietary piece of paper made out of a cotton/linen blend, just like the kind you might find upholstering your furniture.

Commissioned to design a project for the National Bank, London-based designer Angela Mathis decided to deconstruct currency from around the world and turn it into a textile. She then used this textile to upholster a number of custom-designed stools.

She calls it "Value." As designed, Value comes in the form of four stools, each upholstered with a potpourri of different-colored currencies, reduced to shreds. Depending on how she combines these currencies—the American dollar, the purple English pound, the brown Indonesian rupees, and the color dense euro—Mathis was able to create different colors, textures, and effects (such as marbling).

This might seem like an extraordinarily wanton (and maybe criminal) destruction of money. Not so. The artist points out that the average life of a note is scarcely more than 18 months, at which point, it is decommissioned. In America, you can actually buy a five-pound bag filled with $10,000 worth of shredded currency for just $45.

This is the sort of currency Mathis used for her project, making it far more affordable than it looks like it would be at first glance. She asked herself: what will happen to all of this cotton and linen when the digitization of currency has made physical bills almost obsolete? Value imagines a world in which currency is routinely repurposed, because it has no inherent value anymore, just material worth.

Many of Frank Gehry's designs, such as the Guggenheim Bilbao, or the Los Angeles's Walt Disney Concert Hall, looks like the billowing top sails of a fleet of boats. Now the 86-year-old architect is finally applying the aesthetic where it belongs: to his first ever yacht.

To make sure he came up with a design that could actually float, Gehry worked with Argentine naval architect Germán Frers. "Don't let me get too crazy," Gehry reportedly told him. "It has to work." Built out of traditional larch wood and accented with titanium, it looks modern only in detail, like the webbed planking of the steering wheel, or the elaborate lattice-work glass windows on the deck and the stern. But the profile is still very traditional: a curved crown with a flat, cabinless deck.

Apparently, while this looks natural to us landlubbers, Gehry's design created a lot of consternation at sea. Town&Country's Vicky Ward reports on many of the technical difficulties of Gehry's design, including his insistence on using heavy wood for what is meant to be a racing yacht, and lattice windows which could make the hull weaker.

In fact, according to Ward's piece, there seems to have been considerable surprise on the part of Gehry and his crew when they dropped it in water and it didn't immediately sink. She writes: "After joining Gehry in Hyannis Port and going aboard the sloop, Frers, and later [boat builder Steve] White, had the same reaction. 'It works,' both men said with considerable relief."

Despite its unconventional design, it's apparently a fast little sloop, clocking the fastest time in last summer's Round the Island race around Martha's Vineyard. The ship's name? Foggy, a nickname based on the acronym for Frank Owen Gehry. The ship even features Gehry's signature on the stern. No one's ever said Gehry's bashful about who his number one love is.

Read more about Gehry's yacht at Town&Country.

Origami is the Japanese art of folding paper into beautiful shapes. The Folding Lamp features an even rarer form of origami: it elegantly folds light, giving a room any ambience you want it to have.

Designed by Belgian architect Thomas Hick, the Folding Lamp is a standard table lamp with an origami-like shade. The shade is made from perforated sheets of metal, which can be folded and unfolded around the LED bulb to create different configurations of light. You can also adjust the quality of the light just by delicately touching anywhere on the body.

The Folding Lamp should fit on almost any table, too: fully folded, the lamp is only 14-inches wide and 10-inches high, although it will obviously unfold to larger than that, if you wish. According to Hick, the inspiration for the Origami lamp came when he decided to create a personalized gift for a close friend who was getting married.

"I used to play around with paper and geometrical forms before, so I took the challenge of creating something beautiful from a plain sheet of metal," he says. "Due to other priorities, this project was put on hold for a while. One day, seeing my kids play creatively with scissors and paper it got me thinking about this forgotten project and inspired me to re-launch it."

The Folding Lamp is not yet available for sale, but it will be launching on Kickstarter later this year, for a still unpublished price. You can sign up to be emailed when it launches here.

Furniture usually obscures the geometry of a space. For their latest collection, Nendo wanted to design some side tables that actually enhance it. The result is the Border Table, the latest experiment in wire frame from the Japanese design firm, which exists to solidly outline the corners and intersections of a room, while also giving you a place to balance a plant or a cup of coffee.

Presented as part of a solo show at the Eye of Gyre Gallery in Tokyo, the Border Table isn't much more than a square metal rod with a small disc welded to it. What makes it interesting is how this rod is bent. Depending on how it is positioned or bent, the Border Table can function as a free-standing table in the middle of the room, a side table near a corner, or even be positioned around a column as a series of shelves.

According to Nendo, the Border Table was actually designed to be placed around areas of a room that are traditionally awkward for furniture to fit, like near columns, in corners, or near stairs. But, of course, the added perk of this design is it serves almost as a double-underline under the interesting and sometimes idiosyncratic geometry of any space. Better a table than a Magic Marker, right?

If you've ever thought about buying a crazy set of frames, only to shy away from wearing something so wacky on your permanent "face," Biz Eyes could make it easier for you to be more daring with your eyewear: It's a crazy, modular line of 3-D-printed frames that can be easily mixed, matched, and swapped out, according to your mood.

Inspired by everything from pop culture to pop art, Basquiat to comic book superheroes, the Biz Eyes frames are designed to make it as easy as you want to get extreme with your eyewear. Biz Eyes are made of two parts: a sturdy, transparent base frame, in which your prescription lenses sit, and the spectacles' faceplates themselves, which are 3-D-printed out of custom-dyed white nylon and resin.

Although all of the base designs look pretty wacky, there's no reason your Biz Eyes have to be extreme. The core concept here is that this is a platform for modular eyewear, so the actual "design" of the frame simply twists on and off in pieces. So if you feel like wearing Steve Jobs's glasses one minute and Bruce Vilanch's the next, you don't have to buy separate frames: You can just screw on a different face plate, as easily as putting a new case on your smartphone.

Biz Eyes is the brainchild of Nasim Sehat, an Iranian architect and designer currently living in Shanghai. She's definitely emphasizing the more experimental, pop art side of the Biz Eyes concept right now—the sort of glasses you might wear on New Year's Eve in Rapture—but if you want more traditional frames alongside the artier ones, you can get in touch.

Both abstract masters who explored the possibilities of primary colors in their work, there are many parallels between Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky. Even so, you'd never confuse Kandinsky's vibrant, swirling Yellow-Red-Blue for any of Piet Mondrian's strictly geometric Compositions, unless you were staring at it through this pixel art magic mirror, which reveals just how similar the two artists' masterpieces really were to one another.

Created by Berlin-based designer Florian Born, Encoded Mirrors is a flat, square array of around 1,600 static mirrors. Positioned in front of Kandinsky's painting, at first, the surface just seems to be a riot of different colors. But if you stare at the Encoded Mirror from just the right spot, you see that each individual mirror has been precisely placed, so that it reflects only a tiny patch of the painting's color. If you find the sweet spot, Kandinsky's Yellow-Red-Blue transforms into Mondrian's Composition.

Encoding Mirrors was developed as part of the University of Arts Berlin's 2015 Digital Klasse. It's a very clever design, one that aims to educate art lovers about the shared color theories that inform both Mondrian and Kandinsky's work. "Both [Kandinsky and Mondrian] had different approaches in terms of form, but when it comes to the choice of color, they agreed," explains Born. "The three primary colors—red, blue, and yellow—are the most essential in their work." You might never see this similarity if you saw the paintings side by side, but through Encoding Mirrors, you can literally watch one transform into the other.

You can check out more of Florian Born's work here.

Millennials are officially old news. Now, generation Z—the cohort of people born after the late '90s—is about to get behind the wheel and hit the road. This is why Nissan is asking itself a simple question: How do you market a car to an entire generation of people whose eyeballs are perpetually glued to a touchscreen?

Enter the Teatro for Dayz, which is essentially one giant touchscreen. The name sounds like generation Z gibberish, but that's exactly the point. It's a concept car aimed at "share natives" who want to learn to drive a car only if it happens inside a physical manifestation of social media as an electric Kool-Aid acid test gestalt.

And this is completely different from just customizing a car. The idea is for the car to have the ability to match any given mood of its gen-Z passengers. In other words, it's for people who want to be able to skin their car's interior like they change their iPhone wallpaper or their profile pic.

Every surface inside the Teatro for Dayz is pure white by default. When the car is off, all the driver sees is a steering wheel, an accelerator, and brake pedals, but when on, can be customized according to the driver's preferences, like Android widgets. For example, you could download a fuel efficiency meter, or see how many tons of CO2 your car put off during a custom trip. You can also effectively skin the inside of the vehicle, so that the inside of the car reflects the season of the year. You could even get more extreme with it, transforming the inside of your car into a 360-degree IMAX of the latest Fast and the Furious movie, endlessly on repeat.

Nissan doesn't really explain how the entire inside of the car is a display, although given the fact that no one exactly wants to sit on a hot glass LCD, my guess is the plan is to use some kind of projection mapping to achieve the effect. Either way, to this gen-Xer, the Teatro for Dayz feels like a fever-dream blend of genuinely good ideas (software-customizable interface panels and gauges) and ones that make me pray that self-driving cars take over the roads sooner rather than later. When I'm crossing the street on my walker, a few decades from now, I'd rather be run over by a robot than a "share native" driving a living Snapchat rainbow barfie around town. But for now, the Nissan Teatro for Dayz remains just a concept.

When MIT's Tangible Media Group first unveiled its shapeshifting display, the inFORM, one thing the team pointed out was that it had a lot of possibilities for the manufacturing and industrial sectors. With Kinetic Blocks, a follow-up of sorts to the inFORM, the Tangible Media Group chose to explore this potential, showing how the conveyor-belt assembly lines of today could be replaced by flowing rivers of 3-D pixels.

Like the inFORM, Kinetic Blocks is a flatbed "shape display" made up of computer-controlled pins, with a Microsoft Kinect as an overhanging eye. What has been supercharged here is the ability and granularity with which those pins can manipulate objects. In their video demonstration, the Tangible Media Group shows how the Kinetic Blocks platform can be used to stack, rotate, twist, and move blocks, without any human intervention. It can even construct preprogrammed structures.

It's true that the original inFORM could manipulate objects to some extent. But the execution was clumsy, and it required a human operator to manipulate an object on top of the display. Not only is Kinetic Blocks fully automated and programmable, but it's much, much more speedy and accurate at manipulating the objects you place within its field. You can also use Kinetic Blocks to record the motions of a human operator assembling something. The program will then analyze the human's motions, and learn how to recreate the assembly from scratch.

As with the inFORM before it, you have to use your imagination a little to see the application of shape displays, but once you do, you can't unsee it. Right now, assembly lines require expensive human or robot operators to assemble a product. Something like Kinetic Blocks could transform the conveyor belt of an assembly line into a robot operator. Imagine automobiles or iPhones that seemingly assemble themselves as they move down the factory line. Kinetic Blocks isn't capable of making that happen yet, mostly because it doesn't have enough pixels to finely manipulate small objects, but the concept proves it's possible: All we need is for shape displays to go Retina.

[via Design Boom]

There's a new trend happening. Call it the Daddening of Tech: men who have made their fortunes in Silicon Valley suddenly having children, and becoming concerned that the walled gardens they in part helped to create have shut their kids out from learning to code. Now one is trying to fix the problem . . . with robots.

Vikas Gupta, Google's ex-head of consumer payments, is a dad with a coding conscience. After his daughter was born, he became very concerned about how she would learn to code when all of the smartphones and tablets kids are growing up on today are for the passive consumption of content, not for tinkering or building things. So he founded Wonder Workshop, a company that focuses on one problem: making coding, and learning to code, fun and easy for every child through play. His solution? A couple of cute, Pixar-ish robots called Dash and Dot that kids can easily learn to program through a connected smartphone or tablet app.

Conceptually, Wonder Workshop's concept is a lot like a mash-up of two apps we've previously covered on Co.Design, Tinybop's The Everything Machine and Robot Factory. Using a colorful touchscreen-based app called Wonder to connect an assortment of code modules, kids can program the Dash and Dot robots to do all sorts of things: For example, navigate a race course, dance in a circle when you clap your hands, or even operate as simple accelerometer-based musical instruments.

The difference between Dash and Dot is ability. At $49.99, Dot is the more affordable robot: He's basically a big robot head, slightly Minion-like in appearance, loaded with sensors and accelerometers. He can't get around by himself, but he can be programmed to talk, flash lights, blink, and make all sorts of sounds. Dash, meanwhile, is the autonomous version of Dot. Costing $149.99, he's got wheels that allow him to get around by himself, allowing kids to learn how to program a robot to move. In a fun twist, both robots are compatible with Lego bricks through a $20 accessory, which allows kids to personalize their robots. There's also an optional Launcher that can be connected to Dash to turn him into a robot catapult.

It's all very cute, but Dash and Dot represent an attempt to solve a very real problem facing kids and parents today, says Gupta. In the United States, most kids learn computer science only in high school, and even then, it's an elective course. "There's a big gap in computer education in this country," Gupta says. "The world is becoming more infused with technology and software by the day, but children aren't being taught to master those skills."

Without learning how to make computers work for them, Gupta worries that kids growing up in our increasingly connected world will feel stripped of agency. "Coding isn't just a valuable skill for programmers," he argues. "Doctors, architects, engineers: no matter what a kid wants to do, they won't be nearly as good at it if they don't understand computer science." Dash and Dot are Wonder Workshop's attempt to start empowering kids as young as six with a deep understanding of computer science by making coding and robotics fun, affordable, and accessible to everyone.

Last time we heard from Dadaviz, a team of infographic auteurs based in Tel Aviv, they were looking to launch the YouTube of data visualization. Here's the bad news: they totally failed to do that. "Around two months after launch, we figured out most of our traffic came from the visualizations we did ourselves," says Dadaviz founder Jishae Evers. "So we realized we'd be better off just focusing on that, and dropped the curating aspect."

But Dadaviz's dropping of its original mission didn't spell failure. In fact, it opened a door. The company has now been acquired by Vocativ, the deep web media company first founded in 2013 to use data mining technology to discover and tell stories. It's all part of Vocativ's strategy to double down on data visualization.

As part of its new place within Vocativ, Dadaviz will work to generate data visualizations for stories on the fly, integrating with the rest of Vocativ's staff. Unlike a regular newsroom, Vocativ's approach to generating content is a little different: instead of every story going from an editor to a beat writer to the art department, the company has broken its newsroom down into self-contained units. Although these units are overseen by a senior editor, the actual mix of people within it may contain video producers, graphic designers, social media producers, GIF makers, and so on.

"The mix differs, but it's up to these units to figure out the best way to tell a story with all of the data at their disposal," says Vocativ's Chief Creative Officer Gregory Gittrich. That data is supplied by Verne, a proprietary tool Vocativ uses to scan the deep web for interesting stories, social media posts, and other assets that might otherwise get missed. With Dadaviz's team of data visualizers now absorbed into Vocativ's ranks, and Evers now reporting as the deputy managing editor of visual storytelling unit, Vocativ now has over 20 journalists on staff focused on data visualization, and is capable of producing them almost 24 hours a day.

The acquisition of Dadaviz is part of a bigger push to restructure Vocativ's content strategy. Since Gittrich came on board in January, Vocativ has shifted its strategy to visual storytelling. "We're very focused on creating stories that live in social media now," says Gittrich. The idea is that Vocativ's audience might never actually visit the website, but instead experience Vocativ content through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on.

It's a strategy that has already paid huge dividends. Since January, Vocativ has seen a 13,029% increase in Facebook shares. That's not a typo. Facebook comments have similarly increased over 14,000%. Views of Vocativ's videos have gone from 1.6 million a month in January to 95.8 million last month. And despite the fact that Vocativ's new strategy is to produce content that you never need to leave Facebook to consume, the traffic on Vocativ.com has shot through the roof: they're up to 8 million uniques a month in November, from 2.5 million in January. Gittrich thinks the addition of the Dadaviz team to Vocativ's newsroom is only going to make those numbers more impressive.

Dadaviz's acquisition is just the latest example of data viz going pro. "I think media companies are hiring us up because there's a huge, young audience flocking to data viz," says Evers. But why? It's "no bullshit journalism," according to Evers: just an attractive, insightful presentation of the facts that allows readers to make up their own mind. It's also an extremely friendly format for a mobile-first audience, says Evers. It requires a change in how you go about designing them, but data visualizations make their biggest impact when they can be used without scrolling on a smartphone.

That's why Vocativ's buying Dadaviz. In an industry that is still having a hard time figuring out mobile, Vocativ has recognized data viz as every bit as viral as GIFs and videos. "With the Dadaviz team on board, we know we can do more," says Gittrich. "We know this approach works, and we know it resonates."

Save for electricians, no one gives much thought to fuse boxes. After all, if a fuse box is working, it's just going to be collecting dust in your basement, right? Not necessarily. In apartments, fuse boxes are just as likely to be visible as your thermostat, so why shouldn't they be as nicely designed as a Nest? And even in the basement, fuse boxes are confusing to operate and badly labeled.

There's a lot of room for design to improve the old fuse box, and make it a proud member of the Internet of things. And that's just what designer Dan Salisbury has imagined with his concept for the Fuse, a 21st-century fuse box that both conforms to industry standard, but has the brains and beauty of a Nest product.

Envisioned with an e-ink display and a white aluminum body worth of Apple, the Fuse would supercharge the traditional fuse box in a number of clever ways. First, unlike regular fuse boxes, the Fuse would be more than just a panel of switches that shut off when there's a problem. It would also display exactly how much juice each fuse is taking up, using e-ink to display the wattage and name of each room. This e-ink panel could provides useful safety tips for when a fuse does get tripped. And with this design, the switches all contain LED strips which illuminates them in the dark, perfect in case of power outage.

Sweetening the deal is a connected smart app even forecasts how much electricity you're using, what it's likely to cost, and how it compares with your historical usage, as well as alerting you in case there's a problem.

It's an incredibly smart concept, which is why it won both a Red Dot Award and the BraunPrize this year. While it sadly remains just an idea for now, it's obvious that the Fuse is a natural extension of the smart home concept that utility companies should be subsidizing in the future. As Nest has shown, good design is even more important for the appliances and gadgets that serve as gateways to the most important utilities in our lives.

[via Yanko Design]

Especially in the realm of science literature, there was a golden age of graphic design in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. Notable for its use of abstraction, minimalism, and geometric forms, it was a school of design that owed just as much to Paul Rand as it did Sol LeWitt. Now animation designer Henning M. Lederer is bringing these static covers to life.

A designer hailing from Essen, Germany, Lederer's Covers takes 55 vintage covers with titles like Heidegger, Being, And Truth and The Strange Story of the Quantum and animates their bold geometric shapes. Although many of these books are relatively unknown, they all feature bold abstract covers that make them vintage paperback catnip for graphic design nerds.

What makes animation such a wonderful method of exploring these covers is that it reveals the underlying dynamism of their designs. Though static, in all of these covers, motion is already being implied. Lederer's work is so seamless, it seems like he's just hitting the 'play' button on these covers, instead of animating them.

I love it. It makes me wonder what the rock stars of graphic design in the '60s would have done with the animated GIF, then realize it probably wouldn't be too different from what they actually achieved with static imagery.

If you're interested in checking out more vintage book cover design, check out Lederer's sources at Montague Projects and Book Worship.

[via Mental Floss]

Calculus made James Stewart a millionaire. Starting in the late 1970s, when the Canadian-born mathematician published his first calculus textbook, Stewart wrote over 30 bestselling calculus textbooks. Last year alone, he sold 500,000 books, from which he made around $26 million.

When Stewart finally built his dream home, he decided to make it a house that calculus built. This resulted in the Integral House, an 18,000-square-foot property covered in flowing curves that would be impossible to recreate without using integral calculus, his forté.

Designed by Canadian architects Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe, the sumptuous Integral House stands in Rosedale, Toronto. It's a house that seems even more individualistic and beautiful than other North American designer houses, like Boston's Gropius House, only far more grand.

Featuring panoramic ravine views on all sides, the Integral House appears to be only two stories tall from the front, but it rise to five stories tall as it moves back. Sotheby's describes its aesthetic as "passion, curves, and voluminous space," and that's as good a descriptor as any. "I think it's one of the most important private houses built in North America in a long time," Glenn D. Lowry, director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, once told the Wall Street Journal. "The curved walls make it almost impossible to relate it to spaces that you know. It's one of the most remarkable houses I've ever been in."

What's so unique about the house is that every single room, wall, and surface really looks a beautiful math problem, its curves brought to life with exquisite taste, thanks to the power of calculus. It's full of wonderful little touches, from the staggering view from Stewart's private study, to the private infinity pool, to the dedicated concert hall (Stewart was also a violinist), in which Phillip Glass and Steve Reich once performed. Even Stewart's pet peeves are catered to: for example, the fact that the electrical sockets are completely invisible in every room.

The Integral House took six years to build, and was finally completed in 2009. Sadly, Stewart didn't get to live there long: the mathematician passed away last year of a rare blood disease. Now on the market for around $18 million USD, it's sad that a house this unique will never be open to the public.

Maybe we should launch a Kickstarter?

[via Mental Floss, the Guardian]

Superman predates Batman by almost a year, but chances are, you know Batman better. Don't believe me? I bet you can name half-a-dozen Batman villains off the top of your head: the Joker, the Penguin, Catwoman, Two-Face, Scarecrow, Poison Ivy, Bane, and so on. But what about Superman's villains? Unless you're a big comics fan, Lex Luthor might be the only one you can name.

Brooklyn's Pop Chart Labs wants to fix that. As a companion piece to their popular map of every Batman villain ever, Pop Chart has grouped all of Superman's villains into distinct kingdoms, phyla, and genuses, all according to their weird similarities.

The truth is, Superman's pretty much invincible, which probably helps to explain why his foes are lesser known. I've come across some of them: General Zod, Bizarro, Doomsday and Cyborg Superman among them. But the Kryptonoid, Faora-Hu-Ul, Duke Duvvil, and Kuku the Klown? No idea. Which is sort of the charm of this poster.

In all comics, there's a strange taxonomy that dictates the universe, and Pop Chart Labs does a great job of illuminating it here. For example, Superman tends to fight a lot of "men of certain type" (i.e. super men), like Kryptonite Man, Futureman, Moonman, and Glowman. Because he basically is a modern update of one, Superman also tends to face off against a lot of mythological figures, like Atlas, Titano, Sodom, Gomorrah, and... Socrates? And then, of course, there's my favorite category of villains, those with Unpronounceable 5th-Dimensional Names. This is my favorite category of Superman villains, including the legendary impster, Mr. Mxyzptlk (which is not quite so unpronounceable: Mix-Ee-pit-a-lik). But there's also Ferlin Nyxly, Vyndktvk, and Nyzkmulk to learn to pronounce.

Available in a gorgeous print designed around bold primary colors, the Myriad Monikers of Metropolis Menaces is available for purchase from Pop Chart, starting at $20. But you can also buy it as part of a World's Finest set alongside the similar infographic for Batman villains, starting at $36.

MVRDV, the Rotterdam-based architecture firm known for its bold, futuristic designs including everything from small town community centers to South Korean Skygardens to dazzling skyscrapers that look like Twizzlers, is now jumping into the sporting arena. Its latest design is just as much furniture as it architecture though: a comfy red tennis clubhouse that doubles as a seating area for over 200 spectators.

The new building is simply called the Couch, because of course it is. Located in IJburg, near Amsterdam, and built for the appropriately named Tennisclub IJburg, first founded in 2008. The tennis club already has a number of facilities, including 10 clay courts and a tennis school. But with the addition of the Couch, Tennisclub IJburg finally has not just a place to relax between games, but a place to watch them.

"With the Couch, we have integrated sport into society" says MVRDV co-founder and architect Winy Maas. "By turning the roof of the club-house into a tribune, a Centre Court is created. Here we celebrate the talent of the amateur players who are challenged to excel in front of the public. By covering the entire building in red polyurethane the club gains visibility: an advert for sports and movement. The essence of the building is the stimulation of fitness and the fight against obesity and inactivity."

MVRDV developed the clubhouse together with a co-architect, Studio Bouwkunde. In execution, the building is reminiscent of Bjarke Ingels' work on Copenhagen's Gammel Hellerup School. For that project, Ingels used the roof of an undulating rec center and the school's new arts building as common spaces for lounging around, eating meals, and watching sports. MVRDV's take, though, looks warm and accommodating, like a pillow a giant sat on after deciding to sit and watch a tennis match for a spell.

[via Dezeen]

In Star Trek, turbolifts are futuristic transport tubes that whisk in all three dimensions between decks on a starship. Comparatively, Hitachi's latest elevator isn't quite as functional—it doesn't travel in three dimensions, just one—but aesthetically, it's just as cool. It's a sleek elevator design that makes traveling from one another as comfortable as it is futuristic.

Overseen by Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa, Hitachi's new elevator was designed around the tendency of people to hug a corner when they have to travel between floors. Fukasawa's design makes these corners more intimate, by rounding them into comfortable, body-conforming hollows. Yet while Hitachi's elevator makes corners more comfortable, it also takes pains to make the interior less claustrophobic, by raising the ceiling a couple feet.

But that's not the only gorgeous touch. Instead of the standard bank of buttons, Fukasawa's panel is a vertical-oriented LCD control panel, with a minimalist sans-serif UI and an information screen that gives information about the news and weather outside. Meanwhile, the ceiling of Hitachi's elevators has built-in LEDs that mimic the color of ambient light around the building at any time of day.

A recipient of the 2015 Good Design Award, the only thing missing is the ability to travel horizontally as well as vertically. But as we've written before, that technology is coming, as early as 2016. And when that happens, Hitachi's elevator won't just look like a turbolift. It will be one.

[via Dezeen]

Safety first! Even as far back as the inaugural World's Fair in 1851, graphic design has played a big role in extolling the innovations of the industrial age. But industry is also dangerous: it can slice off your hands, electrocute you, light you on fire, and even explode you. Consequently, graphic designers have spent just as much time warning people about the dangers of new and old innovations as they have advertising their virtues.

The design history of the safety poster and other safety materials is the subject of Margin of Error, a new exhibition curated by Matthew Abess at Florida International University's Wolfsonian museum. Starting November 13 and going until next May, it features memorable work by a diverse group of artists including Man Ray, Lewis Hine, Margaret Bourke-White, Herbert Bayer, Julius Klinger, and Louis Lozowick.

Focusing on safety materials produced between 1851 and 1945, the exhibit brings together more than 200 posters, pamphlets, postcards, and brochures. Designed to warn people of the dangers of the changing times, the works caution against everything from changing a light bulb to flying an airplane.

In the safety materials scattered between, Abess argues that you can see reflected the political, social, and economic concerns of the age.

"At one end, you have the year of the first World Fair, this great exhibition dedicated to the Utopia, just on the horizon, that the Industrial Revolution was going to bring forth," explains Abess. "And on the other, you have the end of World War II, when everyone can see that the so-called Utopia has turned into something else entirely."

For example, the exhibition has a series of Italian postcards on display from 1938. The prints look almost like pages from a children's book, but they warn Italians (with amusingly pedantic verbiage) about the dangers of everything from electrocuting yourself in the bathroom to getting your hair caught in a sewing machine. Abess says that these designs were informed by the Fascist government taking responsibility for the well being of all its citizens, therefore viewing them as children of the state.

Another example of this is the bold graphic design from the 1930s. Safety posters during this era tended to show brawny, virile workers mastering machinery, climbing skyscrapers, and so on. At a time when Americans were depressed and exhausted, these posters not only promoted safety, but were a form of propaganda to promote the strength and fortitude of spirit that they wanted the everyday American laborer to possess.

Two of the stand-out pieces in Margin of Error focus on light bulbs, though. The first is a print of a light bulb by the legendary Dadaist visual artist, Man Ray. Unlike other works in the show, it is more a testament to the power of electricity than its dangers. But the other doesn't disappoint: it's a gorgeous, vibrant lithograph by the Austrian designer Joseph Binder of a man being electrocuted while changing a lightbulb, with accompanying text that describes all of the myriad ways in which light bulbs might kill you. "It's such a ubiquitous act now, and everyone changes lightbulbs all the time now, but at the time of this print, the phenomena was so new, no one knew how to do it!" says Abess.

Ultimately, Abess hopes that in addition to amusing and entertaining visitors, Margin of Error will get people thinking more about our relationship with technology and industry, and how we define ourselves in relation to that. "Especially when that completely derails."

It sounds like something out of a gothic story or a fantasy novel, but it's real: the ruins of a magnificent 16th-century temple have just emerged from the bottom of a Mexican river. Unfortunately, though, neither magic nor mysticism were responsible. It was drought.

In the southern Mexico state of Chiapas, the Nezahualcoyotl reservoir was first created in 1966 by the damming of the Grijalva river. Although the dam had positive impact on the region, it also had the unfortunate side effect of drowning the ruins of the Temple of Quechula, a 183-foot long, 42-foot wide, and 30-foot tall building. That's pretty tall, but usually, it's fully covered by the reservoir waters.

Luckily, the Temple was abandoned hundreds of years before, in the great plagues of 1773 to 1776. It doesn't look like it was ever widely used, either. According to architect Carlos Navarete, speaking to the AP, the church was built in 1564, and probably never got a lot of traffic. "It was a church built thinking that this could be a great population center, but it never achieved that," Navarrete said. "It probably never even had a dedicated priest, only receiving visits from those from Tecpatan."

With waters having dropped almost 82 feet this year at the reservoir, the Temple of Quechula has now slowly emerged from the waters once again. It appears that a brisk trade has opened up by local fishermen, who have started ferrying curious tourists out to the once-sunken temple.

It's only the second time since 1966 that the temple has emerged from the waters. The Temple of Quechula previously made an appearance in an even worse drought in 2002, where the water was so low that visitors could actually walk into the church, and perform processions and religious ceremonies.

There was a time not too long ago when all the fonts on the web were pretty much the same: Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman, Comic Sans, Impact, Georgia, Trebuchet, Webdings, maybe some Verdana. But with advances in web technologies over the years, websites can throw pretty much any typeface they want at their visitors. So which fonts are the most overexposed, and which ones are still relatively obscure? Fontreach is a new tool that tells you, by crawling the top million websites and looking at what fonts they call for.

Here's how it works. Go to Fontreach and start typing in the name of a font, say, Impact. Fontreach will then pull up stats about that font's usage on the web. In the case of Impact, it's used by 11,133 of the top million sites on the web, making it the 47th most used digital typeface. Clicking on the font gives you a breakdown of which of the biggest sites are using it. You can also view a numeric ranking of the top fonts on the web, which isn't very surprising at the head of the list (Arial, Verdana, Helvetica Neue are the top three), but gets a lot more interesting the further down you scroll. Ever heard of Cufon, Oswald Stencil, or Love Ya Like Sister? Some sites depend on them. You can even search by domain name.

Fontreach was created by Jason Chen and Jason Chen of Digital Ocean after they started looking for a new typeface for their website. They thought the current typeface they were using, Proxima Nova, was too overexposed. But how to prove it, and find something equally versatile, but much less played out? So they built Fontreach, a tool spinning off Libscore, a previous project that scans the top million sites on the web and examines what JavaScript libraries they are calling up.

Fontreach is more than just a cool web toy, though. It's a useful tool for designers to quantify their understanding of the web, and justify their decisions with hard data. As Chase writes on Medium, web designers are now getting access to hard statistics to back up their gut instincts. "Having certain information at our fingertips can better prepare us in making decisions that shape the web of the future, he writes. "Be it a library, a font, or other usage information, we should have the tools necessary to identify trends in how we build the modern web."