Combining elements of IKEA ingenuity and their own classic line of modular toys, Meccano (makers of Erector Sets) is now offering a new type of do-it-yourself furniture modeled on their own miniature for-kids equivalents.

Made in France, the Meccano Home furniture series involves the same sorts of struts, surfaces, connectors and bolts found at smaller scale in their toy line, a kit-of-parts approach letting you build then rework any domestic object you desire, reusing pieces along the way.

Currently sold in sets, you can start out with a single piece then use the modules to make something entirely new or combine elements from other packages. Twenty different pieces help create sufficient consistency while also providing variety – there are a lot of options but no risk of losing a ‘rare’ part that could be more difficult to replace.

Flashy colors and a nostalgic aesthetic aside, the bigger picture here is a powerful one: a world in which we no longer scrap or sell our used furniture, but instead cannibalize the parts, storing them for future use or re-purposing them on the spot into new furnishings.

What started as a set of infinitely-flexible table legs has now spawned a second but equally stellar sibling design: a series of wall brackets that let you turn scraps into shelving and switch out surfaces whenever you find something neat and new (or old).

Made in Detroit, the Floyd Leg system allows users to choose what kind of material they want to create anything from desks to dining, coffee, side or even ping-pong tables. And for any who find this specific solution too expensive, it could also be viewed as great inspiration for do-it-yourself alternatives.

The owner simply splices the desired surface between the colorful and variable-height brackets, be it reused lumber and scraps or new off-the-shelf boards – as a bonus, the bracket system means the surfaces can also be uneven.

Using the same design strategies, the Floyd Shelf mounts to walls and will let you swap in and out whatever you want to use With its industrial aesthetic, the adjustable bracket set lends itself particularly well to rugged or worn found materials.

“I was moving frequently between cities and constantly disposing of furniture. The legs were born out of this circumstance and the idea also resonated with our friends. We decided to launch a Kickstarter to gauge what the public reaction would be to the legs,” says Kyle Hoff, creator and co-founder. With an initial goal of producing 100 sets, the pair raised funds for an initial run of over 1,500 sets and shipped to 33 countries.

“Backers sent in photographs of their creations. It was exciting to see people employ the legs in ways that reflected their own living spaces,” says Alex O’Dell, co-founder. The Floyd Legs are produced in Detroit utilizing the existing manufacturing infrastructure. “We appreciate having our production facility only a 10 minute drive away. It allows us to more close- ly integrate the manufacturing and design processes, while also ensuring the quality of our prod-ucts,” says Hoff.

The Floyd Leg serves as a pilot piece for a greater line of products that the company will be launching in September 2014. “We’re committed to producing simple, flexible furniture made for denser living in cities. High design furniture is inaccessible and mass produced often means disposable,” says O’Dell. “One of our goals is to really rethink the way people buy and engage with furniture—from the purchasing experience to shipping and assembly,” says Hoff.

The Tangible Media Group from MIT has developed an approach to responsive design in physical space that is both conceptual and plausible, futuristic yet already a reality.

Displaying their work this year at Milan, the group unveiled Transform, an extension of their amazing interactive inFORM user experience invention from last year.

1,000 independently-mobile squares shift up and down to shape bowls and surfaces – with even more such ‘pixels’ of a soft material the same technology could be applied to chairs and couches, too.

The morphing surfaces in play can be manipulated in all kind of ways, from passively sensing your mood (and changing shape accordingly) to responding directly to commands, gestures, movements or remote control. Their approach grows out of a notion that we increasingly take for granted: computers are moving into everything, not just dedicated laptops or handheld devices but everyday objects all around us.

This last video shows where it all started, with inFORM, a “Dynamic Shape Display that can render 3D content physically, so users can interact with digital information in a tangible way. inFORM can also interact with the physical world around it, for example moving objects on the table’s surface. Remote participants in a video conference can be displayed physically, allowing for a strong sense of presence and the ability to interact physically at a distance.”

Vhils is adept at carving, cutting and peeling to reveal art inside solid surfaces, but his artistic experiments also include carefully-calculated explosions to create pictures and phrases when the dust settles and debris clears.

While this Portuguese artist (real name: Alexandre Farto) has exhibited in galleries, his 3D building-side murals are somehow especially sublime, tied as they are to gritty urban contexts and turning crumbling paint, plaster and brick into physically and emotionally layered portraits.

His work with explosives is also powerful, playing with both relentless reality of controlled demolition and the festivity of fireworks, with elements of unpredictable chaos thrown into the mix.

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Subtractive Street Art Sculptural Murals Cut Into City Walls

New Zealand artist, illusionist and urbanist Mark Hewson has a good many tricks up his sleeve involving spatial deception, convincing citizens there is less (or more) to their city than can ordinarily be seen.

His first trick in this series: disguising an ordinary street-crossing skyway from a series of key vantage points. But even from alternate angles where the lines do not sync up, the effect is dizzying. Our pattern-seeking brains keep looking for transparency or reflection where there is just a solid painting.

Other illusions in his repertoire involve mirroring or warping unseen elements behind solid surfaces or sheets of material. Again, this toying with voids and our structural expectations induces odd forms of visual vertigo.

In previous projects, like the Lost Space Installation, he has worked with gaps and openings, filling them in with imaginary scenes that range from plausible to impossible. While these may be more obviously fake on the surface, they create a nonetheless potent sense of spatial distortion and disorientation.