Ellen Lupton, contemporary-design curator at the Cooper-Hewitt and director of the graphic design MFA program at MICA, has built a career on bringing design thinking to the masses. Her 2004 book Thinking with Type is now a curriculum standard for anyone learning about typography. D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself, co-authored with her graduate students at MICA, explains basic design to a general audience. And D.I.Y. Kids, written with her twin sister, Julia, does the same thing for the younger set. The Lupton sisters teamed up again for Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things, out today from St. Martin’s Griffin.  The book began as a blog where Ellen and Julia ruminated about everything from toasters to buying the right bra. Entries were often illustrated with Ellen’s signature paintings of objects, which also appear in the book. “Design, we argue, is more than the stuff you buy at high-end stores or the modern look that moves products at Target and IKEA,” the sisters write on the blog. “Design is critical thinking. It is a way of looking at the world and wondering why things work, and why they don’t.”

Design your Life is all about how people forge personal connections with common objects. With that in mind, we sent Ellen Lupton into some of Manhattan’s finest thrift stores to see what everyday pleasures she might find in others’ cast-off goods.

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Last Sunday, despite the nonstop rain, Metropolis’s associate art director, Dungjai Pungauthaikan, and its picture editor, Sarah Palmer, joined an estimated 30,000 other hearty souls on the 42-mile TD Bank 5 Boro Bike Tour. The ride began in Lower Manhattan and made its way into the Bronx, through Queens and Brooklyn, and, finally, over the Verazzano Bridge into Staten Island. The tour traversed bridges, roads, and highways not normally accessible to cyclists, and provided exciting views and a sense of community rarely felt in the crowded streets of New York City. Here, Dungjai and Sarah present a slide show of images from their water-logged trek.

The tour kicked off Bike Month NYC, which includes such events as National Bike to Work Day, commuting and repair workshops, and a variety of other tours in New York City and beyond.

Earlier this month I traveled to the great city of New Orleans to serve as a guest judge for the Billes Architecture Home Design Competition. The firm, which is working with Brad Pitt on the Make It Right initiative, gave architecture students a challenging brief, and they responded with youthful gusto. On April 11, principal and founder Gerald Billes presented $1,000 checks to the five winning teams at a ceremony at the Renaissance Arts Hotel in the Warehouse District. Later I learned that some jurors wrote lengthy assessments of the ten finalists, while I merely checked boxes. To correct that oversight I’m offering belated “judge’s comments” on each of the winners, along with a plug for one of my favorites that failed to take top honors.

First a little bit about the program. Students were asked to design a 1,500- to 2,000-square-foot home for one of four neighborhoods in the city: Uptown, Downtown, Gentilly/Lakeview, or New Orleans East. The home needed to be eligible for gold or platinum LEED certification; to be raised to what local officials call the Advisory Base Flood Elevation; and to come in between $150,000 and $225,000 (more on that later).

The contestants were either fourth-year undergraduates or first-year master’s students. Michael Jemtrude, director of McGill’s School of Architecture, incorporated the competition into his classes, which explains the preponderance of Canadians in the final five. Keep in mind, all of my comments are completely subjective (and quite possibly wrong) and done in the spirit of respect and constructive criticism. Congratulations all around!

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Top: “The Breezeway House” by Hamaza Alhbian and Jessica Dan of McGill University