The Built World

Rob Walker|Essays

Infrastructure Field Trips

The Macro City conference in the Bay Area includes "field trips" to examine "overlooked networks of infrastructure that surrounds us," firsthand.

John Thackara|Interviews

Ecuador, Open Knowledge, and ‘Buen Vivir’: Interview With Michel Bauwens

John Thackara interviews Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, is to lead a strategic policy project for Ecuador’s government called Free/Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK), also known as the social knowledge economy project.

Alexandra Lange|Essays

Lunch with the Critics: Fourth-Annual Year-End Awards

Our intrepid critics, Alexandra Lange and Mark Lamster, celebrate (and castigate) the best and worst architecture and design of 2013.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Belgian Solutions: The True State of Things?

The foul-ups or “Belgian solutions” in a new book of street photographs are simply the way things are.

John Thackara|Essays

Trust Is Not An Algorithm

By some accounts the world’s information is doubling every two years. This impressive if unprovable fact has got many people wondering: what to do with it?

Observed|Essays

Parking Meter History

The history of the parking meter — originally designed to have a positive affect on traffic flow and shopping.

Philip Nobel|Reviews

Oops: Understanding Failure

A review of To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure, by Henry Petroski.

Observed|New Ideas

A Campaign to Save The Post Office

Tucker Nichols is campaigning to save the Post Office.

Observed|Miscellaneous

Forgotten Tube Stations

A graphic tribute to the forgotten stations of the London Underground.

Observed|Miscellaneous

Celebrate World Toilet Day

2.6 billion people don't have access to a toilet. For them poop can be poison.

Alexandra Lange|Essays

Knolling Your Polling Place

Knolling your polling place: for the next election, a little spatial organization would go a long way.

Rob Walker|Essays

The Infrastructure of the Cloud

On the material structures we depend on to deliver us the immaterial digital world.