The Design Annual - inside: private identity: Following the successful debut in May 2006, the Messe Frankfurt and Stylepark will once again this year be bringing the very best of international design to the Festhalle in Frankfurt.

The latest issue of Berker Blueprint is dedicated to the Lloyd Hotel in Amsterdam, a former prison which the Dutch architecture studio MVRDV and numerous designers and artists converted into a design-oriented concept hotel.

Tobias Grau caught the eye at the Euroluce in Milan with a new suspended luminaire.

With the Shigeru Ban pavilion in Milan, Finnish furniture manufacturer Artek and the forest product company UPM-Kymmene are pointing the way to a future dominated by ecological architecture and sustainability.

The Milan Furniture Salon and the Euroluce fair, which took place simultaneously, broke all the records this year.

New standards in product photography: the book about Konstantin Grcics stool Miura with photographs by Florian Böhm.

Italian design company Driade is celebrating its own achievements, its designers and its history.

They overcome the limits of classical product design: Reed Kram, 35, and Clemens Weisshaar, 29. Both first hit the limelight with their work for Rem Koolhaas: The handled the media design (and interactive changing rooms) for the US Prada flagship store designed by Koolhaas' office AMO.

Stefan Diez has created two chairs for long-standing furniture makersThonet.

Stefan Diez's "Kuvert" range of bags for Authentics

If there really are things, which are not apparent unless you are aware of them, then the Fortuny lamp is a good example of this. If you didn't know it had been designed exactly a century ago, you definitely wouldn't notice it.

Another Dornbracht "Ritual-Bad" [ritual bathroom] premiered at this year's ISH Fair in Frankfurt in March. Dornbracht's so-called "Ritual-Architektur" reflects the traditional company's long-running examination of the washing and space theme, in which the focus of the product presentation is on the person.

The Kram Weisshaar office has designed a limited edition for porcelain manufacturer, Nymphenburg.

Membrane or cable-net constructions and pneumatic affairs: From the mid-20th century onward, thanks to new materials and the inventiveness of a few pioneering architects in the field of textile constructions, a new sense of lightness entered architecture.

With coatings, technical details and new production methods makers of carpets and floor coverings are offering a new approach to room design. An overview of selected innovations@Domotex.

Are we soon going to be wearing “digital fashion”? Will jackets with integrated solar cells, lingerie with inbuilt GPS systems and 3D-printed garments be posing a serious threat to tried-and-tested manufacturing processes?

The cause of numerous traffic-jams is often the driver himself. Franziska Queling talked to Congestion researcher Micheal Schreckenberg about cooperatively acting ants and what lessons we can learn from them.

Walls becoming doors: Car concepts inspired by nature.

It needn’t always be digital. The good old notebook, without the upper case N, proves its worth in an age when everyone has to be permanently creative.

Anyone who has become accustomed to striding across Cologne in January every year, half freezing to death, can look forward to something really special in June. From June 20-24, Cologne is now showing its design profile in the summer, too, and in the form of Rheindesign has kicked off a summer festival in which creativity will conquer the city and the general public be given every reason to enthuse.