Search
Maria Popova
Creator and Author, “Brain Pickings”
Maria Popova is a reader and a writer, and writes about what she reads on Brain Pickings (brainpickings.org), which is included in the Library of Congress archive of culturally valuable materials. She has also written for The New York Times, Wired UK, and The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Fellow. She is on Twitter @brainpicker.
Read Less
In rural India, over half of all households don’t have electricity. To light households and power commercial equipment, villages use kerosene lanterns, which are both expensive and environmentally harmful. But […]
Trypanophobia – the extreme, irrational fear of needles – is said to affect 10% of American adults. And then there are the merely squeamish ones, for whom getting a shot […]
Whether or not there is a creativity crisis may be up for debate, but one thing is clear: Our current education system is failing to create an environment that truly fosters creativity . . . Now, a new application out of MIT Media Lab is aiming to address some of these issues.
The average person flushes more than 7,000 liters of water down the toilet every year. With more than half of the world’s population using flushable toilets, this amounts to trillions […]
In 2008, filmmaker and activist Annie Leonard launched The Story of Stuff – an ambitious animated web film aimed at raising awareness about the various systems of consumption and creating […]
If you knew exactly how much electricity your home consumed, would you be more mindful of your carbon footprint and adjust your habits to lower consumption? Textile designer Cecil Marcq […]
Brooklyn-based design studio Hyperakt operates under the admirable slogan of “Meaningful Design for the Common Good” – a commitment to only work with companies whose products and services create positive change […]
We’ve covered variousdesignsolutions for the vision-impaired. But what about the hearing-impaired? While the sight is visual in nature and thus more organically linked to design, can the auditory sense be […]
Every year, millions of women and children across Southeast Asia are being enslaved and exploited in the multimillion-dollar human trafficking industry. This is one of the largest-scale human rights violations […]
Over the past few months, we’ve looked at how designers are addressing the vision-impaired – from low-cost eyeglasses to Braille-inspired obejcts for the blind to an innovative diagnostic test using […]
In 2007, papermaker Stora Enso commissioned six leading designers – Paula Scher, Marian Bantjes, Christoph Niemann, Bruce McCall, Michael C. Place and Winterhouse – to create a series of posters around […]
A new partnership between design hotshop IDEO and furniture-maker Steelcase aims to address one of the biggest design challenges of traditional classrooms – the static, linear and restrictive nature of […]
2010 is barely halfway through and it’s already been the most disastrous year in modern history. Suddenly, disaster relief becomes not just a playground of humanitarian agency manifestos but a […]
Last month, we looked at a design vision for sight – how designers are revolutionizing low-cost corrective eyewear. This month, a new device out of MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture […]
Last year, betacup extended a challenge to the creative community to rethink the coffee cup from a sustainable angle that eliminates the 58 million disposable cups America tosses in the […]
Over the past few years, bike-sharing systems have gained popularity around the world, experimenting with different models of building a sustainable mode of alternative transportation – from the ad-supported models […]
The tragic reality of most sustainability messaging is that it hangs haplessly somewhere between forgettable and toothless. UK-based nonprofit Do The Green Thing is a bold exception. Founded by a […]
Urban farming has been one of the biggest socio-environmental trends of late. But, so far, it’s been a fairly high-commitment, high-maintenance game requiring a demanding amount of time, resources and […]
Bottled water is one of the environmental movement’s biggest scapegoats – and for a reason: Only about 10% of plastic bottles are recycled; the rest end up in landfills, or […]
Every year, The Buckminster Fuller Challenge awards a $100,000 prize to a project that has the potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems and significantly improve human quality of life. The […]