Charcoal*Marl

American artist Doug Wheeler has created the illusion of an infinite white space inside the atrium of the 18th Century Palazzo Grazzi in Venice.

Installed for The Illusion of Light exhibition, the installation – titled D-N SF 12 PG VI – is flanked by two rows of original stone columns and when viewed from the entrance, it appears borderless and without end. Visitors that enter the space seem suspended in a glowing white light.

The effect is created using a reinforced fibreglass shell, which is coated in titanium dioxide paint and illuminated with LEDs. The shell curves up gently from the floor to form two walls and a ceiling. Lighting is used to remove the shadows that would usually indicate where the surfaces change direction.

A statement from the gallery says: “Light becomes matter and redefines the space and time by eliminating the perceptual markers of the visitor, who is left between a mirage and reality.”

Matt Abergel and Lindsay Jang – the creative duo behind Hong Kong restaurants Yardbird and Ronin – have launched their latest comestible venture in Hong Kong’s up-and-coming neighbourhood, Kennedy Town.

A stone’s throw from the Island’s jam-packed Central and Sheung Wan districts; Sunday’s Grocery is a curated convenience store, liquor shop and take-away sandwich joint. Boasting Hong Kong’s first draught wine system, Sunday’s Grocery sells a delectable collection of lifestyle and food products, including made-to-order sandwiches, soup and chicken schnitzel on Sundays – a welcome twist on the traditional roast dinner.

Ranked highly in the food hierarchies of Japan, China and Korea for millennia, seaweed consumption is beginning to increase in Western countries. Bursting with nutritional attributes – rich in dietary fibre, fatty acids, essential amino acids and vitamins A, B, C and E, it’s considered a superior food source that could play a critical role in feeding the world in the future. After its impressive assail on the comestible landscape, seaweed is moving beyond the confines of the culinary industry – proving it’s as versatile as it is nutritious.

British skincare brand Haeckels produces a range of premium organic skincare products made from wild seaweed hand harvested along the coast of Margate in the UK.

UK-based experimental food inventor Charlie Henry Francis has created the Edible Mist Machine – a contraption that extracts flavour from food and transforms it into an edible mist that can be inhaled through a straw.

London-based material lab The Unseen has collaborated with Austrian glass manufacturer Swarovski to create an experimental crystal headpiece that changes colour to visualise the wearer’s brain activity.

Crafted from lab-grown spinel stones that have been coated in heat-responsive, colour-changing pigment. The crystals absorb the heat lost through the head, causing the stones to change from black to orange, red to green and blue to purple.

British designer furniture e-tailer Made.com has launched Made Unboxed – a pinboard-like social network that encourages customers to show-off their creative interiors, and allows potential customers to connect with them for advice and reviews.

Designed to bridge the gap between store and online, Made Unboxed lets users search by product to see what’s popular, or by postcode – enabling them to see pieces in homes in their own neighbourhood. From there they can message one another and even arrange home tours to see the furniture for themselves.

Made Unboxed is a solid example of a brand leveraging community-driven content to build authenticity and drive sales. But, can an in-house network ever compete with the social content available on public networks, such as Instagram and Pinterest?

Israeli designers Omer Polak and Michal Evyatar, in collaboration with professional chef Erez Komorovsky have created ‘Blow Dough’ – an experiential cooking process in which colourful pastries made from vegetable juice and fresh herbs are baked by inflating the dough with a stream of hot air.

Presented as an interactive one-day installation at this year’s Jerusalem Design Week, visitors were provided with a flattened dough circle, covered with a metal ring, which they placed on top of a heat exhaust. Inflated by the stream of hot air, the flexible dough created spherical forms. When guests bit into the crunchy pastry, a fragrant aroma was released – creating an intense olfactory experience.

Dutch clothing company G-Star Raw has teamed up with American singer Pharrell Williams to create Raw for the Oceans – a denim collection made from recycled ocean plastic.

Awarded the inaugural Grand Prix for product design at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the jury praised its “sense of commitment to sustainability and social responsibility.”

The collection will be available at select G-Star Raw stores and online from August 2014. Check out the YouTube video here.

US ice cream brand Häagen-Dazs is launching two vegetable-based savoury ice creams in Japan next month.

The ‘Spoon Vege’ series will come in Carrot Orange (made with concentrated carrot juice, orange juice, orange pulp and orange peel) and Tomato Cherry (made with cherry juice and tomato paste) varieties. 

The Current Table, created by Dutch designer Marjan van Aubel in collaboration with Swiss solar-power firm Solaronix, functions as an independent source of energy.

The table has a dye-sensitised solar cell embedded in its surface, which means it can recharge devices such as phones, lamps and tablets using a process similar to photosynthesis. Unlike photovoltaic solar cells, however, the table doesn't need direct sunlight to function.

Van Aubel suggests the Current Table could be a solution for small-scale commercial buildings such as libraries or restaurants, providing personal power outlets for visitors without the need for cables.

For Chanel’s Paris Fashion Week Show, Karl Lagerfeld transformed the Grand Palais into a giant supermarket.

Striding down the aisles, pushing brightly coloured trolleys and pretending to exchange gossip, models perused products with tongue-in-cheek labels, such as Coco beer bottles, Chateau Gabrielle white wine and Chanel crémeuh – milk.

Once the show was over, fashionistas rushed into the aisles to snag some free goodies. But only the fruit and vegetables were on offer, as the rest of the food had been promised to charity. According to Lagerfeld, Chanel created over 500 food labels and put a staggering 100,000 items on display.

Space Replay drifts ominously through transitional public spaces, recording and playing the ambient sound signatures it picks up.

Created by Royal College of Art students Francessco Tacchini, Julinka Ebhardt and Will Yates-Johnson, the latex balloon floats according to the natural flow of air, emitting mysterious echoes of human activity. The sphere contains a battery-powered Arduino, an Adafruit Wave Shield – hacked to record and playback audio sounds – and a small speaker.

Founded by Erika Shumate and Christine Luby, San Francisco-based start-up Pinrose uses a scent-selecting algorithm, which personalises fragrances to match consumers’ moods.

The service is based on how consumers respond to colours, shapes and sounds. Customers complete an online quiz, which results in three recommended fragrances from Pinrose’s 10-fragrance collection. Each scent also comes with an online playlist and Pinterest inspiration board.

“It can be an esoteric industry, and using other senses gives people a better vocabulary to describe the scents they like,” says Luby. “Spiky shapes often mean you want citrus notes. And for those who pick rounded shapes, a preference of vanillas and musks is much more common.”

Swedish research company Innventia and designers Anna Glansén and Hanna Billqvist from design agency Tomorrow Machine have teamed up once again to create a collection of self-cleaning plates and cups.

Mimicking the hydrophobic (water repellent) surface of the lotus leaf, the cellulose-based products boast a super hydrophobic coating that repels dirt. Designed for the year 2035, the self-cleaning plates and cups save the world’s dwindling water supply and offer an ecological alternative to environmentally damaging detergents.

American artist Phillip K. Smith has transformed an abandoned shack in the Californian high desert into an interactive light installation, called Lucid Stead.

Smith added mirrored panels to the building’s exterior to create an illusion of ethereal transparency. During the day, the horizontal bands of mirrors reflect the building’s environment – allowing sections of the building to seemingly disappear into the desert landscape.

At night, white light is projected through the walls of the cabin, revealing the striped cabin’s framework. The windows and doors – also inlaid with mirrors – become brightly coloured rectangles that subtly change in hue. This is caused by an LED lighting system.

Pharrell Williams has created the world’s first 24-hour music video for his latest single, Happy.The online music video – directed by creative video agency We Are From LA – captures celebrities and non-celebrities dancing their way around the streets of Los Angeles.

The video begins with Pharrell singing to the camera as he makes his way to a convenience store at midnight to buy snacks. He is followed by hundreds of people dancing and singing to the pop song, including Jamie Foxx, Kelly Osborne and Steve Carrell.

Spanish food designer Martí Guixé has created Embedded Drinks – a series of edible snacks infused with spirited alcohol.

Inspired by the Catalonian tradition of soaking bread in wine and sugar for children, Embedded Drinks saturates five biscuits with a different alcoholic beverage – tequila, red wine, vodka, whiskey or gin. The biscuits are tailor-made to enhance the unique properties of each spirit. For example, the whiskey biscuit has various sized holes, which oxygenates the whiskey as it’s poured – enhancing the flavour. The hexagonal snack for vodka is flavoured with pepper to draw out certain tastes in the transparent spirit.

Guixé says: “An embedded drink is not a cake soaked in alcohol, but an intelligent container [used] to taste in a much more technical [manner] without the need of a glass or a cup.”