Stewart Hicks and Allison Newmeyer of Design With Company have shared with us their project "Character Building," a series of functional, identity-creating objects they designed for a local Independent Media Center situated inside an old former post office building. — bustler.net

When I finished my studies, I decided I wanted to go into urban planning and I moved to LA. It seems funny, but I really played down the fact that I’d won this competition. I was afraid it would make me look like a graphics guy, rather than an urban designer. I didn’t even mention it on my résumé. Also, the symbol itself languished for a while. I remember seeing it once on a bank statement, but then it disappeared. — ft.com

This laboratory, as Mr. Hill calls it, for small-space, sustainable and — it must be stressed — high-end living is the first tangible product from his fledgling company, LifeEdited. It comes with an awkward manifesto that nonetheless manages to gather an armful of social and economic trends and philosophies, including happiness research, the booming field of collaborative consumption and data on the proven efficiencies of cities. — nytimes.com

We were thrilled when our friend Drew Seskunas, one of the founders of the fledgling design studio The Principals- based out of Brooklyn, shared their latest project with us. The "Cosmic Quilt" is an awesome exploration of interactive architecture being created for May's New York Design Week. Check out their video above, and their Kickstarter profile here to contribute to the advancement of design, architecture and a promising young studio. — Made by Originals

Apartment 17-B, right, set decorator Claudette Didul said, is "in a high-rise that feels like it was built in 1960 with a white-carpeted sunken living room and a fascinating fireplace and a Case Study-style kitchen with two pass through windows."

It also sports walnut cabinetry with a built-in television set and one of those new-fangled-for-the-time push-button phones. — latimesblogs.latimes.com

The Hefner/Beuys House by Jimenez Lai is a cartoonish architectural installation that extends its story into the realm of performance art. Citing two predecessors of performance artists, Joseph Beuys and Hugh Hefner, this project also asks - who is the real extrovert between the two? Hefner may be the obvious answer, but Beuys relocated himself out of his context to a stage-like environment whereas Hefner simply stayed in his mansion. — kickstarter.com

Wynn’s hotels are famous for having brought a luxurious, five-star approach to Vegas. But their real achievement may be psychological: they have remade the architecture of gaming itself. The received wisdom of modern casino design was codified by a former gambling addict named Bill Friedman in his book “Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition.” — The New Yorker

The pavilion concept SEAT by New York and Portland-based collaboration E/B Office has won the commission for this year's Freedom Park Project at Atlanta. SEAT is a garden pavilion composed of approximately 400 simple wooden chairs arrayed and stacked in a 3-dimensional sine wave surface rising above the ground. — bustler.net

The Self-Assembly Line is a large-scale version of a self-assembly virus capsid, demonstrated as an interactive and performative structure. A discrete set of modules are activated by stochastic rotation from a larger container/structure that forces the interaction between units. By changing the external conditions, the geometry of the unit, the attraction of the units and the number of units supplied, the desired global configuration can be programmed. — http://sjet.us

Got a brilliant design idea in the live/work realm that is ready to take the world by storm? Well, now is your time to shine: Our friends at Dwell teamed up with Design Within Reach and launched the Live/Work Design Contest, which challenges designers to create a workspace “classic of tomorrow” – a new home-office solution that DWR could potentially manufacture and sell. Dwell will host the DWR-sponsored contest through the end of June [...]. — bustler.net

Craft practices are at once defined and restrained by their connections to tradition. Viewing woodworking in the context of objects made with wood; housing, particularly stick frame construction, emerges as possibly the most widespread use of the material throughout the modern world. Utilizing these techniques in a studio based practice, it is my hope to further the conversation on how notions of craft fit into the modern world.

British journalist and author (then) and now Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic's awesome London loft, designed by Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick. It actually itself looks like a small Design Museum itself, or a spaceship that's been travelling around galaxies, curating. — warymeyers.blogspot.com

Designed by PENSON, Google Engineering's new London offices are a giddy exercise in science fiction set decoration, replete with smooth white surfaces and bold solid colors. I'll admit that as I paged through the publicity images, it was a little hard to take them seriously. — fastcodesign.com