Best of 2015 #design

A room filled with 25,000 dishes and 3D printed joints, a phone just for calls and a bicycle in wood and carbon, here are this year’s best design stories.

In our selection of the best design stories 2015, fifteen projects between technology and craftsmanship, offering new solutions for contemporary living.


– For the renovation of Maruhiro flagship store in Nagasaki, Japan, Yusuke Seki used 25,000 locally sourced imperfect, white, tableware to create new levels in the space.

– The search by upcoming designers for a modus operandi that goes beyond industry makes us reflect on the point reached by our highly civilised society, introducing a touch of contentious nostalgia into the desire to begin all over again, i.e. from contemporary primitivism.

– A father and his son, combining craftsmanship and knowledge, old materials and new fibers, give shape to a lightweight and durable bike made of carbon fiber and wood.

– Nendo presented during Milan Design Week the new door collection Seven doors, developed for the Japanese wooden door manufacturer Abe Kogyo.

– For his final year project at RCA, Chinese product designer Chao Chen took inspiration for the pinecone to develop a water-reacting material that can be used for a lot of applications.

– Hugues Weill developed for Drugeot Labo a collection of bookshelves made out of natural oak with a rigorous orthogonal structure, disturbed by an oblique frame.

– Hungarian industrial designer Ollé Gellért developed a collection of 3D printed small joints able to connect bigger parts from different materials.

– Koichi Futatsumata designed, for the “Showcase” exhibition in Tokyo, the prototype of a stool made out of Japanese cypress and copper.

– Presented during the London Design Festival, Jasper Morrison-designed mobile phone for Punkt. performs the core mobile phone functions: calling and text messaging.

– Riva, the iconic Italian shipbuilding company, has presented a family of wooden building toy boats designed by Madeindreams, handmade in Italy without glue.

– Naoto Fukasawa, Jasper Morrison and Konstantin Grcic: three designers for three micro-homes, commissioned by Muji to slip away from the hustle and bustle of the city.

– Employing traditional-artisan techniques, Israeli designer Alon Dodo created a cabinet whic plays with the tension between gentle and rough, wild and tamed, combining wood and steel.

– Recovering Siberian traditional manufacturing techniques, with her new collection Anastasiya Koshcheeva represents some unique and outstanding qualities of birchbark.

– Eighteen students and two designers propose a series of variations on the theme of pencil, re-thinking an everyday object and giving it new functions and meanings.

– Nendo designed for Tod’s a new leather bag based on real architects needs that changes its shape in accordance to what it holds inside.

Top: Eytan Berkovic, Fairy pencil