The current market-driven ethos of “more with less” encourages designers and manufacturers to think big while thinking thin, as it were.  Yet there’s always the question of “how”?  Dr. Andrew H. Dent, vice president of Library and Materials Research at Material ConneXion, Inc. and all-around industrial science guru, offers the seeds of an inspired how to – and some pointed insights into the resultant stripped-down creativity – with a tour through the latest significant developments in materials technology.  Ranging far and wide, and possibly far into the future, he discusses the winner and runners up from Material ConneXion’s MEDIUM Award for Material of the Year, an annual juried honor given to materials and processes that demonstrate outstanding technological innovation and the potential to make a significant contribution to the advancement of design, industry, society, and economy.  Dent concludes with a look featured in ICFF’s Materials Matter exhibition, which this year highlights natural surfaces for interiors, including innovations in stone, cork, wood, natural fibers, and virgin and recycled glasses.

Patricia Urquiola, the much-lauded Oviedo-born and Milan-based architect and industrial designer, discusses the nexus of design and business in today's global marketplace with Linda Tischler, the smart, sassy industry savant and Fast Company senior writer.  A design experimentalist who opened her multi-discipline studio in 2001, Urquiola today has a client list that spans the gamut of A-list international manufacturers from Alessi, B&B Italia, Driade, and Flos to Hansgrohe, Kartell, Molteni&C, Moroso, and others.

"Ich bin ein designer?"  If you respond to that personal probe with a resounding "yes," and even if you don't, do not miss this exceptional, multi-pronged exploration of the German design zeitgeist now.  Wilhelm Seibel, president of Siebel Designpartner GmbH, introduces the event, and there's no one better for the role.  Seibel, the fifth generation leader of a family firm renowned since 1895 for its production of metal "tools for the table," adheres to today's new-fashioned ethos for the old-fashioned quality his forebears established: superior handcraftsmanship and extraordinary design.  Moderating the panel discussion is Andrej Kupetz, managing director of the German Design Council since 1999.  Kupetz posits an inherent German knack for form, function, and efficiency – Bauhaus, Braun, Porsche, etc.  The difference in German design today, he thinks, is its new emotional expressivity.  Panelists include Laura Straßer, the porcelain specialist who creates tableware, accessories, lighting, and other objects that seemingly emerge from history with a captivating, contemporary narrative quality; Sebastian Herkner, a young designer celebrated for lamps and furniture pieces that express the possibility of creative play through familiar forms shaped wittily by materials, craft, and technology; and Reinhard Dienes Diaz, who has tickled many with furniture, seating, and lighting designs that are not always what they seem, and that function in unexpectedly clever ways.

Where would Americans be without Spain?  Historically speaking, undiscovered?  Or would that be nada?  So let's say gracias to those great explorers, and to today's as well.  Among them is Cindy Allen, Interior Design's effervescent and peripatetic editor, who brings to the fore the happenings design-wise in Spain's latest creative flowering.  Panelists include the industrial design polymath Mario Ruiz, widely renowned of late for his Quadro collection for Steelcase and K-22 collection for Haworth, whose latest products for Gandia Blasco will be on view on the show floor; Edda Design's Jordi Mila, who is pushing the design envelope every which way, from exhibiting his own furniture line under his own name to expanding and enriching the nature of the design experience (read expertise) he and his staff provide to clients, and thus to consumers; Javier Gutierrez and Emilio Lekuona of Inocu the Sign, the cheeky Barcelona-based multi-disciplined firm that specializes in image making (moving and still), and whose clients include, among others, Nike, Volkswagen, and Samsung; and Apparatu's Xavier Manosa, a contemporary ceramicist trained in industrial design and the graphic arts who, among other things, explores the application of digital design and digital production techniques to one of the most ancient of handicrafts.

These days, evolution is as much about speed as it is about change, thanks to the digital revolution, the volatile economy, the increasingly complex matrix of social, political, and aesthetic imperatives, and the ever-more demanding client.  So if you’ve hit the fast forward button to reinvent your professional self – or if you know you need to – don’t miss the annual Metropolis full-day conference.  As facilitated by Metropolis’s longtime editor in chief, Susan S. Szenasy, the conference, sponsored by the ASID (American Society of Interior Designers), Dornbracht, and Interiors from Spain, is a kind of post-doc fellowship in a day with continuing education credits, too.  (Metropolis, a registered provider with the AIA (American Institute of Architects) Continuing Education Systems, can report upon request AIA members who complete the event.  Certificates of completion for non-AIA members are available upon request.)

 

The faculty is stellar.  Valerie Fletcher, executive director, Institute for Human Centered Design, gives The Second Annual ASID New York Education Legacy Fund’s (ELF) Horace Havemeyer III Keynote: Universal Design Now and Next, following Szenasy’s welcoming remarks.  Other insights will come from Andreas Dornbracht, the art-loving and philosophical CEO of Dornbracht, who explores the arts program that so distinguishes his family firm.  John Williams, of Columbia University’s Center for Environmental Research and Conservation and senior vice president of sustainable development at HDR Engineering, makes the compelling case for “green” from both the design and client side.  Jürgen Häpp, associate partner at Foster + Partners, discusses the attempt to cultivate green design, the so-called “zero-carbon development” of Masdar City, in the serest of climates; Russ Wheeler, president of Hansgrohe North America, joins Häpp on a tour of architecture, right down to his firm’s bathroom fixtures.  Robert Kloos, director for visual arts and architecture, Consulate General of the Netherlands, and Andrej Kupetz, general manager of the German Design Council, along with representatives from European Union countries and Asia, discuss how strong design programs affect companies with global reach.  Jennifer Leonard, an interdisciplinary project leader at IDEO and a former journalist, unveils the master plan behind her firm’s collaboration with Design 21 on livingclimatechange.com.  Dan Wood, AIA, LEED, of Work Architecture Company, reviews his firm’s work on the Edible Schoolyard, soon to be built, in Brooklyn.  Yves Béhar, founder of fuseproject, explores student designs that incorporate the solar-cell technology pioneered by Swiss chemist Michael Michael Grätzel.  Grace La, of La Dallman Architects and the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Mike Tennity, vice president of design and development at KI, expound on the ties that bind, and often yield innovation, between academia and industry.

 

Finally, the 2010 honorees of Metropolis’s Next Generation of Design Competition explain their ideas to improve the environment.

 

ICFF Theater
When it comes to the visual drama of the ICFF, contemporary design is the lingua franca of every space, every scene, every act. At the ICFF Theater, it’s seating for the audience, thanks to Stefano Giovannoni’s Magis Vanity Chair. Mike and Maaike's Council Swarm units make the walls. Talk about taking center stage, and the front of the house, too.