Quick, which is better: Lucas or Spielberg? Star Wars or Star Trek? Kobe or LeBron? Internet Explorer or Chrome? You probably have an opinion on each of these questions that’s strongly held enough to make a choice in seconds. And there’s something undeniably fun and satisfying about making dopey this-or-that snap judgments. Designer Luke Wroblewski has built an entire app around this vacuous-yet-addictive experience called Polar: a work of mobile-design genius.

This should come as no surprise if you know Wroblewski’s pedigree. ”Everyone’s still in the laptop mindset–even [companies] that really have their shit together,” Wroblewski tells Co.Design. “We’ve done testing about how people actually use their phones, and we said, ‘Let’s design the product entirely around that.’” Wroblewski calls these native experiences “micro mobile interactions,”: a quick glance here, a flick or tap there, and done. The more of these interactions you can fit into your user experience, and the more seamlessly and delightfully you can serve them up, the more engagement you’ll build. Even if your app does nothing but ask whether kittens are cuter than babies.

In an age when data is our most abundant resource, wearable technology offers new opportunities to interact with the urban landscape. frogs across the globe created eight concepts exploring the potential of wearable technology to create a more resilient and responsive urban experience by transforming the raw data of our daily lives.

Tree Voice collects data from a series of sensors—dectecting elements like motion, temperature, noise, and pollution—to display an augmented tree that “speaks” through light and iconic images. The interactive display provides anyone the opportunity to engage with the tree and receive updates on their local environment. Cloud connectivity feeds this data into a companion dashboard, aggregating data from neighborhoods and cities while also providing an overview of trees over time.

The online dashboard is a companion interface to the one found on the trees themselves. While you can interact with the tree to get local environment data, the dashboard is a way to get information about different neighborhoods as well as look at data over time. The dashboard allows people from around the city to view aggregated information about the environment from different trees. We imagine that people would be able to use this information to make decisions as basic as where to go workout in the evening or as substantial as where to buy a house. Eventually, we imagine the data could be used to give trees a voice in local government and be used for planning future cities that are data rich and environmentally intelligent.

Check out more design from FrogDesign Wearable Technology contest here. 

In an age when data is our most abundant resource, wearable technology offers new opportunities to interact with the urban landscape. frogs across the globe created eight concepts exploring the potential of wearable technology to create a more resilient and responsive urban experience by transforming the raw data of our daily lives.

Mnemo is an interactive friendship bracelet that enables you to record, relive, and share a memory reel of all your friends’ pictures, songs, and locations from a single event. Mnemo bracelets are collectible and customizeable. When two or more are linked together, common moments are combined to create collective memories of shared experiences.

Check out more design from FrogDesign Wearable Technology contest here. 

A lot has changed since 2006. Social networks rule. Smartphones are no longer a luxury for the geek elite. And every kid knows the word “app.” So maybe it’s only natural that each of these ideas worked themselves into Lego Mindstorms EV3, Lego’s first major refresh of the Mindstorms line since 2006. If you aren’t familiar, Mindstorms are Lego’s programmable robotic parts–a brain, motors, and sensors–that interface with their Technic line.

“Children today don’t perceive robots as industrial machines. A robot is something of a character. It has a personality. It could be humanoid or an animal, but certainly something with a mind of its own,” technology concept lead Oliver Wallington explains. “People might say ‘iPhone–that’s the way Lego fashion should go!’ But really, when you build an iPhone into a Lego Technic model, they just clash. We have to complement the models.”

So while the Mindstorms kit is intended to fuel infinite creativity, it’ll be marketed with five “character” designs, which were partly inspired from Lego’s conversations with children themselves. One design is a snake, while another is a humanoid, while yet another is a rover-like tank. The idea is to appeal to almost any child’s particular interests, using characters as a gateway into creation. “The play, look, and feel has been modeled for children,” global project lead Camilla Bottke adds. “But the hardware has been made to also embrace adult users.”

So Mindstorms walks an interesting line of approachability and depth and youth and maturity. It’s designed very intently to be playable within 20 minutes without anything more than a few nonverbal instructions, what the company calls a “Christmas morning” appeal. It helps that Mindstorms now include IR sensors (allowing simple remote control). Additionally, each Mindstorms block holds the basics to programming–a single setting–that can be activated on the body, while the rest of the options lurk on a computer. So a motor can be set to start and stop, or aimed in a particular direction, right on the brick.

Mindstorms EV3 will be available in the second half of 2013 for $350.

Zoybar is an open R&D Lab for academic, hobbyist, and commercial developers to easily create music instruments and applications.

Our innovation model considers every user as a potential unique developer creating a “Decentralized R&D Lab” that grows rapidly in different directions. One of the most popular and powerful feature of Zoybar is its collaborative nature as a social network for music instruments innovation.

The collective intelligence co-creates endless modifications along with new music instruments that would have never been produced by traditional innovation and business models.

We believe that only open decentralized approach can provide tools for the different needs and abilities of these scattered vast users. We provide physical and virtual platforms as creation tools for developing new music instruments. The end instruments are in the users hands, making each user a unique developer that can share ideas, solutions and even sell their own applications and instruments to other users of the community.

As part of the design and production process, the Zoybar Hardware is manufactured only by demand, with no over production and minimum waste. Our decentralized production process and the modular components system were designed to accommodate flexible productions scales with variety of solutions.

Popular wisdom has it that tablets are great for consuming content but aren’t that useful for creating it. Don’t tell that to Josh Leong, though. His Y Combinator-backed startup, Grid, is based around the idea that a tablet should be a great place for spreadsheets. Indeed, as Leong told me earlier this week, his idea is to reinvent the spreadsheet around touch, all the tools and sensors available on mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad, and the way normal people (as opposed to Excel power users) actually use them.

The fact that Leong, Grid’s CEO and designer, is interested in spreadsheets and knows a lot about how people use them is no coincidence. He was the designer of Microsoft’s upcoming Excel 2013, after all. Most people, Leong told me, use spreadsheets like Excel for just about everything, whether that’s to keep track of their investment accounts or their wedding plans. The tools in Excel are built around power users, however, who write their own VBA scripts and juggle massive spreadsheets. The fact that people can do all of these different things using the same tool, Leong said, is a testament to the flexibility of the original idea of the spreadsheet.

Once you get to a mobile device, spreadsheets can be about a lot more than just numbers. By using a mobile device, after all, you now have access to location data, can add photos and movies and access contacts from your phone (or Facebook) with just a few clicks. This allows you, as the company puts it, “to organize and work with them in a whole new intuitive way.” By giving Grid local access to your contacts, for example, you can add so-called “people tiles” to your spreadsheets (useful when you’re using it to organize your wedding party, for example) and using its location feature allows you to quickly add an annotated map to your spreadsheets. Grid also allows you to draw sketches and put them into a cell. In addition, you can also invite others to work on a project with you in real time.

One feature that’s still missing, though, is actually running spreadsheet-style calculations on your numbers in Grid. The Grid team promises that this feature is coming in one of the next versions.

One feature that really stands out here is Grid’s Maestro input system (“simply the best way to put things into the Grid”). Just touch a square and swipe left to bring up Grid’s input options and right to bring up more advanced options. While Microsoft is moving toward radial menus for its new Office apps, Leong believes that using his system based on swipe gestures makes you feel more connected with your data and is a more natural way to interact with the app. This system also scales very well and, for example, allows you to select multiple cells at the same time.

We’re playing Spaceteam, a new iOS game by Henry Smith, who recently left Bioware to create indie games. Spaceteam is his first release, and its premise is borderline genius. You know how you’ve watched shows like Star Trek and all the characters on the bridge shout techno mumbo jumbo while punching fake displays? Spaceteam takes that scenario and, through a fantastic UI/mechanic, puts you right in the captain’s chair of nonsense.

Each player (up to four) has a control pad–a series of levers, switches, dials, and buttons. Different commands appear simultaneously on each player’s screen, and generally, these commands are for the other person. So I shout at my partner to adjust teleroboto settings while he’s purely concerned with me closing that omegapipe. Because if we’re both not fast enough, our controls take damage, begin falling apart, and will eventually explode along with our ship.

So how is this possibly fun, you’re wondering. Well, it’s downright hilarious to babble five-syllable nonsense in a life or death situation. “I had loads of fun just coming up with random technobabble, so I figured that was a good sign,” Smith tells me. “And I could tell from the first prototype (which only took a couple of weeks to build) that the basic concept worked.”

It just takes such a ridiculous amount of concentration to speak so much silliness while looking for the right switch to save the day–a switch that might be dangling from your console after hitting an asteroid–and so you’re laughing at yourself the entire time.

Clement Briend is a photographer living and working in Paris, France. He is also a professor of photography at the University of Valenciennes. Briend studied at the Ecole Louis Lumiere and specializes in projecting images onto various surfaces and then taking photographs of the hybrid imagery.

In his series entitled ‘Cambodian Trees‘, Briend projects haunting images of Cambodian spirits and deities onto trees around Phnom Penh. The night time incarnation of these cultural figures, set against the urban environment of the capital city, gives these photos an incredible feel.