Journal

The Reality Editor is a Minority Report style AR app that makes programming your smart home as easy as connecting the dots.

The end goal of the Internet of Things is to make every object in your life programmable. But our smart objects are still pretty dumb. They don’t talk to each other, and most are only capable of doing one thing; a smart lightbulb for instance can dim and brighten but it can’t tell your TV to change the channel for you. The result of three years of research at MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Lab, Valentin Heun’s Reality Editor aims to address these problems. It’s an augmented reality app that lets you link the smart objects around you together, just by drawing connections with your finger between them.

Read Full Story

Can architecture be future-proof? OMA reckons so and has created a mutable behemoth that combines offices, housing, retail, and more.

There’s no shortage of grand gestures in high-profile buildings tailored like a bespoke suit for a specific client and function. Once the original tenant moves out, however, the structures are often gutted—which is expensive—or demolished—which is taxing on the environment. In designing Rotterdam’s new city hall—dubbed the Timmerhuis—the Office for Metropolitan Architecture opted for a multi-purpose approach. Intended to be future-proof, the pixelated mixed-use structure can morph over time, demonstrating a new paradigm for sustainable urban design.

Read Full Story

A boutique hotel in Barcelona is designed to channel everyone’s favorite brooding Wes Anderson character. Where are the cigarette burns?

Margot Tenenbaum—the excessively eyelined, mink-clad Wes Anderson character who’s inspired many a Halloween costume—has expanded her influence into the hospitality industry. Margot House, a boutique hotel in Barcelona, pays homage to the fictional character with a design that supposedly channels Margot’s now iconic preppy bad-girl style.

Read Full Story

One term you’ll hear a lot in the world of TV writing is “breaking the story.” Master of None‘s Alan Yang breaks down how it’s done.

The opening credits on most TV shows often come with a side order of lies. The main offender is the “written-by” credit. It’s a suspiciously narrow designation that suggests one or possibly two story-artisans painstakingly handcrafted every plot-point, every turn, and every string of sparkling banter that make up the episode all on their own. Barring some exceptions, what actually happens is an entire writers room full of interlocking personality types forms like a comedy Voltron to pitch and polish ideas until one or two writers have enough material to go off and write up a draft. It’s a process that’s known as breaking a story, and it is incredibly difficult to do.

Read Full Story

As the world eats more meat, methane emissions from livestock are becoming a bigger climate concern. It’s time to take that seriously.

Our food habits are a big cause of climate change. Because the world wants to eat more animal products these days, the cow, sheep and goat population is growing (3.6 billion at last count), and consequently more emissions are going into the atmosphere. We tend to associate global warming with industry and energy generation, but ruminants shouldn’t be forgotten. Collectively, they produce more than 11% of human-related greenhouse gas emissions, a study last year showed.

Read Full Story