June 2012 / Process, Transparency, Experience


Located throughout the world, the Trendease Team continues to deliver our subscribers around the globe must-know market information and inspiration straight to their computer screens.

Designs continue to provoke us, to make us think and to attempt to draw a response. Successful design is not solely based upon what we see on the outside, it is the story around it, the process that creates it, and the hands that hold it. This issue is just as much about the end result as it is the steps taken to achieve it. See hundreds of inspiring creations emerge from an impressive talent pool we have fished, including design week reviews, underground venues, new surface interests, and products that are just as yummy as the food that influenced their creation. This is the who, what, when, where, how, and why of today’s marketplace. Get inspired with the June edition!

We attend over 100 design events a year on your behalf to bring you trend insights and design movements to help you maintain cutting-edge knowledge of the lifestyle and design markets. Currently we keep readers within 170 countries/territories in the know! Are you reading Trendease.com?

Show us what you’ve got! For editorial consideration please email editorial@trendease.com with your latest original designs. Upcoming Trendease Market Edge PowWows and Trendease.TV scheduling can be found on the homepage.

REPORTING TO INSPIRE,
Jennifer Castoldi,
Chief Creative Director

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Features and Articles

Jennifer's June Journal

Worldwide — For the most part, we know where we come from. We know when and where we were born, who our parents are, the origins of our family, and so on. But can we say the same for the chair we sit upon, the sheets we sleep in, the towel with which we dry ourselves? There has been a growing movement around the traceability of our food, the ingredients that make up our meals, and it is coming closer to home—it is in our home! Read more of Jennifer’s reflections and see a gallery of carpets worthy of having interior picnics.

Part of the process belongs to the end consumer

The Precious Process

Worldwide — Show the people how your products are made. We are in the era of transparency, where consumers want to know from where their products—from food to furnishings—originate. The trade is finally grasping hold of this in numbers, and it has become more evident as we travel the globe exploring design happenings to keep our finger on the pulse of the shifting global environment.

Enter into an unexpected world

Behind the Black Door

New York — Design week in any city can be exhausting, and finding time to have a proper meal, versus mingling with the creative crowd to get the latest scoop, can be a challenge. But we must remember that life is about balance, and grabbing a quick potato knish on the street in between events may stop one’s belly from rumbling, but it does little to feed the soul.

KLM business class tableware and cutlery

Bringing Food to the Center of Design

Worldwide — Society as a whole is beginning to pay a lot more attention to what it puts in its bodies. People want to know the ingredients they are ingesting. Locavores are growing in number around the globe. Now we see designers bringing food to the center of design. Tradition, low-tech, ergonomic, process, transparency, waste-free, affordable, and made-at-home are all key words to describe this movement. May this gallery of supporting images and project descriptions inspire you!

That's Some Amazing Fertilizer!

Multiple European Cities — These days, after a romp through a collection of international trade shows, the Trendease Team imagines that the make-believe garden flourishing in the heads of the designers is under the influence of some impressive fertilizer. My how your garden grows! Just look at the size of the flowers garnishing the fresh selection of bedding, wallcoverings, upholstery, and pajamas seen in this gallery.

Textile Motion for 2013

Istanbul — This year’s design directions under the theme ‘Motion’ for 2013 were envisioned by Lobster Concepts for Evteks 2012 and UTIB: “A wider insight in the world of tomorrow. The zeitgeist is changing. Welfare over wealth, positivity over gloom, empowerment over dependency, ideals over greed. A crisis with challenges and developments brings forward a fresh, light and airy mood in fashion, lifestyle and textile design.”

All Patched Up

Multiple European Cities — Once upon a time pieces of fabric from worn out clothes would live a second life as functional and decorative pieces to a homemade textile puzzle otherwise known as a patchwork quilt. Intelligence in the industrialized production lines started to use scraps from other products to create patchwork collections in a similar vain. Of late we witness something new happening to patchworks…

Peel the Big Apple to Its Core

New York — Less than two weeks ago the Trendease Team was peeling the Big Apple down to its core in search of the latest designs and innovations. The International Contemporary Furniture Fair has been coined as “North America's premier annual showcase for contemporary design” and we could not agree more. Within this gallery subscribers can uncover new market directions and the apples of our eyes.

Consumer Translation

London — From time to time we like to take a stroll through consumer fairs to see how products are being translated to the end user. In May we explored Grand Designs Live at ExCel Centre, a fair open to the public now in its eighth year running. The exhibition boasts seven home shows under one roof with areas dedicated to every room in the home, specialized seminars, and interior workshops.

An interesting way to display carpet fibers

NEWSLETTER #400 - Clerkenwell Design Week

London — Here is a huge gallery of images reviewing the Clerkenwell Design Week, the 3-day festival reveling design's creative robustness, social significance and technological innovations through a full schedule of workshops, lectures, product introductions, and debates. We trudged through the crowds to bring you these event highlights and product images from the Farmloe Building, Order of St. John, and House of Detention, the main venues of CDW.

NEWSLETTER #401 - Urban Art & Inspiration

London — Here is the special preview show of Nelly Duff presenting Banger Art. For one night only, if you had the address of a particular subterranean parking lot in East London’s Bethnal Green, you were in for a unique experience: a sneak peek of the work of ten internationally renowned urban artists who transformed ten vehicles bound for the junk yard into art to be shown as an installation at this weekend’s Lovebox festival. But this art inspires more than you can imagine…

NEWSLETTER #402 - Bubble Lights

Multiple European Cities — Once again it has been a jam-packed week of inspiration from student shows to the IPR Fundamentals of Design & China seminar, with a visit in between to the Crysalis Crossborder Professionals Program with UCA Rochester, Stad Ronse, Integria Devon, and Ville Calais. This week’s informative gallery boasts an impressive collection of bubble lighting we have uncovered during our international journeys. Think our 2004/05 favorite word “blobular” with a twist.