Elegant Armor: The Art of Jewelry presents innovative pieces of contemporary art jewelry from our permanent collection, dating from the 1940s to the present. The works on display range from the subtle to the flamboyant, from the purely geometric to the organic, and from narrative to sculptural works that extend the limits of the human body. The exhibition presents the major themes, materials and techniques that make contemporary jewelry visually exciting and intellectually stimulating.

This exhibition at the Design Museum London is the first comprehensive presentation of Hussein Chalayan’s work in the UK. Spanning fifteen years of experimental projects, the exhibition explores Hussein Chalayan's creative approach, his inspirations and the many themes which influence his work such as cultural identity, displacement and migration.

In the design gallery Kunsthal Rotterdam presents the installation Icon Dressed by the Danish-Dutch artist Annette Meyer, a poetic recreation of fourteen silhouettes based on female fashion from the past two centuries.

The world’s most interesting and forward looking designs have been nominated for Brit Insurance Design Award by industry experts spanning seven categories: Architecture, Fashion, Furniture, Graphics, Interactive, Product and Transport.

The exhibition Design for the Other 90% features more than 30 projects that reflect a growing movement among designers, engineers, and social entrepreneurs to create low-cost solutions for everyday problems. Through local and global partnerships, individuals and organizations are finding unique ways to address the basic challenges of survival and progress faced by the world’s poor.

The work of Le Corbusier remains highly significant and relevant in today's architectural discourse. Yet during the past two decades, no major museum show has addressed the many aspects that still make Le Corbusier's work such an important point of reference for contemporary architecture and urbanism. To fill this void, the Vitra Design Museum is now joining forces with the Netherlands Architecture Institute and the Royal Institute of British Architects in the production of an international retrospective.

This exhibition in the Porter Gallery will display more than 300 hats chosen with the expert eye of a milliner. On display will be hats ranging from an Egyptian Anubis mask dating from 600BC to a 1950s Balenciaga hat and couture creations by Jones and his contemporaries. To show the universal appeal and delight of wearing hats, Jones has included a wide variety of styles including top hats, berets and a child’s plastic tiara.

This exhibition will explore the varied new uses of felt—an ancient material, believed to be one of the earliest techniques for making textiles. Made by matting together wool fibers with humidity and friction, felting requires little technological expertise and is an extremely versatile material.

Lautner’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad. His buildings have been featured in countless publications, in a documentary film on his life and work, in the James Bond and Diehard films, among others, and in commercials for television.

The exhibition is dedicated to Henry van de Velde’s book art (1863-1957). Henry van de Velde is primarily known as an architect, but in keeping with the spirit of the times he lived in he was also a versatile designer: he designed carpets, furniture, silver objects and ceramics. But he was also a gifted book designer.

Resolving the vital role of packaging with its impact on our world is at the heart of this important new exhibition at London's Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising. Drawing on the museum's extensive collection, the exhibition explains the importance of packaging, how it has developed over the years, the serious challenges it now presents, and how manufacturers, retailers and designers are working together to adopt a more environmentally friendly approach.

Is everything design today? The Museum für Gestaltung Zürich is looking into this question with the presentation of its collection, which has never been previously exhibited to this extent. The whole spectrum of the museum's internationally important Applied Art, Graphics, Poster and Design Collection will be on show in a scenography by the renowned Swiss design studio Atelier Oï.

Televisions that retract into the ceiling, pivoting walls with a built-in mini-bar, underground ‘nuclear cities’ – the works of Italian designer Joe Colombo could have emerged from the set of a contemporary James Bond film. They exude the spirit of the shrill Sixties yet also impress with their functionality and striking forms. One of the most successful designers of his time, Colombo produced design classics such as the Elda armchair, the Universale chair or the lamp Alogena. In 1971, he died at 41 years of age. The exhibition Joe Colombo – Inventing the Future is the first international retrospective dedicated to Colombo’s work.

In this exhibition, several works created over half a century by legendary outdoor furniture designer Richard Schultz are being presented on the Perelman Building's outdoor Café Terrace.

Marcel Breuer: Design and Architecture is the first exhibition to treat all facets of Breuer's work with equal weight, from the highly innovative furniture he produced as both a student and teacher at the famed Bauhaus, to the elegant but modestly scaled houses he created after moving=to the United States, to the large-scale governmental and institutional buildings he eventually designed for major cities around the world. Developed by the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, the exhibition traces several themes that connect the apparently diverse elements of this prolific and influential designer’s portfolio. The RISD Museum is the exhibition's second North American venue and the only Northeastern stop. Twelve models — produced exclusively for this exhibition — will highlight Breuer's extensive architectural work from single-family houses to major religious, cultural, and civic institutions. In addition, drawings, floor plans, photographs, video projections, and interactive computer terminals will shed light on Breuer's long and varied architectural career.

Prisons. Courtrooms. The Department of Motor Vehicles waiting rooms. Telephone booths. Preschool classrooms. What do these places have in common?

According to Richard Ross, they all embody "asymmetrical architecture" – spaces that exert power over individuals. Architecture of Authority: Photographs by Richard Ross features 44 of Ross's large-format color photographs that capture the essence, and even the beauty, of these "powerful" spaces in sometimes surprising ways.

Death is omnipresent in the media and in our leisure distractions. Yet we avoid direct contact with those lifeless corpses which confront us with our own fragility. Our diversionary tactics vary: over-elaborate ritualisation or, on the contrary, an aseptic and depersonalised relationship. The funerary urn, an object made to preserve the deceased ashes and dissimulating them in a neutral container, belongs to these tactics. Its aesthetics are usually solemn if not morbid. How to remediate this?

Object Factory: The Art of Industrial Ceramics is the first major museum exhibition devoted to state-of-the-art industrial ceramic production and the industry's impact on craft, art, and design. Originally shown at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, this international survey of contemporary ceramic products, designs, and art explores how artists and industrial designers are re-imagining the possibilities of ceramics in the 21st century.

Over a career that spanned almost half a century, Panton emerged as one of the most colourful, imaginative, innovative and forward-looking designers of the 20th century. This exhibition showcases more than 100 of his chairs, lamps, textiles and sculptures, seeking to capture the diversity of his works, which contributed significantly to the development of design in the latter half of the 20th century.

As modernism took hold in the early years of the twentieth century, designers began to view ornament as unnecessary and even morally offensive to modern industrial production. Increasingly they shunned decoration in favor of rational, austere designs that were devoid of extraneous embellishment. Despite their criticism, however, ornament was never entirely exorcised from consumer culture, and by the late 1950s designers were returning to an informed discussion about ornament and its symbolic value.

1609: The Dutch Discover New York

2009: New Yorkers Discover Dutch Design

The exhibit presents everything from furniture and tabletop objects to jewelry by 23 emerging Dutch designers and manufacturers and 1 photographer.

This display features highlights from the Royal College of Art (RCA) fashion MA graduates' final collections and reveals aspects of the design process. For the past 60 years, the RCA has prepared aspiring designers for fashion careers leading to graduates working in fashion houses such as Galliano, Vivienne Westwood, Chloé, Dior and Burberry. Others such as Ossie Clark, Boudicca, Julien Macdonald and, more recently, Erdem Moralioglu and Carolyn Massey have developed their own labels.