How about some innovative ideas to wrap up the week?  This one comes from French company B-ton Design.

How many times have you shied away from a table because it is already occupied by one person.  Some people are comfortable and others feel like it is perhaps intrusive to plop yourself down next to a stranger at a typical picnic table.  By design, this attractive picnic table seems to encourage singles and small groups to intermingle and use the furniture.

Europeans are also quite forward thinking when it comes to bike-able cities (at least as compared to US cities).  This is a lovely accessory for city bikers.

found at like cool.

It is simply for holding onto while waiting for the light to change.   It is located in a Copenhagen traffic circle. When I visited Floriade years ago (outside of Amsterdam) we biked from the city to the garden show.  We got a little lost and those flat distances are farther than they appear but I always remember how welcoming the city was to those on bikes.  The foot rest reads: “Hi, cyclist! Rest your foot here… and thank you for cycling in the city.”

And here is another interesting concept….

Seems futuristic perhaps, but it is actually a quite well thought out concept By Bulgarian architect Martin Angelov.  It is called Kolelinia.  Click trough to see more of the design details.  What I think is exciting about this concept is that the tree tops would start to take on a greater interest in urban settings.  While they would continue to provide shade at the street level and carbon reduction throughout, the bike lanes would ride along at canopy height, giving a whole new way to view some of our urban landscaping and surely exciting evolutions in design.

also found at like cool.