For the last few years, Phillips de Pury, a hoary auction house, has been running an auction series specifically dedicated to cultivating hip, young collectors with lower priced items, in the hopes that they'll blossom into the next generation of mega buyers. This Saturday, it will feature a once-ob...

A group of Swedish Designers, Humans Since 1982, just completed a design that's sure to draw protests: A wire-mesh lounge, supporded by the structure of a prone cross—letting you sprawl out in the same pose as Jesus on the Cross. (Direct your letters to the designers, please!) The all-black design...

It's not only the virtuous who are jumping on to the green-building bandwagon: Companies hoping to burnish spotty track records are hopping on as well. The blog Green Building Elements did a helpful service, gathering ten of the most egregious examples. Included are Justin Timberlake's green golf lo...

It's easy to imagine interior designers getting testy over a color palette. But gamers? When the creators of the Diablo video game franchise tried to refresh the look and feel of the third incarnation of the dark fantasy role-playing game, fans flipped out. They charged the designers with being untr...

This Friday, the London Design Museum opens an exhibition dedicated to the winners of its 2009 Designs of the Year—one of the most prestigious, most comprehensive in the world, encompassing everything from fashion to cars. If you can't make it, here are some of the highlights. (You can see all the...

Pixar obviously has an enormous stable of talent. But how does the company find the people they hire? Here's a video explaining the process. Randy Nelson is dean of Pixar University, the company's recruiting and training arm. As he explains, Pixar's HR process overturns several widespread assumption...

Kirsha Kaechele's mother was a wild-child painter; her father was an astrophysicist at a miltary think tank, at the dawn of the Cold War—until he took acid, and gave it up. So it's safe to say that Kaechele's work does her parents proud: Since 2001, she's been buying up houses in one of New Orlean...

Slowly but surely, the U.S. Army is adjusting to the reality of hard-fought, guerrilla wars like the ones we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and redirecting its R&D towards a new breed of battlefield technology. This year, it will debut more evidence of this move in a new, wearable set of e...

If you have an even passing interest in art, you should check out smARThistory, a recently redesigned website that's quickly racking up awards. An ongoing experiment founded by Beth Harris, MoMA's director of digital learning, and Steven Zucker, graduate-studies dean at the Fashion Institute of Tech...

Herzog & de Mueron won the architecture profession's highest honor, the Pritzker, in 2001; last summer their iconic "Bird's Nest" stadium was beamed into a billion homes during the Beijing Olympics. But unlike other starchitects they haven't been recycling old ideas (Frank Gehry, that's you). Th...