As workers become increasingly packed in modern, open-plan offices and coworking spaces, designers keep working on high-tech solutions to allow employees to focus, often with the unintended effect of highlighting office layout shortcomings.

The latest of these gadget-based solutions is a set of “blinkers” from Panasonic’s “Future Life Factory,” designed to block out sights and sounds from the wearer’s sides so they can hone in on what’s in front of them.

These Wear Space units, they believe, will help keep work environments distraction-free. They were created in collaboration with Japanese fashion designer Kunihiko Morinaga. Somehow, though, the photographs just reinforce a sense of dread, with humans arrayed in front of small screens like captured cattle. But who knows: maybe they will prove useful barring other spatial redesigns.

“As open offices and digital nomads are on the rise, workers are finding it ever more important to have personal space where they can focus,” said the company. “Wear Space instantly creates this kind of personal space – it’s as simple as putting on an article of clothing.” The user can then adjust their field of view and reduce peripheral vision to desired levels. This is coupled with noise-cancelling technology for audio isolation. Of course, no such potentially dystopian, present-day design would be complete without a crowdfunding campaign, currently scheduled for late 2018.

Stretching and reversing conventions for balancing foreground and background, one urban photographer in Tokyo is taking the Japanese concept of Bokeh to dazzling extremes.

Bokeh (which translates as ‘blur’) plays with a lens’s circle of confusion in which points of light become glowing discs, but instead of making the background fuzzy, Takashi Kitajima unexpectedly lets the foreground become the backdrop.

The result seems to highlight the chaos and movement of what is closest to the viewer’s perspective in a surreal but suggestive way that indirectly resonates with our actual experience of cities.

In turn, more distant monuments, buildings and bridges on the horizon or off to one side emerge as stable anchors, contrasted with a sea of light.

The net effect is something between a photograph and a watercolor or pastel painting, a fusion of concrete realism and playful abstraction.

A nearly-complete London tower is being investigated thanks to reflected daylight that is dazzling (and sizzling) the neighborhood in extreme, surprising and undesirable ways. The structure is the alleged source of myriad problems, from cooked car parts in adjacent vehicles (parked in its bright glare) to spontaneous fires in a nearby businesses (with carpets catching fire from the focused light).

On the vehicular front, per Mirror News in the UK (images via [Duncan]): warped side panels, melting mirror casings and a burning smell in some cars all point to the proverbial finger at glare caused by the uniquely-shaped, 37-story structure known as the Walkie Talkie building still under construction. While the matter is studied, usage of parking spots that fall under the building’s reflected spots of sunlight has been suspended.

Meanwhile, local businesses report peeling and puckered paint and other forms of heat damage to their exteriors and interiors, including a carpet that spontaneously ignited, presumably due to the light rays reflected from above and focused through the facade glass storefront.

As a temporary measure, and in a tacit acknowledgement of guilt, the building developers are apparently doling out cash for repairs and preventative measures to affected individuals and businesses until a lasting solution can be found.

This almost-finished work of urban architecture has a 300 million dollar price tag, yet it remains unclear how this fundamentally problematic design issues can be addressed now that the skin has been installed. Thankfully, the damage should be nearly done for this year. As the sun drops in the sky over the next few weeks of fall, the phenomena should disappear … at least until next summer, that is, but at least it buys the developers a bit more time.