Plastic bagging it

Now that Whole Foods has gone over to plastic bags and the whole world seems to be toting around those hideous, bright green Tyvek shopping bags, I'm so ready for the year of the canvas tote bag... But I digress.

One excellent reason to bring home a plastic bag this weekend is Kiosk's Plastic Bag Happening, in which artist Jason Rosenberg will be crafting things out of plastic bags brought in by visitors. Today through July 1, 3-7pm, 95 Spring St in New York.

If you haven't been to Kiosk, it's a great chance to check out undesign from around the world: little objects so simply designed as to be iconic, at perfectly reasonable prices.

In the same vein, Sunday is the last day to check out the Super Normal exhibition at the Vitra store in the Meatpacking district; in the basement, they've lined up Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukusawa's selections of similarly unbranded, ultra-simple objects -- some designed by the curators, others designed anonymously. In an over-designed world, there's a great pleasure in seeing objects created solely with their purpose in mind, and not with some clever subtext or logo.