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100% Design in London
by Vera Siegmund | Oct 8, 2007

"The Essential 100" guide for this year's 100% Design in London London takes up 20 A4 pages and you can't help wondering how you are supposed to manage even this selection in just three days. Once again from September 20 - 23, London was in design fever. 100% Design is not only the most important British fair for contemporary furniture design and the very latest interior design but also a meeting point and source of inspiration for architects, designers, manufacturers and retailers. In just 13 years 100% Design has morphed from an experimental insider event to an international forum for design ideas of all kinds. What makes it so special: famous and (as yet) unknown designers can meet manufacturing firms directly. A springboard for newcomers.With star and re-designer Tom Dixon as this year's Creative Director and Greenpeace along for the ride, it was hardly surprising so much attention was devoted to "Sustainability". Greenpeace and designer Jason Bruges jointly presented Varilight , a spiral-shaped energy-saving bulb that can be fully dimmed - displayed as an enormous sea of lights comprising hundreds of bulbs.
The brilliant thing about 100% Design is that the visitor is offered both: pioneering product design and simultaneously the stuff that makes these dreams possible in the first place - a wealth of material innovations. The categories 100% Detail and 100% Material open up a veritable land of milk and honey to designers and architects. And should you have ever wondered where designers get their materials from the answer is that there are special designer DIY markets. Berlin-based firm modulor is the European market leader (luckily for all those outside Berlin you can order the more than 15,000 articles online). This year it teamed up in London with Stylepark and modulor subsidiary Materialworks, a young firm that recently began providing the design world with unique sample editions and a database for material research. A cooperation you might say they felt their way into, feel being so important in the world of materials. The designer paradise summed things up modestly: ?As the feedback was extremely positive, it will soon be easier to find materials by modulor in Great Britain.? Looks like the Brits struck it lucky.www.modulor.de
www.materialworks.com