In this special report, we are very happy to present the top three winners of the Faces of Design Awards 2010. They are the three candidates who received the most panel votes overall, and they are three candidates who show the great diversity of the competition all by themselves. A great success for three very international young designers, who are about to get a chance to each speak directly with representants of one company of their choice.

Asisi Visual Culture GmbH from Berlin is a cultural enterprise that stands for the creation of illusional spaces, both on a national and on an international level. Its founder, the artist Yadegar Asisi, has created the world’s largest 360° panoramas and is committed to the idea that the act of “seeing” and “understanding” is an essential factor in the development of the individual, and society as a whole. It is Asisi’s aim, with the aid of his exhibitions and educational programmes, to promote a lasting concept of visual culture.

Anyone who has seen the portraits by Swedish
master photographer Georg Oddner (1923–2007)
never forgets them. How can one, when confronted with the self-conscious glance of a young Anita Ekberg in the 1950s, her face framed by an elegantly folded shirt collar?
 

It started in a so-called brownstone on 53rd Street, a museum founded by three ladies who lunched. It was, as Glenn Lowry writes in an essay published to coincide with the museum’s reopening, separate from the street, pointedly removed, up a set of stairs. This was not a museum that was about ‘accessibility’. It was a museum that was about a particular subculture of the wealthy and connected, until 1939, when J. Alfred Barr, the museum’s first director, commissioned its first proper home, designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone.

When you come driving on the small road towards the village of Porquera de los Infantes, 100 km north of Palencia in northern Spain, the first thing that strikes you is that this is just another of those Spanish villages that once had a life and then fell into oblivion. Most of the houses have collapsed and only a few people have chosen to stay.
Coming closer, you start to realize why bus-loads of visitors have come to the almost abandoned village lately and why the leading Spanish newspaper El País has written about it.

Chatting over coffee one day, I discovered Claudia's background and decided to feature her here on Faces of Design. Claudia's background involves an unusual job profile in combination with a lot of aspects that we value highly here at Faces of Design: she's got an international, interdisciplinary mindset, as well as great curiosity and drive.

A flamboyant career created with passion and dedication fused with natural talent. Tall and long-limbed, his sculptural body reflecting a devotion to sports, two deep dark eyes looking down from almost two metres, Arik Levy took a shortcut to the world of international design to be recognized as an inventive and polyhedric creator. Designer, technician, artist, photographer and filmmaker, Levy’s skills are multi-disciplinary and his work – fuelled by a poetical and never-ending zeal for research and innovation combined with an unpredictable and surprising world of visions – can be found on display in renowned shop-windows as well as prestigious galleries and museums worldwide.

Thomas Sandell relates Danish architect Bjarge Ingels’s explanation for this tendency to spontaneously say ‘yes’ when invited to take on a new assignment. Simple: – “Yes is more!”So, even when he is approached by people for suggestions about their kitchens, he says yes, which sometimes irritates those who feel that he should concentrate on bigger issues. – For me it is a pleasure I can seldom resist. Meeting people is often good, especially when they are open to a dialogue.

No matter how much we tell ourselves to forget the environment when the economy is in crisis, the issues don’t go away. But most would agree that a call-to-arms for corporates to take up – what looks like – ‘sustainable business’ is futile, when the financial outlook is so bleak. Michael Braungart, the chemist, environmentalist and co-author of Cradle-to-Cradle (C2C) with William McDonough, thinks he’s chosen his moment well.

Some people struggle a whole lifetime to get in touch with their feelings and innermost wishes. Others seem to be born with that rare gift – a direct connection to their emotional self. Belonging to this second category, jewelry designer Efva Attling also makes it the color of her success.