Design
Possibility: Refugees drive affordable housing innovation in Europe
From The Intelligent Optimist Magazine Fall/Winter 2016 European nations are finding that by working on one problem—sheltering the waves of refugees in ways that help integrate them into their new homes—they also can address other, seemingly intractable problems: Affordable housing for Read More...
Ode to Abeer Seikaly, Amman, Jordan
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 A new kind of mobile home People move. It’s what they have always done and what they will keep doing. Architect, artist and cultural producer Abeer Seikaly, from Amman, Jordan, designed an elegant and practical home for people who are forced to move on to a Read More...
How self-driving cars will profoundly change real estate
Menlo Ventures managing director Venky Ganesan says that urban spaces will change dramatically once self-driving cars become widespread. "The average house is roughly 3,000 sq ft and it's been going up. The size of your garage is roughly 500 sq ft. That means roughly 15 to 20% of your living space Read More...
Beijing mega-region plan aims to alleviate poverty, but some are wary
Ming Jun snaps some dusty twigs and drags them indoors to cook lunch for his daughter and heat his mud brick home. The Chinese farmer is down to his last pile of firewood, and he can't afford any more. It's just ahead of the Lunar New Year, but Ming says he feels no holiday cheer. "Other families Read More...
This Argentinian artist is building a "pantheon of banned books" in Germany
Ever since the printing-press was invented, different regimes have tried to censor books they found controversial. In fact, Argentinian artist Marta Minujín worked with researchers from the University of Kassel to identify over 72,000 forbidden titles going back to the early 1500s. As a massive Read More...
Ants mastered sustainable agriculture 30 million years ago
Ants cultivated designer crops in controlled environments millions of years before humans figured out how to push seeds into the ground to grow food, scientists reported in a study Wednesday. It has long been known that dozens of ants species tend and harvest fungi in subterranean farms, mostly to Read More...
How Rotterdam became a world leader in sustainable urban design
When Helly Scholten makes dinner, if she needs a tomato or squash or an onion, she heads upstairs–the top floor of her house is a 440-square-foot indoor vegetable garden. She starts cooking before the sun goes down, while warmth is still flooding through the glass walls of the kitchen Read More...
A Swedish suburb is being redesigned to make it 'more feminist'
A suburb of Stockholm is being redesigned to make it more feminist. Housing company Svenska Bostader (SB) is remodelling the area of Husby in the Swedish capital in an attempt to attract more women and make female residents feel safer. Changes are being made in the district, which is on a Swedish Read More...
How to design our neighborhoods for happiness
Biology is destiny, declared Sigmund Freud. But if Freud were around today, he might say “design is destiny”—especially after taking a stroll through most modern cities. The way we design our communities plays a huge role in how we experience our lives. Neighborhoods built without Read More...
The surprising ways neuroscience can help design smarter, more intuitive cities
We have used economics, creativity, and technology to shape the built environment—and now it’s time for science to become the final piece in this puzzle. By integrating aspects of cognitive neuroscience into the design process, we can build cities that are primed for their Read More...