Cuba's Microbrigadas collectivized the building site, not the design
In the 1970s, workers temporarily left factories and offices to build housing later allocated by their workplace collective. Construction was participatory; design was far less so.
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Ideas
IRZ news, analysis and ideas about Ideas.
Your blood draw still runs on a 1949 patent
A factory-calibrated vacuum acts as pump, meter and seal at once: a teardown of the closed system behind most routine blood draws, built on a patent filed in 1947.
The concert that didn't crackle
Nightly German orchestra broadcasts sounded far too clean to be records. That one detail led an American engineer to the Magnetophon, the machine that made audio editing invisible, then normal, then universal.
The first digital hospital started by removing paper journeys
MIS-I did more than put medical records on a screen. It replaced paper journeys between departments with a shared system for orders, results and clinical documentation.
The right to repair has finally reached the workshop. It still does not cover everything
Since 31 July 2026, EU rules finally push manufacturers and sellers toward repair. Their real reach is still limited to products already covered by repairability requirements.
The industry that stopped training its own taste
D&AD's 2026 report doesn't say AI is replacing creatives. It documents a quieter mechanism: the tasks being automated were the industry's training program, and nothing has replaced them.
The ATM never killed the bank teller
Automating a task doesn't necessarily kill the profession around it. Tellers, radiologists, Klarna, measured developers: what survives beyond the task, and the honest case where everything goes.
Digi-Comp I had only three bits. That is why you can see its logic
Three mechanical flip-flops, a hand clock and plastic tubes expose state, Boolean logic and counting. The machine teaches precisely because it cannot hide much.
At Open Source Ecology, the entrance exam is already a wall you have to build
The Future Builders Academy wants learning to produce something real. Applicants already have to build a wall panel, film the process and document quality-control points.
An architecture practice fits in 1 m². Its working conditions don't
Opposite Office installed an approximately one-square-metre office in a tree in Weimar. It can contain two or three architects, but not a normal working day.