Works That Work is a magazine of stories about design and how people solve practical problems around the world.
HN commenters link it for stories such as Kongo Gumi, a shared-space town cutting accidents, unified Arabic script, and Heineken's World bottles.
[warning: dangerously off topic rabbit hole]
Huh, according to Wikipedia (without citation, unfortunately), that ancient construction company pioneered the use of CAD for temple design. I wanted to see if I could corroborate this claim, so "kongo gumi cad" on Google lead to: https://worksthatwork.com/3/kongo-gumi which makes a very similar claim. From what I can tell, this claim is echoed all over the (English) internet but originates from "worksthatwork.com".
The earliest wayback snapshot of that website from 2014 doesn't mention CAD, but the March 30, 2015 snapshot does. Looking at the wikipedia article edit history, there seems to be an edit war happening regarding the accuracy of sources (someone seems to believe very strongly that Nikkei Asia is not a reliable source): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kong%C5%8D_Gumi&oldid=1121470324
The CAD claim seems to have originated in 2022, but the citation to "worksthatwork.com" was swiftly removed in a subsequent edit due to lack of evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kong%C5%8D_Gumi&oldid=1102660712
Well, this was a strange rabbithole to fall down. I'm interested to know from where this claim originates, or if "worksthatwork.com" just made it up in 2015. The answer probably lies beyond the English language internet.
I wish Wikipedia had a "blame" feature like git. If it exists, I couldn't find it.
This was once attempted, and in a way such that each letter needed only one character no matter it's position in the word
Unfortunately it died
https://worksthatwork.com/6/unified-arabic
https://worksthatwork.com/3/kongo-gumi
Interesting that it started by building Buddhist Temples and has been building and maintaining them for that long. Cool!
Number of traffic accidents went down by 50% in this town.
https://worksthatwork.com/1/shared-space
I wish Heinekin’s World bottles succeeded: https://worksthatwork.com/artefacts/world-bottles