How Two Designers Visualize Amazon’s Data Differently

It’s Infographics meets Iron Chef as two data viz experts debate each other one the best way to make sense of Amazon’s bestseller database!

Data visualization is just as much an art as it is a science, which is why there are many different ways that a single set of data can be visualized. At today’s Innovation By Design 2014 conference, two New York-based data viz studios showed us their indivdual approaches to interpreting Amazon’s complex bestseller database. It was the Iron Chef of data viz, and the resulting work couldn’t have been any more different.

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What Bruce Lee Can Teach You About Design

Former Nike designer D’Wayne Edwards says Bruce Lee has impacted his career and design.

“What people don’t know about Bruce Lee is that he was an amazing philosopher,” D’Wayne Edwards, the founder of footwear design school Pensole, explained on stage at Fast Company’s Innovation By Design conference on Wednesday.

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Plant Life Peeks Out Of This Sputnik-Inspired Table

Named after the first satellite to take living creatures into space (and return them alive), this piece is half-table, half-planter.

A gorgeous new table design by Russian design studio Plan-S23 takes its inspiration from the 1960 Soviet satellite Sputnik 5. Known in Russia as Korabl-Sputnik 2, which not only carried the first dogs into space, but also transported a variety of plants. Designer Max Scherbakov’s table is its own miniature version of Sputnik 5, minus the dogs: It launches plant life through a marble table and into your living room.

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Nest CEO Tony Fadell on Why Jetsons-esque Connected Homes “Just Don’t Work”

Fadell on the future of smart homes, Google’s $3.2 billion acquisition of his company, and why the Nest Protect has “a motherly voice.”

Kicking off Fast Company’s Innovation By Design 2014 Conference, Fast Company Executive Editor Noah Robischon hosted an intimate chat with Nest CEO Tony Fadell. The designer behind the original iPod, Fadell founded Nest in 2010 as a way to make our homes smarter. In front of a packed audience, Fadell talked about the future of the connected home, Google’s $3.2 billion buyout of Nest, the importance of getting design details right, and whether or not Fadell might be Google’s big Android boss someday. Here, four insights from the CEO who wants to change how we live:

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8 Classic Books Revamped To Evoke Mid-Century Design

Faber’s Modern Classics, including titles by Sylvia Plath, Lorrie Moore, and T.S. Eliot, channels the bright colors of retro book design.

Faber is rereleasing 10 classic books, with covers inspired by mid-century graphic design. All feature lots of white space, understated typography, and bright, translucent bands of color framing single eye-catching images.

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Coca-Cola Launches New Program To Recruit Startup Founders

Coca-Cola Founders is a new way to create startups, the company’s vice president of innovation and entrepreneurship declared.

Coca-Cola announced the launch of a new entrepreneurship program at Fast Company’s Innovation By Design conference today, in conversation with Fast Company senior writer Linda Tischler. David Butler, Coca-Cola’s vice president of innovation and entrepreneurship, (who has written a book with Tischler) announced the Coca-Cola Founders program, a way for startups to gain access to Coca-Cola’s tremendous reach and for Coca-Cola to tap the ideas of independent entrepreneurs. The company goes into startup communities around the world and hand-selects founders, giving them insider access to Coca-Cola–both the company’s assets and its challenges. The founders’ ideas are then shaped by what they see inside Coca-Cola.

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This Macabre Restaurant Is Decorated With 10,000 Bones

Hueso, a restaurant in Guadalajara, Mexico, challenges the squeamish with animal-skeleton decor.

Restaurants usually try to keep animal bones confined to meat dishes, not displayed on the walls. But Guadalajara, Mexico’s Hueso–which translates to “bone”–plays with the sculptural elements of deconstructed skeletons, making bones the mainstay of its decor. Architect Ignacio Cadena is behind the beautifully spooky design, which incorporates thousands of animal bones, both real and artificial, into the interior of the revamped 1940s building.

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In Praise Of Architectural Extravagance

Rotterdam-based MVRDV create the rare work of audacious architecture that doesn’t cater to obscene wealth.

Every now and then, a work of architecture comes along that makes your jaw drop. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao was one. OMA’s CCTV Headquarters in Beijing was another. Almost always, these buildings are extravagant symbols of wealth, power or cultural ambition. The newly opened Rotterdam MarketHall, over a million square feet of housing and food stands organized within or beneath a massive 12-story arch, is the kind of uncanny structure ones tweets without thinking. As surreal as it appears in photos, the building is actually designed for the most down-to-earth uses: daily life.

The notion of ‘gezelligheid,’ a hybrid of comfort and hominess, is central to Dutch culture.

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Think Standing Desks Are For Wimps? Check Out The Dynamic Chair

A gyroscopic chair turns browsing Twitter into a triathlon.

Throw your standing desk in the trash. Sitting, not standing, might be the best way for the 9-to-5 office drone to stay active, as long as they’re willing to strap themselves into the Dynamic Chair–an exoskeleton-like chair that turns a sitter’s entire body into a computer mouse.

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How Parks Gentrify Neighborhoods, And How To Stop It

A new approach–“just green enough”–tries to balance sustainability and equity.

On the three Es of sustainability–ecology, economy, and equity–the High Line in New York passes the first two with flying colors. The elevated-railroad-turned-park has brought a fresh mix of plants, flowers, birds, and insects to the once-drab West Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. It has also attracted billions in financial investments, with area property values increasing 103 % between 2003 and 2011, Great Recession be damned.

A dazzling park comes in, the low-income locals go out.

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