contributed by Deb Barrett [designer / business consultant / trendspotter / blogger]

One of my favorite things about making the January round of European design shows is soaking up the exhibitions by young and emerging designers. The thing about young designers is the crazy experimental stuff that you know doesn’t always have much of a chance of survival in the marketplace, but you still find yourself marveling at their provocative approach to design. Out-of-the-box really doesn’t describe the offerings. You can’t help but feel privileged to be amongst so much talent and you hope that they’ll get noticed and that their products get picked up. After all it’s the crazy stuff – the experimental design – that drives the industry. A trip to IMM Cologne is not complete without seeing Hall 3 where D3 Talents, design schools and design professionals serve up a feast for the senses when it comes to home décor products. Come walk the virtual trade fair halls with me to see what the young buck, future design stars have been innovating this year.

Light In Motion

This year’s Interior Innovation award winner was an amazing light – Etirement by Rémi Bouhaniche of USIN-e. His inspiration was based on the principle of an organic body composed of skin and skeleton. In pulling the pendant light’s center rod, the intensity of the light is raised or lowered, coinciding with the distortion of the light’s fabric membrane. In order to produce a flowing and expressive movement, the designer concentrated on a very precise and harmonious gesture focused on one point. In this way, the lamp becomes a temporary shape creating a poetic time from daily action. See the Etirement video here on my blog.

Wood As A Textile

Being a self professed fabric junkie, I couldn’t help but be in awe of German design student Elisa Strozyk’s Wooden Carpet. As her Master of Arts project, she started experimenting with wood, looking at it in a new way. Always inspired by materials and our presumptions about it, Strozyk likes to switch properties and meanings and pose questions like "Can a hard material be liquid or soft”" She looks at everyday objects around us and rethinks their function or imagines hybrids between them.

Using wood veneer castoffs from a workshop that was closing down, she cut different geometric pieces, transforming them into a flexible and three-dimensional surface. The pieces were hand- or laser-cut, playing with the shape until she found one that gave her the result she was looking for and then stitched to a textile backing. The results are stunning, winning honorable mention in the interior innovation awards.

Knit1 Purl2

Chae Young Kim created The Knitted Room. Last year we saw Chae at Design Talents with her Urban Camouflage 05 that is now being produced by Tapeten Agentur. This year’s edition, Knitted Room, is proof that science and design can go hand in hand.

Kim pushes the boundaries of digital textile design, combining her expertise in software and using a complex graphic coding program, she creates new ways of imaging. Manipulating lines and intersections, the results are breathtaking. Even though the process is digital, the results aren’t cold. Her work has soul; you can sense the emotion that Chae puts into it.

Inspired by a snowflake sweater she owned, Chae created the Knitted Room wallpaper by drawing extremely fine 2-D vector graphic lines. These were re-interpreted as threads to be braided and knitted onto hard surfaces and giving a warm and fuzzy feeling of knitted fabrics. Printed in grey scale, the light and shadow effect adds a 3-D illusion. I can’t imagine the precision it takes to create the illusion of knits. Furthermore, the opaque heat-sensitive ink will increase the phantasmal vision revealing partly and randomly, as it gets warm from sun or indoor light. It’s better than an M.C. Escher image.

Toy Story

The Brick Series started with Pepe Heykoop‘s viewing of a drawing called "all the chairs I sat on" by James Gulliver Hancock. His reaction to the childlike but detailed qualities of the drawing led him to create furniture pieces using colorful wooden blocks.

Pepe commented that the drawing took him back to his childhood and memories of building worlds with Lego or wooden blocks. Those blocks became his materials to work with. His Brick Chandelier has over 1,500 blocks and spans over 8 feet. The Brick series will soon be produced by Furnism.

Financial Statement

Award winning Royal College of Art Master Graduate Palvinder Nangla combines centuries of indigenous craft skills in embroidery from his native Indian heritage in his mixed media, printed and embroidered textiles. Nangla creates a sense of timelessness in his finely hand stitched and knitted fabrics.

The piece showcased during imm Cologne was inspired by the global credit crunch as the pieces of the financial pages are intertwined in the warp. Small charms and bead randomly scattered across the textile add to the textile’s story. It blew me away!

In Confidence

See more young emerging designers on my blog, Design Confidential, as well as items like the IIT tassel lamp by Bormann Atelier and the Eine Wand wall system from ID Modus. But remember – innovation certainly isn’t reserved for the young. On Design Confidential I’ve also paid homage to the equally genius industrially hand crafted textiles of Jakob Schlaepfer, fabric provider to Haute Couture, launched at Paris Deco Off. And many more…

EDITOR’S NOTE: By the way, if you have a design travel jones, Deb and a colleague are taking a tour group with them to MAISON & OBJET in Paris August 31-September 8, 2010. The group is limited to 12 designers and, besides the monumental show, they are planning insider access to several other design destinations in Paris. GO HERE to find out more. “Give me a ticket for an aeroplane…”