As an attempt to bridge the communication-gap between Danes and the local muslim community, a group of academic muslims have launched a novel form of home-service.

The service is called 'Book en Muslim' (Book a Muslim) and it enables people to book a meeting with a young Danish muslim. The meeting takes place either at people's own homes or at their workplaces.

The objective is to create a platform for dialogue between Danes and Danish muslims who feel caught in between the religious and political fronts that emerged as a result of the Mohammed cartoon saga.

Bookings can be placed through the internet, free of charge.

The illustration is from a previous library-event called "borrow a prejudice".

• The Network

In 1969 George Perec wrote the lipogrammatic novel 'La Disparition', in which the letter 'e' does not appear.

The novel was later translated into English, still without using the letter 'e'.

Recently, Danish artist Mogens Jacobsen created 2 fonts - Perec Sans & Peric Serif - which only contains the letter 'e'.

• Perec Fonts

Somewhere after 8:40pm on Dec 1st 2005, Cory Arcangel committed Friendster Suicide.

In other words, Cory got fed up with his existence on Friendster.com - the online network community - and consequently decided to delete his account.

In the spirit of Friendster, the e-suicide was staged as a social event and carried out in front of friends and friends of friends...

• Friendster Suicide

Flowmarket is a store with an attitude.

All the products in Flowmarket are reflections of what we need rather than what we can actually get. Behind the label of the products there is nothing - the minimalistic bottles, cartons and boxes are empty.

Still, these products are real and for sale. For 2-20 euros you can buy items such as "Commercial-free Space', 'Pollution Dissolver' and 'Spam Killers'.

The store is located at the Danish Design Center in Copenhagen. If you're paying the city a visit, this is the place to buy youself a holistic and sustainable product - or perhaps just a cool souvenir, depending on your view on things.

• FLOWmarket

The 2006 edition of the Play Award design contest is devoted to football (or 'soccer' as it is called in the US).

Football hasn't changed much over the past century but now Play Award calls for young designers to rethink, challenge and innovate the elements of the game, such as: the rules of play, the stadiums, the teams, the balls, the turfs etc.

PLAY-AWARD is an initiative of NIKE Germany and the Berlin based design festival DESIGNMAI.

• www.play-award.com

PS. As inspiration or critical context, you might be interested in Friedrich von Borries' book Who is Afraid of Niketown? in which he analyses Nike's marketing strategies with a focus on how they target local sub-cultures and urban space.

Here's a link to my interview with Theo Jansen, published at artificial.dk.

Theo Jansen is a Dutch artists who is occupied with the making of 'new nature'. For the last 15 years, he has been evolving a series of wind-powered animals that look like skeletons. When these creations are fed by wind, they set into motion and transmute into organic-looking creatures; or 'beach animals' as Jansen calls them.

• www.artificial.dk • Theo Jansen

Singles Wallpaper is a product for the lonely.

The wallpaper is imprinted with a 1:1 picture of a person, which will stimulate the sense of physical human presence in your home. But in contrast to real people, the imprint is always friendly, it won't smell, be noisy or complain about your bad habits.

So, if you are the lonely type and have some social problems this product could either solve them - or multiply them.

The wallpaper comes in a few different variations depending on your visual and social preferences.

• www.single-tapete.de

Google Will Eat Itself - GWEI -by Hans Bernhard (ubermorgen.com) and Alessandro Ludovico (neural.it) is a subversive web project, which aims to buy Google with funds generated via Adsense - Google's own advertising program.

GWEI.com is designed to look like a serious website about web marketing and business but like so many other websites, the real objective is to hijack hits from people searching for information and subsequently lure them into clicking the ads.

Each time someone clicks one of the Google text-ads, GWEI receives a micropayment, which will be invested in Google shares. In other words: Google will slowly be bought via its own advertisement-system!

The project is a critique of Google's growing monopoly of information. The long term plan is to take over Google and turn the ownership over to a GTTP-community - Google To The People!

• www.gwei.org and more info at hansbernhard.com

Debbie Mollenhagen is the winner of the 'NanoWorld2020 Imagination Contest' that encouraged students to picture the social impact of nanotechnology in the not-so-distant future of 2020.

In her pilot project 'How to Grow an Orangina Bottle' Mollenhagen suggests that plants should be genetically modified to grow its own packaging. Traditionally, packaging is related to branding but by developing plants that grow their own packaging, Mollenhagen believes that brands can be deleted from the consumption loop, thus freeing capital for more constructive purposes.

Packaging that imitates the form of its content (the Orangina bottle) could be a thing of the past and Mollenhagen also suggests that a similar concept could be used to grow houses.

• nanoworld2020 • Orangina concept + Orangina video

As a counter reaction to the increasing amount of sensitive data stored about individual citizens, students at the Danish School for Design in Kolding have developed a 'How to Disappear' kit

The DIY kit is enclosed in a video cassette case that can only be purchased from a vending machine. The case contains tips and gadgets that you need to fight the most basic forms of surveillance, including an instructional booklet that explains "How to blend in with a crowd" or "How to use invisible ink".

By following the simple instructions, anybody will be able to become nobody - the more you are willing to sacrifice the more you will be able to disappear.

'How To Disappear Kit' is a collaborative project developed by: Luca Dyrvang, Anne-Mette Poulsen, Kim Mejer, Louise Rosenkrantz, Lars Lyngstadas and Morten Just.

The Kit will be on display at the exhibition 'SAFE: Design Takes on Risk' from October 2005 at MOMA in New York.

• How to Disappear