Designed for a bad experience. “Then I thought, what if objects were actually designed for a bad user experience, instead of a good one?” Greek architect Katerina Kamprani makes deliberately inconvenient everyday objects, and the interview gets at why useless […]
Payphone tag. “Payphone calls in Australia are now free. No coins, no credit, just pick up and dial.” Someone turned the collection 14,000 free payphones across the country into a real world game of territory control. ~ learn more
How to talk to anyone – and why you should. “You don’t always know if it’s OK. Sometimes you have to take the risk and find out.” The Guardian argues we’ve lost the everyday habit of talking to strangers, and […]
Happy map. 100,000 moments of human happiness, mapped. ~ learn more
Interstate 19: America’s only metric highway. “There’s not many places in the U.S. where you get a little math problem while you’re driving.” Interstate 19 in Arizona is a 102-kilometer stretch where signs are in meters and kilometers, and locals […]
Say now Shibboleth. “Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right.” So they killed him. A shibboleth is a word or habit that marks you as an […]
A wastewater plant that grows nature. “The largest bio-remediation facility in the world” is cleaning Riyadh’s wastewater while building habitat along Wadi Hanifa. Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison visits the site and treats it like a working ecosystem, not just infrastructure. […]
Part bank vault, part citadel. “They are part bank vault, part food store and part citadel.” In southern Morocco, these agadir (igoudar) were communal fortress granaries where families stored grain, jewelry, and documents behind thick walls and carved wooden locks. […]
The origin of Erewhon. I just learned that the name came from an old science fiction book. “In Erewhon, illness is crime and crime is illness.” Samuel Butler’s 1872 satire flips medicine and morality, with doctors acting more like judges […]
You were training Google’s AI. “At peak, 200 million reCAPTCHAs were solved every single day.” Sharbel argues those clicks were free data annotation from people just trying to log in, and that it helped train computer vision for products like […]