Muji always bring the design heat at Christmas. My favourites this year include the Solar System, the London/Paris/New York playing cards that form a map, and of course their city blocks (Edo is a lovely recent edition to the “street”). An honourable mention must also go to the penguin skittles.

If anyone wants to buy me something for Christmas, check out Muji’s website

N Building from Alexander Reeder on Vimeo.

If the future is giant barcodes on the side of buildings, not only will I likely be out of a job, but it would be a shame for the whole creative marketing industry… but of course with every closed door a new one opens. With that in mind, being positive, the above augmented reality video looks at how buidlings can communicate with passers by. Going one step beyond Bluetoothe’d messages, or a remote website, this building sends its comms to those who passing by that are intrigued by the goings on within. Tweets from shoppers inside, discounts and offers from concessions, and more. Read more at DesignBoom

Space Invading has been set up by Archinect, the cool resource for all things architecture. A very cool collection of beautiful living spaces – mostly real, but some imagined – for your perusal. I think it’s fed in by RSS feeds, but in the future I’d not be surprised if they went for a NotCot style community-contribution system. Gorgeous.

This straw won the Muji awards this year – a clever oberservation-turned-product. And a sustainable one too, seeing as we’re on that tip today. 

And here is one of the runners up – a camelia washing up powder. Again, a clever and more ecologically friendly product.

View the rest of the 2008 Muji Awards winners here

Anatomical drawings are not new, but check these Kaiju dissections of Godzilla, Jiger, Guiron, Gamera and more over at Pink Tentacle.

Kaiju Big Battel madness can be seen here

Oh, and it’s got a spot about Curry in Japan too, right at the end.

Great little Shop selling miscellaneous objects collected from around the world….

“Kiosk: An independent stand from which merchandise is sold, often placed in the common area of a shopping center.

Kiosk is a store located in SoHo, New York. We offer a curated range of products from all over the world. Everything is sourced during our travels; we build the collection while we are traveling and then feature it in the shop for 4 – 6 months. Our currently featured country is HONG KONG, in addition we also have an “Ongoing” collection of objects from previous countries.

We opened the store to offer an antidote to over-design. We consider the objects we stock to be humble, straightforward and beautiful for their simplicity and directness. Often they are traditional goods that have developed over generations or anonymous design found in general stores, DIYs and kiosks, products created by not one personality but things that are the result of local aesthetics and needs. Their beauty is sometimes hard to see in today’s market; our motivation to start Kiosk was to shed some light on these anonymous objects.

The store is not static. We are not be able to predict our stock as it is decided by each trip. Sometimes certain goods are only available on a very limited basis. We intend to have products that are not currently for sale in the United States. There is always a mix of things; the goods assembled together in Kiosk become a rough portrait of each trip.

Hope to see you at the shop!”

Love it!

W-base are a japanese Fixie/courier related company. Check the W-base online store for LOTS of nice stuff, including the ‘resistant’ bag, available in lots of fetching colours to co-ordinate with your fixie. 

“Two years ago, Goro Miyazaki found himself in a terrifying position. Anime producers Studio Ghibli tapped him to direct his first feature film, Gedo Senki, based on the classic novel Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin. LeGuin had released the rights to Earthsea on the proviso that Goro’s father, Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away), direct the flick. Unfortunately, Hayao was unavailable so Ghibli brought in Goro, who had never worked in film before.” —from article by Dominic von Riedemann