
The Whole Neighborhood Is Looking for Santa. Don’t Tell the Kids.
A notice at a Korean apartment complex mixes Chinese characters, English and numbers. Adults encoded a call for Santa volunteers to keep the preparations secret from children.

A kitchen-table welcome at Maggie’s Leeds
Maggie’s Leeds offers support to people with cancer and their families. Heatherwick Studio brought counselling rooms, a kitchen and gardens together beside the hospital.

Seaboard: a keyboard you play by pressing and sliding
ROLI's Seaboard 2 responds to finger movements after the initial strike. Pressing, wiggling, and sliding let players shape the pitch and timbre of a sustained note.

Anglepoise: a lamp balanced by springs
Anglepoise uses springs to balance its articulated arm. We look at how a mechanism developed in the 1930s lets readers and artists move the light where they need it.

Park ’n’ Play turns a parking garage roof into a playground
The railings of an exterior stairway continue onto the roof as play and exercise structures. Copenhagen’s Park ’n’ Play invites people onto a parking garage even when they have no car to park.

How IRENE recovers sound from records without a needle
IRENE reads the grooves of fragile recordings with optical equipment and turns those measurements into sound.

At the Human Library, you talk to a person instead of reading a book
Participants ask questions of people who volunteer as living books. Copenhagen’s Reading Garden closed, and Human Library events continue elsewhere.

A washing bag catches fibers shed in the laundry
GUPPYFRIEND is designed to collect fibers released from synthetic clothing. Its use continues after the wash, when the trapped fibers must be removed without rinsing them down the drain.