The Putting Lot examines the relevance of empty space in the city. Located in Bushwick, Brooklyn, this miniature golf course occupies what was once a vacant lot.

Visitors will be able  to experience putt putt as a means for embodying and moving through art and ideas. Each hole will be designed by a different group of artists or architects around themes of urban sustainability. Whether actively or passively, users will engage with the art and the ideas embedded in the course.

The Putting Lot will be fun and entertaining while creating awareness about specific urban issues in an affordable and accessible way. The changes that have and continue to occur in this neighborhood jeopardize its sustainability. Empty spaces hold the potential to shape the future of this area, and The Putting Lot examines what might occupy these spaces. By experiencing the ideas of urban sustainability presented by artists and architects and by taking part in a series of events held in the public area, visitors are encouraged to participate in a productive conversation.

The New York Times goes shopping with the creators of the Putting Lot here.

Designing anything beneficial–for one dollar or less–was the challenge Pratt students set for themselves as part of this year’s ICFF Design Schools’ Exhibition.

Surprisingly, the Pratt students managed to come up with a wide array of intriguing items, many of which were born of cast-off materials. That made their cost not only less than a dollar, but environmentally solid gold.

Directed by Pratt’s professor of industrial design, Mark Goetz, students were asked to create designs that factored in such things as transportation, energy, material, waste, labor, and a wide array of manufacturing costs. Some 80 graduate and undergraduate students took the challenge, and 15 of the best were chosen to participate in the exhibit.

Repurpose offers a look into the hardware hacking community in Montreal, including the Foulab collective. Why are more and more hobbyists experimenting with hacks and circuit bends? What relationship does this imply about consumer society and technological advancement? Is this a real-world analog of ‘user generated content’?

A Real Human Interface is an installation by Multitouch Barcelona, an interaction design group that explores natural communication between people and technology.

The group designs experiences that merge real and digital into a creative environment where people are invited to touch, play, move and feel as they do in the real world.

The New York Times website has published a collection of special features called Living With Less, on the human side of the global recession. Survival Strategies is an interactive feature where readers share tips on everyday actions they have taken in response to the economic downturn.

Submissions range from impressive belt-tightening DIY tips (“I make my own laundry detergent, for 5¢ a load. I made 8 new washcloths out of 2 old bath towels. I pack lunches, bake bread, & mend socks”) to tongue-in-cheek humor (“I make self-deprecating jokes about how broke I am. Believe it or not, it actually cheers me up. Especially when others are doing the same”).

What are your survival strategies? How are you getting by in the economic downturn? Share your best advice, ask a question, comment on other peoples’ strategies and recommend the most helpful ones.

You can follow Living With Less on Twitter here.

mux is a collective formed by B-Quartet’s Bani Haykal along with the band’s sessionists Luqman Hakim and Siraaj Anwar. They are out to experiment and device new performances weaving sound design, music and text.

mux’s approach to performance deals greatly with the coexistence of experimental lateral storytelling and layered, yet minimal, sound and music compositions. The stories they tell incorporate streams of consciousness, almost always resulting the text to become more of an ambient than a direction leading towards an end.

They have been awarded The Substation’s Associate Artist status and are commissioned for a piece of work.

You can join their Facebook group here.

EILE is a performance, a concept, a process
EILE is a live video, live music and improvisation
EILE is a story, an abstraction, real
EILE is noise, concrete and experimental
EILE is a puredata patch

Using stones, balls, bits of paper and string, Yroyto plays a score totally live. He plays with the notions of scale and size, of noise and impact,  to create a strange and heady cinema. The video is textured and granular; the sound is concrete and noisy.

In April 2009, Lenka Clayton & Michael Crowe sent a personal, handwritten letter to each of the 467 households in the small Irish village of Cushendall. They hoped these unsolicited letters would prompt neighbourly discussion, spreading across the town, promoting community curiosity.

The art work consists solely of the discussion between the recipients about what on Earth these letters are, who sent them and why, etc.

Platform21’s Repair Manifesto opposes throwaway culture and celebrates repair as the new recycling. With their project Platform21 = Repairing they seek to make repairing cool again – with your help.

In Platform21 the work of designers and artists inspires to repair your own possessions, which you can do in the different repair stations.  Platform 21 aims to start a movement, one that isn’t new per se but has been forgotten.

If you have ideas about how you can save a product, let them know by emailing info@platform21.com.

In Bb 2.0 is a collaborative music and spoken word project conceived by Darren Solomon from Science for Girls. It collects 16 YouTube music videos and lets you play them in any order, or all at once. And because 15 of them feature music in the key of B-flat major, the sounds match up perfectly.

The videos can be played simultaneously — the soundtracks will work together, and the mix can be adjusted with the individual volume sliders.