Innovative designers are creating compelling atmospheres and interactive experiences by merging hardware and software with architecture and design.

Today’s designers are creating compelling atmospheres and interactive experiences by merging hardware and software with architecture and design. This book is a collection of this innovative work produced where virtual realms meet the real world and where dataflow confronts the human senses. It presents an international spectrum of interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of laboratory, trade show, and urban space that play with the new frontiers of perception, interaction, and staging created by current technology. The work reveals how technology is fundamentally changing and expanding strategies for the targeted use of architecture, art, communication, and design for the future.

This book is about blood, violence, and weapons, about sex and genitals, bowels, bodily fluids, and decay. And, yes, it is about design. Because a rift is developing in the world of our aesthetically designed everyday objects—lamps shaped like weapons, bloody dishware, a gasmask as showerhead, a dildo in the shape of a crucifix, a coffee cup sporting breasts, jewellery made of real teeth—a myriad of morally dubious ideas are being translated into products. Is this arrogant and repulsive or poetic? Is it art, kitsch, parody, or irony? And, is it OK if such things make us laugh? Wicked! features works by more than eighty international designers, artists and companies, both of high and low culture—from Ettore Sottsass’ phallic “Shiva” vase or Philippe Starck’s “Gun Lounge Lamp” to the anonymous penis mug and weapon-shaped chocolate from the gift shop.