Clever Overload

Apartment Therapy New York | AT Europe: London Close-up - The Amazing Staircase

Wishing I could have this awesome book/stair-case.

Information Architects » Blog Archive » Links in Print: The Story of a Beautiful Failure

I really like Information Architects’ design of the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, especially the idea of highlighting keywords for quick scanning and for typing into a search engine to get related articles.  There’s other nice stuff in there too, check it out.

These Indian villagers didn’t build bridges - they grew them, out of tree roots. Amazing, as are many other things in the article, such as the island built completely out of reeds.

Dark Roasted Blend: Living, Growing Architecture

Hands-on: Scribblenauts

Man, this Nintendo DS game sounds awesome…

“It’s Scribblenauts, an unassuming DS puzzler with a massive lexicon, charming gameplay and, as far as we can tell, a large infusion of impossible technowizardry.”

Here’s the basic premise:

“One level we played placed us in the desert with a thirsty, thirsty man. A cue appeared as we began the level: “Refresh him!” Of course, writing water would suffice — but that’s not very original, is it? My first time through, I managed to summon an oasis. It appeared, I dropped it into the ground, the man fell in, and the Starite appeared. At the end of the level, the game gave me a score based on how far I went over par (the target number of items you can beat the level with), and awarded me badges — achievements for clever word usage.”

This could be an awesome language-learning game.  Sure, you could only practice nouns, but that’d be great already.  If only they were coming out with this in Japanese…though I’d probably have to look up how to say “teleportation device”.