Co.Design

The real reason why luxury fashion brands love the art world

Luxury fashion houses, such as Ferragamo, Hermes, Prada, and Louis Vuitton, have invested aggressively in art in recent years. Are they the great art patrons of our time or are they simply burnishing their own brands?

Furniture made out of old jeans is way more beautiful than it sounds

The marble-like material is made out of old denim, collected from recycling centers.

This folding chair is more structurally complex than some buildings

It can also be stored flat in seconds, making it the most high-flown folding chair we’ve ever seen.

This MIT team is reinventing building by looking at the ancient world

Using some clever physics, designers figured out how humans could move 1,000-pound concrete slabs on their own.

The competition to redesign Notre-Dame’s lost spire is already on

And it exposes an eternal rift in historic preservation: to recreate, or reimagine entirely?

These gorgeous tiles are glazed in volcanic ash from Mount Etna

It took years of experimentation to create the five shades of glaze, each of which contains a different amount of finely ground ash.

Sidewalk Labs’s ambitious smart city plans now face a legal battle

A Canadian civil liberties group is taking aim at all three tiers of government for allegedly allowing Sidewalk Labs to make decisions about citizens’ privacy in Toronto.

See Everlane’s first sneaker. It’s green, cheap, and so normcore-chic

Our sneaker addiction is killing the planet. Everlane joins the quest to create a sneaker with a small environmental footprint.

The new digital divide is between people who opt out of algorithms and people who don’t

Here are three ways to take control of the algorithms in your life.

The quest to digitally preserve the built world, from Notre-Dame to Easter Island

The booming 3D-scanning industry, which has its roots in robotics, offers hope to heritage sites damaged by accidents, climate change, and the simple passing of time.

Converse’s plot to take back basketball–with help from Nike

Converse built one of the first basketball shoes in 1917. Today, it’s launching its first new performance design in years.

Maybe Notre Dame shouldn’t be rebuilt exactly as it was

Re-creating the ancient wooden roof could require destructive forestry practices and pass up the benefits of building a safer, sturdier church.

Exclusive: Adidas’s radical new shoe could change how the world buys sneakers

Futurecraft Loop is an experiment in the circular economy. For Adidas, it could be the beginning of a major shift in how it does business.

Kids draw their dream bedrooms, and they’re wonderful

Watch epidemics as they spread in real time with this new disease map

The best work-life bags of 2019

A crop of new startups is challenging the dominance of luxury brands, creating beautiful bags that put functionality first. I tried six of the best.

This new app manages your privacy for you, from Facebook to Alexa

Jumbo is like a concierge for privacy, cleaning out your old data and maintaining your privacy settings across your accounts and apps.

These clever shelves make your books literally float in midair

“We are interested in ‘errors’ that occur in perception,” explain designers Naoki Ono and Yuki Yamamoto.

Notre-Dame can be rebuilt–if we let go of our obsession with “authenticity”

Western notions of authenticity insist on preserving a building’s original materials. But other cultures think differently–and we should look to them when considering how to rebuild Notre-Dame.