Philippe Starck is a French industrial architect and designer known for his wide range of designs, including interior design, architecture, household objects, furniture, boats and other vehicles.
The Sacco chair, also called a bean bag chair,beanbag chair, or simply a beanbag, is a large fabric bag, filled with polystyrene beans, designed by Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini and Franco Teodoro in 1968. The product is an example of an anatomic chair, as the shape of the object is set by the user. “[The Sacco] became one of the icons of the Italian anti-design movement. Its complete flexibility and formlessness made it the perfect antidote to the static formalism of mainstream Italian furniture of the period,” as Penny Spark wrote in Italian Design – 1870 to the Present.
Jasper Morrison is an English product and furniture designer. He is known for the refinement and apparent simplicity of his designs. In a rare interview with the designer, he is quoted as saying: "Objects should never shout."
Sir David Frank Adjaye is a Ghanaian-British architect. He is known for having designed many notable buildings around the world, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Adjaye was knighted in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to architecture. He is the recipient of the 2021 Royal Gold Medal, making him the first African recipient and one of the youngest recipients. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2022.
Dieter Rams is a German industrial designer who is most closely associated with the consumer products company Braun, the furniture company Vitsœ, and the functionalist school of industrial design. His unobtrusive approach and belief in "less, but better" design has influenced the practice of design, as well as 20th century aesthetics and culture. He is quoted as stating that "Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design."
Brionvega is an Italian electronics company that is known for manufacturing futuristic television sets and audio equipment, its contributions to post-second world war technological and social advancement in Italian industry, collaborations with well known industrial designers and architects, and its impact on the aesthetics of 1960s Italian design.
Patricia Urquiola Hidalgo is a Spanish architect, industrial designer and art director.
James Irvine was a British industrial designer who created furniture and product designs for many well known companies and brands such as Artemide, B&B Italia, Cappellini, Foscarini, Ikea, Magis, Muji, Thonet, and WMF. He once described the product designer's job as “the work of an unknown hero.”
Tokujin Yoshioka is a Japanese designer and artist active in the fields of design, architecture and contemporary art. Some of his works are part of permanent collections in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 2007, he was named by Newsweek one of the 100 most respected Japanese in the world.
Tokyo Design Week (TDW), formally known as Tokyo Designers Week, was an annual design event that occurred from 2005–2016, at Meiji Jingu Gaien in central Tokyo, Japan. The event featured product design, interior design and had expanded to include art and graphic design as well as short films. Since 2005, Tokyo Design Week had been held at Meiji Jingu Gaien, near Gaienmae Station on the Tokyo Metro Ginza Line.
Erik Adigard des Gautries (1953) is a communication designer, multimedia artist and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. A co-founder of M-A-D, a Berkeley-based design firm. He is a former design contributor to Wired magazine.
Michael Young is a British industrial designer and creative director based in Hong Kong. He works in the areas of product, furniture and interior design with studios in Hong Kong and Brussels. He is known for unconventional use of materials and manufacturing processes, and collaborations with brands such as Brionvega, Cappellini, KEF, La Manufacture, and MOKE International. He is interested in "how disruption in society always has a design response, because it usually creates a need for things that perform."
Piero Lissoni is an Italian architect, art director and designer. For over thirty years, he has developed projects the world over in the fields of architecture, landscape and interior, as well as in product and graphic design. He is also art director for Alpi, B&B Italia, Boffi, Living Divani, Lema, Lualdi, Porro and Sanlorenzo.
The École cantonale d'art de Lausanne (ÉCAL) is a university of art and design located in the Renens suburb of Lausanne, Switzerland. It was founded in 1821 and is affiliated with the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland (HES-SO). The designer Alexis Georgacopoulos is the director of ÉCAL.
Emeco is a privately held company based in Hanover, Pennsylvania. The Emeco 1006, known as the Navy Chair, has been in continuous production since the 1940s. Today, Emeco manufactures furniture designed by notable designers and architects such as Philippe Starck, Norman Foster, and Frank Gehry.
Sebastian Errazuriz is a designer, artist, entrepreneur and activist based in New York. He is known or a diverse body of work that demands reconsideration of familiar objects. These works often challenge viewers perceptions of how things are, and blur the boundaries between contemporary art, design, and craft.
Konstantin Grcic, born 1965, is a German industrial designer known for his design of furniture and household products, some of which have been featured in design shows and museums. His design language is characterized by the use of geometric shapes and unexpected angles.
Ole Bouman is a Dutch German historian, writer, curator in urbanism design and architecture. Bouman is the founding director of Design Society, an initiative of China Merchants Group and the Victoria and Albert Museum in Shenzhen, which opened in December 2017.
Itay Noy is an Israeli watchmaker, designer and artist who creates limited-edition timepieces in his independent studio in the Old Jaffa. Noy's timepieces combine craftsmanship with thought-provoking design, meant to induce philosophical perspectives on the concept of time.
Vasily Klyukin is a Russian-born, Monaco-based visual artist, sculptor and architect.
