South Africa seems keen on treat-based tweeting these days. On the heels of Bos’ “Tweet for Tea” social media-driven vending machine at Design Indaba, Cape Town welcomes another guerilla marketing installation integrating the mechanical with the digital to make you smile. Conceptualized by design duo Thingking (who created the Bos machine as well) and advertising agency DraftFCB, the Wonka-like pop-up machine occupies an unused storefront …
Repurposing a retired greyhound racer as a human respirator or a pet sheep as a human dialysis machine represent the type of concepts that irreparably change your understanding of what design can do. How about an electricity-generating human organ that can be implanted to replace the appendix? Such is London-based designer Revital Cohen’s specialization: pushing the applications of design into the realm of what seems …
Sitting, eating, lying, bathing, storing, arranging flowers, telling the time—these are the functions to which mainstream design reduces the sum of human effort, focusing on model houses with model users whose needs do not deviate from the essentials of living. But as Unhappy Hipsters highlights, humans are more than just objects in their own domestic showrooms and, moreover, we are more often than not lonely …
