Lego and Muji recently released a collaborative toy project in Japan that cleverly merges the personality of each brand.

Take a look at EA Sports new pop-up training centers that encourage better personal fitness.

Live vicariously through the eyes of a young designer in London.

Manhattan becomes a city of canals.

Substance over style for buildings in 2009.

Freed up design staff creates an amazing collection of art for a good cause.

Hands down this is one of the most interesting examples creative architecture and community spaces we’ve seen all year. But the finished project almost falls in the shadow of the story about how this library came about.

There’s a long list of new large scale buildings in Manhattan that have skewed the focus of architecture critiques and design reviews of the city towards grand projects. But New York Magazine recently uncovered several small city projects tucked away in the outerboroughs that are examples of good architectural solutions meeting challenging community and city service building projects.

Sculptor Christopher Fennell created a bus shelter in Atlanta from three decommissioned school busses. Exterior slices of a ‘62,’72, and ‘77 buses were joined together and the seating is from an old city bus. Interesting mix of creative reuse of materials and their context.

Automakers have made attempts to create more environmentally friendly factories before. Subaru even leveraged its zero landfill factory in Indiana as part of an advertising campaign. But Toyota looks to have raised the bar to a new height by engineering two new flowering plants to help clean the air at its Toyota City factory in Japan.

The architectural firm IAD proposes rethinking the structure of tall buildings based on how trees grow. Their proposal for a ‘treehouse hotel’ merges living space and vertical gardens in a building that forgoes the traditional glass box.

A unique installation at the Synchronicity architectural and arts festival in Warsaw, Poland provides purified water in exchange for some exercise.

The FHI concept will debut next week at the Tokyo motor show and is based on the theme “Take a Moment to Free Your Mind”. The exterior design hints at the styling evolution of the Subaru brand and features large gullwing doors.

We recently received photos of new work by designer Chris Jackson who we met at the ICFF last spring. He debuted a collection of functional objects called ‘Digital Readymades’ at last months 100% Design event in London.

In preparation for the NYC Marathon, outdoor clothing company Icebreaker has set up a live seamstress in the window of Paragon Sports in NYC to convert old synthetic running t-shirts into shoe bags for free.