With his book "Total design" Mateo Kries, Chief Curator and future director at Vitra Design Museum in Weil/Rhine, has critically assessed the new and supposedly exaggerated role of design.

Everything is beautiful. Art, design, people, cars. In early December, Art Basel Miami Beach and Design Miami transform Florida's capital into an island of bliss.

The catalog "Drawing Fashion" presents drawings of haute couture from 1910 to the present day. Drawings, watercolors and gouaches by illustrators including Georges Lepape, André Edourd Marty and René Bouché enchant readers with their outstanding beauty.

In the form of "Qubique - the next generation tradeshow", which will take place for the first time at the end of October 2011 against the spectacular backdrop of the former Tempelhof Airport, the German capital is finally going to host an event in the area of furniture and Interior design that can be taken seriously and promises to be successful.

In 1958, a model housing development was built in Budapest, the designs of which derived from a government-organized architecture and design competition. Even though the house designs were subsequently not built in other places, the interior designs laid the foundations for the modern Hungarian furniture industry.

Oliver Grabes heads the design department of the long-standing company Braun and in conversation with Jens Müller explains his way of looking at things. What is the design process at Braun like today, how does the company deal with Dieter Rams' legacy, and why are Apple products so successful compared with Braun?

Something is happening in Russia. Concern about the architectural quality of the buildings in Moscow and the approach taken to public space has led to the founding of the Strelka Institutes. The educational institute's provisional new building was created by Rem Koolhaas, who is supporting the initiators.

In some countries a midday snooze is part of everyday culture, in others it is treated with disdain. Science has long since proven that a noon nap boosts a person's performance during the rest of the day. Hardly surprising then that there's a broad array of representative recliners and napping chairs available for rest areas in offices.

Philippe Bestenheider's designs are often reminiscent of the aesthetics associated with primitive peoples. If anything, though, that is unintentional. The Swiss designer simply loves playing with geometry.

Whether a silk stocking, a small pig on a trampoline or the human brain, artists and scientists have made any number of contributions on elasticity to the anthology "Findings on Elasticity" . The outcome is a conglomeration that lets the reader share in a creative thought-finding process.

At present, the London Design Museum is holding a retrospective on the works of John Pawson. Alexander Menden met the British architect and talked with him about the difference between "building" and "architecture", fleeting ideal states and his failed attempt to become a Buddhist monk.

What happens to furniture that has done its service? It is stored in attics, cellars and in forgotten corners. And sometimes it seems as if the old items had taken on a life of their own.

At the 13th Designers' Saturday Stylepark celebrated the occasion of the 10th anniversary of its foundation with a large 10, candy-floss, and a sky full of colorful balloons. And the interest was so great that the pink Stylepark balloons were soon floating all over Langenthal.

Mathias Hahn, a talented young product designer from Germany, moved to London six years ago in order to gain a foothold in the design community. He has made an international name for himself within a very short space of time, with his sympathetic, straightforward and functional everyday products.

NRW-Forum in Düsseldorf is inviting architects and designers throughout the world to submit designs for an exhibition of container houses next spring.

Walls made of gold foil, dancing teabags and any number of light corridors - the 13th Designers' Saturday took place in Langenthal, Switzerland. An excursion on the "Black Line" through this charming Disneyland of design.

Offices are increasingly turning into social centers. To make certain the stress of constant communication does not become too fierce and the office becomes a social flashpoint, the modern work nomad withdraws into a chic little shed or a new kind of basket-chair.

You will search in vain for a new paradigm or new typologies of work at the Orgatec 2010. Instead, people are busy working away at furniture systems that enable the temporary privacy of retreat in the midst of the open field of omnipresent communication.

Luca Nichetto is one of the few Italian designers in the upcoming generation. Sandra Hofmeister talked to him about the life and death of his furniture, about new perspectives in Scandinavia and about the meaning and meaninglessness of national borders in design.

In the form of the Beijing Design Week, China intends to play a prime part in the future international design circus. "Design Landing" is the motto of the first edition, which will launch in September 2011.

Phone booths have more or less vanished from public space. Yet now they are returning in a changed shape - in offices. While they once served to provide access to phones, phone boxes now offer a touch of privacy in the world of today's open-plan offices.

Spanish design collective CuldeSac has come up with a special idea for an exhibition for Tokyo Designers Week: "Made in JAPAIN - The true story of Spanish Design" uses a comic to convey a fantastic tale of interculturality.

With the exhibition "Small Scale, Big Change", the Museum of Modern Art in New York City is honoring socially motivated architecture from around the world. On display are eleven projects which, detached from the mainstream, help to improve local living conditions. As meager as the means may in some cases be, the impact this commitment to building has is astonishing.

The exhibition "Realstadt. Wishes knocking on reality's doors" is showing in Berlin more than 300 architecture and urban planning projects from all over Germany. The exhibition stretches across around 8,000 square meters, yet as far as content goes, the presentation leaves many questions unanswered and the exhibits are more like showy objects.

At the Danish company Petersen Tegl, the seventh generation is now producing high-grade bricks as well as a special range of molded bricks, glazed tiles and special terracotta.

The specialist trade fair architect@work is intended specifically for architects, interior designers and planners. And has long since been established in other European countries. On December 8 and 9, it debuts in Germany, with Düsseldorf as the exhibition venue.

The exhibition entitled "Ideen sitzen / Ideas that sit well" at Hamburg's Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe invites visitors to peruse chairs, armchairs and sofas. The tour of the museum swiftly morphs into a voyage of discovery through the history of interior design, if not even the history of ideas and cultural history of recent decades.

From today the Internet platform Stylepark is also adapting to mobile end devices and from November 2010 Stylepark's very own app will be available. This way, the culture of design and architecture presented by Stylepark becomes an extremely handy reference when you are out and about.

Berlin's Aedes gallery is holding a small but high-quality group exhibition on the topic of surfaces, called "Membranes, Surfaces, Boundaries. Creating Interstices".

"Interieur 2010" in Kortrijk has as its title "The New World". And the trade fair organizers believe that the new world is characterized by optimism not pessimism, by reflection not superficiality, by color not sobriety. And thus it is that the Interieur biennial once again takes its stand as a promising place within the design universe.

We have recently seen the 100th anniversary of the birth of US architecture photographer Julius Shulman would have recently turned 100. With Richard Neutra as his patron, in the 1950s the self-taught photographer swiftly emerged as one of the most important architecture photographers in the United States. To this day, the narrative feel if his images is enthralling, evoking a world somewhere between reality and fiction.

The latest tubular steel product from Thonet is a floor luminaire called "Lum". With its curved shape, it seems to bridge the gap between classic and contemporary tubular steel furniture. Let us take you on a tour of the history, spanning decades, of its development.

Danish designer Kasper Salto dreamed up new chair for Fritz Hansen, a shell chair that allows for any number of different seating positions. Because you only sit healthily if you keep on changing your position. Nancy Jehmlich in conversation with Salto about today's challenges of designing a chair.

Autumn is coming - and naturally enough people are starting to view life from a more contemplative angle. Capitalism at any rate doesn't take a break. So why should you not use the autumn to clarify a few mechanisms in the design of the world economy? The time-honored RSA not only makes this educational but also entertaining by having wonderful illustrations added to lectures.

Few are quite as conversant withthe language of fashion as Hussein Chalayan. It is no wonder, then, that the British fashion designer's retrospective - currently on show at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art - is based on the alphabet. This certainly does not mean, though, that the order of the characters is set in stone. Nor, indeed, that a final end point is visible. Chalayan's language incorporates the body, space, image, music, text and textiles, functioning on the borders of what can be said.