Global Issues in Design

French artist Patrick Blanc has created a vertical garden at the intersection of Montorgueil, Reaumur Sebastopol and the Great Boulevards in Paris.Part of a private initiative to make Paris more eco-friendly, Blanc took seven weeks in March and April to plant the seeds, nurturing over 7,600 plants belonging to 237 individual species.

The Standard Hotel chain is getting some flack for glamorizing violence against women in its new ad campaign. The ad in question features an image of a woman lying face down with a suitcase on top of her, limbs splayed and her body exposed.

The design of software underpins almost every facet of the way we live now, from the interactive bus timetable on your smartphone to the Excel spreadsheet you use at work, but design museums like the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt in New York are struggling to find ways to preserve it. While the...