Unplugged

Japanese artist Kazumasa Nagai's posters put animal spirits at the heart of a floating modern world.

Emeco's famously sturdy aluminum "Navy chairs" aren't cast�they're cut, pressed, rolled, and buffed�but their manufacture shows them to be part of a metal caste system, and players in a dance of fabrication. Video after the jump.

From 1905, a troupe of schoolboys show off their puzzling foil uniforms. Students in an experimental Utopian lyceum? Or visitors from the future?

Is the design world's embrace of domestic iconicity a harbinger of the coming Singularity?

A great idea for getting around in the snow, for which Fritz Rice of Seattle's Dutch Bicycle Co. generously credits fixie hipsters.

These minimalist, stick-on outsoles prefigure a future in which we'll pad and weaponize our bodies with consumer-grade prosthetics for fashion and fitness.

An elegant stocking-stuffer that also proves there's still innovation to be found in books.

Along with advances in telegraphy, weaponry, and medicine, the Civil War seems to have touched off a revolution in box-making.

An ancient device for predicting the occurrence of solar eclipses gets a fun, lucid reboot�in interlocking plastic blocks.

A simple, elegant reboot makes it easy to fill a room with daylight.