#HTE

How Design Enables Crime and the Debate Between Tool Storage Vs Tool Staging 

Core77’s editors spend time combing through the news so you don’t have to. Here’s a weekly roundup of our favorite stories from the World Wide Web.

Smart Criminals Love Centralized Planning

I’ve had a newfound sense of logistical wonder for all the police helicopters buzzing over L.A. ever since reading Geoff Manaugh’s excellent ride-along story about the air-support division of the LAPD. So I was excited to realize that the article was excerpted from Manaugh’s recently released book A Burglar’s Guide to the City, which takes an in-depth look at how architecture and urban design enable crime. (Pro tip: If you’re being pursued by a police helicopter, head for the airport or an urban area dense with skyscrapers—both locations will interfere with the chopper’s ability to navigate.)

—Rebecca Veit, columnist, Designing Women

Tool Storage vs. Tool Staging

Today I’m reading about Joe Laviolette’s shop organization efforts. Woodworker Laviolette addresses an important question: Ought tools be “stored,” or “staged?” The debate is relevant to a lot more than hand tools in a wood shop, and can be applied to virtually anything that needs to have an organizing system designed for it.

—Rain Noe, senior editor

Rebranding Anthropology Textbooks

A short post by 2011 Core77 Design Awards Design Education Jury Captain Dr. Dori Tunstall on a project which juxtaposes textbook art direction: “The aim of the Rebranding Anthropology Textbooks is to offer a critique not just in words, but in counter images that make stark the construction of identities and the owner/subjects of the anthropological gaze in anthropological photography.”

—Eric Ludlum, editorial director

What It Means to be Chekhovian: Lively, Innovative, Experimental

Self-betterment often means putting yourself outside your comfort zone. Have you avoided reading Russian writers, thanks to their rap as ponderous and complicated and full of difficult names? You might want to take a crack at Anton Chekhov. As evidence, take the fact that his story “Dirty Tragedians and Leprous Playwrights” is set in the crater of an active volcano, and one of the characters is “a playwright who is on nodding terms with devils, whales, and crocodiles.”

—Kat Bauman, contributing writer

The Unreal World

This photo essay gathers a diverse collection of images of things that appear to be real but aren’t really—from scale models of the Egyptian pyramids at a Japanese theme park, dinosaur reproductions, wax figures and security drill setups. Seen together, the images reveal how inescapable simulations are in our modern world. 

—Alexandra Alexa, editorial assistant