Despoke

What made you want to become a designer in the first place?
We think it was the need of creating something new, something that masses of people will use and feel happy and comfortable with it in the daily life routine.

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Beautiful and practical products for everybody! This idea is almost as old as the industrial fabrication of furniture and interior decoration itself. The furniture manufactory IKEA founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad held up this ideal from the very beginning. The huge success and international reach of the biggest brand name in furniture worldwide is the motive for the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe to investigate how far the furnishing company has been successful in realising the promise inherent in the idea of “Democratic Design for everyone” propagated by the Deutsche Werkbund, the Bauhaus and their successors. FENOMEN IKEA shows some 250 exhibits, including IKEA products spanning six decades as well as many examples of massproduced goods and high-quality product design which were made long before IKEA and apart from it, such as design classics by Thonet, Panton, Henningsen and others, or the celebrated Frankfurt kitchen from the year 1926 and the most commonly found German living room in 2009. NON IKEA is the name of a special section within the exhibition devoted to the reactions of international artists such as Thomas Schütte, Tobias Rehberger, Morten Steen Hebsgaard and others as well as designers to the phenomenon IKEA.
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Pokaali glassware by Kaj Franck, part of the Into The Woods exhibition

Love glassware? Love Scandinavian design? Then don’t miss this exhibition of work which focuses on the iittala company. Entitled “Into the Woods” the show is curated by Finnish designer Harri Koskinen and considers the work of such design luminaries as Alvar Aalto, Kaj Franck and Tapio Wirkkala among others, drawing on iittala’s vast archives. The result is a journey of discovery through the decades and given the penchant for retro styling in the 90s and 00s, it’s interesting to see that certain designs associated with those periods in fact date back far further. The exhibition is being held at Chelsea Space, near to Tate Britain and runs until 17 October.

iittala company