An accurate inventory can still catch you short
A stock count can be perfectly accurate and still arrive too late. Invumi starts from real movements to help small teams work out what to reorder, and when.
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Ideas
IRZ news, analysis and ideas about Ideas.
Perry’s Neighborhood Unit didn’t disappear — the 15-minute city repaired it
In 1929, Clarence Perry codified the neighborhood unit: school at the center, shops at the edge, a hard boundary. In 2016, the 15-minute city repaired it by switching the metric from space to time.
These hippie houses survived because construction never really ended
Handmade Utopia returns to Northern California’s self-built homes half a century later. What endures is less a style than an ability to repair, extend and adapt.
Mies's pavilion loses more than 857 litres of water a day
Plou prou? materializes more than 12,000 litres of evaporation over fourteen days. What it exposes is the daily cost of maintaining an architectural image.
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.
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.