A Labrador in Milton Keynes is already pressing a button to turn on his owner's lamp. Meanwhile, the rest of us are downloading apps and factory-resetting our dignity. The dog button is trying to tell us something about design — and it's funnier and more serious than it sounds.
Jack Douglas built rock records the way a luthier builds guitars — by hand, with obsessive attention to resonance. His death is an occasion to ask what recorded music has lost in the age of bedroom production.
In a city of filtered noise, a website turns every active NYC subway train into a note — and asks what we lose when we stop listening.
The most human thing about us has always been our urge to build sanctuaries. Now coders, neuroscientists, and AI are helping us build them inside the machine — and the results are stranger and more tender than you'd expect.
A Cameroonian village, a London gallery, and an economist walk into the same argument: that value is something we make together at every scale — or it isn't value at all. Observatory on fractal economies, recursive justice, and what Whitechapel just quietly admitted it doesn't know.
AI can recycle the same 25 jokes forever, outscore most humans at humor tasks, and still not know when to shut up. What machines are learning about comedy — and what comedy reveals about the machines.
ChatGPT Images 2.0 can produce a magazine spread that fools everyone — until you try to print it. That gap between surface and structure is exactly where the future of creative work lives.
The Gunditjmara people built a system that ran for six thousand years. What did they know about work, technology, and ecosystems that we've forgotten?
When code travels without permission, artists have been asking what it could carry instead — and one strange new program answers with pixel vegetables.
A Spanish company built a toilet that ate its own tank, won a design award for it, and nobody at dinner had anything to say. What our silence about bathroom design reveals about the innovations we dismiss — and why the unglamorous stuff is the only design that actually changes how people live.
Over 90 dealers and gallery workers made art, priced every piece at $500, and sold it all anonymously. White Columns turned the art world's power structure upside down — and the result is more honest than most gallery shows you'll see this year.
The Artemis II crew came home to San Diego. The quieter story — about money, cooperation, and renewable energy — is still unfolding on the ground.