Katya Mezhibovskaya visits the apartments of young New Yorkers to find cultural meaning in their possessions and domestic arrangements.

Julia van den Hout explores examples of contemporary experimentation with material and structure, and the creation of elaborate forms that are ornate, yet retain their essential function.

Derrick Mead analyzes themes in critical design such as designing for repair, designing for failure, and designing for “cradle-to-cradle” type life cycles.

Barbara Eldredge questions why guns are missing from museum design collections.

Ann Weiser explores the disconnect between the reality and idealized fantasy of Main Street, from the financially privileged communities of old New England towns and New Urbanist Greenfield developments, to the crumbling sidewalks of Main Streets ravaged by the methamphetamine epidemic.

Anna Kealey dissects the visual and verbal cues on food packaging–from the seemingly obvious to the far more abstract–and illustrates how they are used to create myths about food.

On a research trip to Brazil, Frederico Duarte discovers that Marcel Rosenblum, with his massively popular “Lar Doce Lar” (Home Sweet Home) TV show, a local “Extreme Makeover” in which he and host Luciano Huck go around the country redecorating—and often rebuilding—poor families’ homes, exerts a more real and powerful influence on Brazilian culture than such celebrated design exports as the Campana brothers.

Crew journalist Mike Neal arrives at his home for the next two weeks—the Mars Desert Research Station Habitat in the Utah desert—and confronts the architecture of desolation he finds there.