This week on Dezeen, blinkers to help office workers focus and personal urinals for vulnerable refugee women were just a couple of solutions proposed by designers for global issues.

Panasonic unveiled a prototype device called Wear Space for distracted office workers to wear in order to create a bubble of quiet space in a noisy open plan office.

A collaboration between the tech company's design studio Future Life Factory and Japanese fashion designer Kunihiko Morinaga, the blinkers restrict the wearer's field of vision to 60 percent, and muffles their hearing with noise cancelling headphones.

American designer Anna Meddaugh devised a portable toilet for women in refugee camps to use at night, rather than run the risk of sexual assault when using communal latrines after dark.

The reusable Night Loo folds open at the top like a takeaway box for the user to relieve themselves into, before pouring in a sachet of super-absorbent polymer that soaks up the liquid and eliminates odours.

After last week's dispiriting news about impending climate crisis, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs asked whether humans have the ingenuity to design our way out of the anthropocene era. "Humans are clever. They can solve problems. There is hope," he was told by an optimistic Thomas Heatherwick.

Geoengineering, where humans intervene on a mass scale in the planet's climate, is one option that's rapidly gaining popularity. Dezeen put together a handy guide to the five big geoengineering solutions to counteract human induced global warming.

On a smaller scale of green solutions, Bjarke Ingels Group collaborated with lighting brand Artemide on a lamp that changes colour to help indoor plants photosynthesise, grow and blossom.

Riga Design and Art School graduate Keita Augstkalne has also created a system to help houseplants. Her intravenous drip system regulates the flow of water into potted plants that have withered from dehydration due to neglect.

Kengo Kuma recycled in Taiwan, where he stacked pre-used shipping containers to create a drive-thru Starbucks coffee shop for a new shopping centre.

Mecanoo completed another Taiwanese project, but on a larger scale. With its distinctive bulging roof, the 141,000-square-metre National Kaohsiung Centre for the Arts is the largest performing arts centre in the world.

In architecture news Pritzker prize-winner Álvaro Siza used blocks of red sandstone to clad the irregular volumes of the new International Design Museum of China in Hangzhou.

In Christchurch, New Zealand, Schmidt Hammer Lassen unveiled a library wrapped in a folded golden screen. The project is one of nine cornerstone buildings in the rebuilding of the city after it was devastated by earthquakes in 2011.

Projects that were popular on Dezeen this week include a housing complex in Mexico City made from caramel-coloured concrete, a sugar-pink pebbledash church hall in Fuzhou, and Damien Hirst's new Soho headquarters covered in glazed turquoise bricks.