Digital design prodigy Mike Matas combines the ease of navigating the physical world to create lifelike interfaces that feel so unobtrusive you hardly notice you’re using complex technology. Motivated by the desire to do things on a computer more like in reality, Matas set out to create virtual interfaces driven by touch. “If you want to do something [on a computer] you should just be able to reach out your hand and do it, no buttons, and no user interface required,” concludes Matas.

via Mike Matas.

Infographics already gets tons of play on the web. But geek superstar Golan Levin wants to spread them even further. So he developed an adjustable stencil that lets you spray paint pie-chart data visualizations of your own making on walls, highway underpasses, the house of your high school math teacher — wherever! As someone noted perfectly on Twitter, it’s “Bansky meets Tufte.”

via Infographiti: Golan Levin Brings Data Viz To The Street | Co.Design.

The Miner and a Major is an experiment in communal living and fantastical form. A New York story of creativity born from hardscrabble circumstance, the project grew out of the joint imagination of three architects with a limited budget.

via Take Five – Slideshows – Dwell.

So now that the crisis is over, we should be snapping up houses again, right? Wrong. Some real estate markets remain so overheated or unbalanced that it still might make sense to keep on renting. And this infographic by Sha Hwang of WeePlaces, for Trulia, shows exactly where.

via Infographic of the Day: Does Buying a House Make Any Sense? | Co.Design.

You don’t know Mark Coleran’s name, but you’ve seen his work. He’s the designer who creates the futuristic computer screens that characters in movies (like The Bourne Ultimatum, Children of Men, and Mission Impossible 3) use when saying things like “Enhance!” But now he’s the design director of Bonfire Labs, an agency who specifically hired him for his “fantasy user interface” (or FUI) skills.

via A Master of Sci-Fi Movie Gadgets Moves Over to the Real World | Co.Design.