Phenomena constitute the world as we experience it. Every human-made object is designed. What surrounds us in cities and metropolis is mostly made by collaboration between humans and machines. Karim Rashid works with perception and industries. His peculiar vision produces challenging design that stimulates the human being in a deeper way, breaking the ordinary and obsolete patterns of sensation and recognition. His work goes far behind the simple expression of what comprises the object; he produces an experience. He produces phenomena. The substance of all the phenomena, objects, and spaces developed by Karim Rashid has an evolved and futuristic significance.

An incredible amount of energy is concentrated in his 90 kilos. He has big eyes, a never-ending smile. Marcel Wanders, a Dutch designer with a restless brain and a huge passion for his job fortunately invaded our living-rooms at the end of the last century. His mission? To create an environment pervaded by love, to help us live our everyday life with passion, and make our most exciting dreams come true. The tool? His personal way of furnishing our world.

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.

The exhibition “The Essence of Things. Design and the Art of Reduction” illuminates the influences and motifs of a principle whose impact on design transcends time and place.

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?
 

This is a shortened version of an article published in Matter vol 6.1, a publication of Material ConneXion.

Material ConneXion is the leading global platform for material innovations and solutions.

We meet at Skeppsholmen, a little island in the centre of Stockholm, where Jeppe Wikström runs the Max Ström publishing house together with Marika Stolpe. The island is full of culture, with Sweden’s museum of
modern art, Moderna Museet, as well as the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities and the Royal University College of Fine Arts.
 

Considering their influence, SDL and its sister company Thomas Eriksson Architects seem surprisingly unsung outside the world of design. TEA was founded in 1988 by Eriksson, and had within a few years already worked with Scandinavian giants like IKEA, SAS and Absolut. While leading TEA, Eriksson saw the need for a closer dialogue between architecture and design, and by 1998 Stockholm Design Lab had fully materialized, co-founded by Eriksson, Björn Kusoffsky (Art Director) and Göran Lagerström (Strategist)....

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.