John Hockenberry reports from London, where he visited the UK's National Design Museum to view the "design of the year" nominations on display. With more than 80 entries in seven categories, the designs included a life-size paper hearse and a plan for a hospital in Rwanda that benefits the community.

The Takeaway host John Hockenberry spoke Friday at TED2012 in Long Beach, California.

Design has always been a part of Hockenberry's life. His father, who was a designer for IBM and Kodak, taught him what good design looked like.

How people move on planet Earth affects everything about the quality of their lives. Humans have always thought of motion collective or otherwise as extensions of their individual physical bodies. Transportation involves people and machines interacting intimately. Think of it as putting on and taking off a "car suit" to drive, or a much larger "airplane suit" to fly. Thinking of transportation in this sense, how humans conduct their day-to-day lives seems much less efficient.

Detroit and Berlin both know something about abandoned buildings. After the fall of the wall when the former east opened up, parts of Berlin looked a lot like Detroit today, where scores of buildings stood unclaimed, their purpose unclear. While officials worked on a city’s future, Germans like Dimitri Hegemann, relished in exploring the relics of Berlin’s industrial past. 

"We were very curious...so when I could go in… I was curious like a young boy," he says. "What is this building? Oh, it’s empty? Let’s look inside. And this happened 1,000 times. We just invaded. This was, you must understand, the frame of these days. The atmosphere was burning. It was an amazing situation." 

You don't have to be an urban planner to know that cheap quality space can mean artists, and artists can mean revitalization. With a video slide show, Martina Guzman of WDET tells the stories of artists who have moved or even returned to Detroit and Berlin, not only for the cheap space, but for businesses and manufacturing infrastructure open to their needs. 

The push to re-imagine Detroit as a national Mecca for creative entrepreneurs takes another leap  forward, starting September 21, with the new Detroit Design Festival, eight days and nights of crowd-sourcing ideas, talents and urban solutions.. The city has been making global headlines of late for its ability to draw young artists from all over the country and from every genre on the promise of cheap real estate and rich creative opportunity. This festival marks the first major showcase of creative Detroit and the potential local and relocating artists have to transform one of America’s anchor rust belt cities.

 

On Friday, Chrysler will make its last PT Cruiser. Ten years ago, the Cruiser became a cultural phenonenon with buyers willing to wait in line for their chance to own one. Why did the Cruiser strike such a chord?

Which creatures have just one eye and are made from drops of steel? Wenlock and Mandeville, the 2012 Olympics mascots, unveiled earlier this week in London. They are magical, androgynous figures, fashioned from materials used to build London's Olympic stadium.

Being in the hospital is bad enough. Then to add insult to whatever injury put you in the hospital, sometimes, you get stuck with a stranger as a roommate. Now a growing body of evidence shows that being alone in a single room helps patients get better, faster. This may seem like a no-brainer, yet few private rooms exist in the standard hospital. That could change due to the new field of “evidence-based hospital design”. Here to explain is Carol Ann Campbell, a medical writer whose story on this movement in health care appears today in the New York Times.

For more, read Carol Ann Campbell's article, Health Outcomes Driving New Hospital Design, in the New York Times.

The news is full of Detroit's woes. Chrysler is drawing up bankruptcy papers, GM is shuttering its plants for nine weeks, and just this morning Ford posted a $1.4 billion first quarter loss. Some critics blame the U.S. auto industry's current problems on the ghosts of cars past. Boring design led to weak car sales that led to the financial crisis. So how should Detroit plan for the future?

This week the arts and culture radio program Studio 360 visits Los Angeles to look at the kind of innovative ideas about car design coming out of that city. Host Kurt Andersen spoke with hot rodders, low riders, and car designers freed from the constrictions of working inside the Detroit system to see where the American car industry could be. He also took a ride in an electric car on three wheels that's straight out of The Jetsons. He joins The Takeaway with an account of what he learned about the future of cars.