Every other year it’s that time again: The gates to the Light+Building trade fair open up and there is, quite literally, light. Once again this year in Frankfurt the largest and most important light exhibition confirmed its pioneering role in a highly impressive manner.

Recliners and over-ornamented seating - room installation and colorful weltanschauung: Almost 30 years after its first fiery appearance, Verner Panton’s Amoebe is experiencing a comeback. Verner Panton created his colorful Visiona installation at the Cologne Furniture Fair in 1970. The Amoebe Highback was part of it and is again increasing in significance today as a place of withdrawal: Vitra has again started production of the colorful chair.

There are light sources which simply illuminate something; and there are luminaires which contribute to the illumination in multiple ways at once, be it by means of ingenious technology, the material used or a particular iconic quality. With Artemide, we strive to bear in mind all possible factors when it comes to a new luminaire or a lighting system.

On the occasion of Luminale, the lighting design company Foscarini, based in Marcon near Venice, introduces a world premiere of the new design concept "Tropico". It is designed by Giulio Iacchetti, one of the most successful and promising newcomers of the Italian design scene, recently awarded with the important design prize Compasso d´Oro.

Often it is small things, seemingly insignificant inadequacies that make our lives in the everyday microcosm of our own four walls difficult, and make a smooth sequence of actions harder. Thus we necessarily initially place the shopping bags on the floor while we search for the light switch next to the door frame. Or sit up with a sigh in bed when we notice that we have forgotten to turn off the light.

"Fantasma" was the name given in 1962 to one of the first luminaires produced by the newly-founded company of Flos. The name was chosen by the luminaire's designer Tobia Scarpa and likewise could have served as a motto for the entire product range made under the brand label, as for almost half a century now Flos has been highly imaginative in the luminaires is has produced.

Like plants, humans are attracted to light. Yet there are great differences in light. Each activity or mood calls for a quite particular light, for very special luminaires, and today technical lighting solutions are also expected to be as energy-efficient and eco-friendly as possible.

Giving profane installation and facilities systems technology a pleasant and impressive design is truly no easy undertaking. The special presentation by the highly-experienced Sauerland-based company Berker shows that this can best be proven using a real building: The setting has the stuff to easily be the most spectacular at this year's Light & Building.

Swarovski has long since ceased to celebrate all its countless variants on light and crystal with glittering necklaces. Thus, the company has had internationally renowned designers re-interpret the classical crystal candelabras - the likes of Ron Arad, Ingo Maurer, Tom Dixon, Marcel Wanders and Karim Rashid have all been involved in the code name "Crystal Palace" project.

A desk lamp needs first and foremost to be dazzle-free. To ensure this is the case, the "Flatlux SL II" standard lamp Ludwig Leuchten are presenting at the Light+Building 2008 uses a plastic pane with microstructured prisms. The luminosity is generated primarily via a secondary light source and coupled with a dust-protecting hood over the top of the lamp makes for great working light. The luminaire can be dimmed, has clean lines, and unobtrusive.

The International Council of Societies for Industrial Design (ICSID) has chosen the north Italian city of Turin as the "World Design Capital 2008". We already know that Italy is renowned for its good design. But that a city can be designated the "world design capital" is something new.

He started his career in a team, has been self-employed for the last five years but enjoys working on development projects as part of a group, for a change. The Alma light, for example, is the result of a joint venture with Swiss fashion designer, Lela Scherrer and product designer Christan Deuber.

One furniture manufacturer which has recognized and supported the potential of Spanish creative talent ever since the 1950s is Andreu World. The initially small furniture company has specialized in the production and sale of designer tables and chairs for home living and the commercial world.

She is not an engineer, yet she loves machines. She is not a performance artist, yet she gives design a theatrical component. She is not a pyrotechnic, yet she loves playing with fire. Sarah van Gameren does not stage the end product, she makes the production process a spectacle.

Marcel Duchamp's famous readymades are objects which have been removed from the sphere of the useful and placed in a new context. For US designer Stephen Burks, this "multiple use" and the fact that our perception influences the intuitive use of an object are highly inspiring.

Now that the market for big boys and girls is saturated, it is evidently the little ones' turn. Jacobsen's Ameise chair and Panton's chair have long been available for children too, and now Living Jewels is continuing the trend with its Serie_01 furniture. The items are a miniature version of the LC2 series designed by Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, or rather something close to the original. After all, the cubic armchair LC2, which we know well enough from talk shows and reception areas, is one of the modern furniture classics.

It can be quite a burden to accept an inheritance. In this case, it may help to nurture a somewhat uncomplicated dialog with color, material and form, like Ferruccio Laviani, born in Cremona (Italy) in 1960, whose approach gives him a definite advantage.

This is the place to enjoy it, the real fun of a productive confusion of the senses and the mind. Because Tobias Rehberger, who together with Claus Richter will this year be creating a major installation in the Frankfurt Festhalle on the occasion of "The Design Annual - inside: showtime", is currently leaving viewers marvelously puzzled, not to say astonished in Amsterdam.

Fields is the name of the luminaire, which builds upon the basic geometric shape of the rectangle, by the young Spanish designer Vicente García Jiménez for Foscarini. Different sized rectangles overlap on several levels, creating different areas of light and shadow. Jiménez developed the idea for this striking luminaire from a view of the rural expanses of the region where he grew up, La Mancha.

In the midst of limited special editions and installations fit for a theater, today some may be asking whether there are any designers left who create such profane things as vacuum cleaners, for example? Yes, there are! One who is full of enthusiasm when it comes to identifying functional shortcomings, user needs and other requirements is Sebastian Bergne.

It is a man's best friend - even though it does not always have four legs and neither is it alive, but it is always there for us, especially when our steadfastness wavers slightly: the chair.

Living light can be felt and experienced in various ways - as brightness and darkness, as concentrated rays or as reflections on a wall. Swiss designer Hannes Wettstein speaks in this context of "light semantics". And it was the key factor determining his design for the Scope family of luminaires.

Vienna, a city that knows how to celebrate with countless celebrities, will be hosting Austria's only design event fair for the 8th time on March 5-9, 2008. H.O.M.E.D.E.P.O.T in the Semperdepot will showcase novelties by internationally renowned designers made by 50 top manufacturers.

One might be forgiven thinking that Bruno Taut's vision of "alpine architecture" has partly come true: With the hybrid freeforms typical of her work, architect Zaha Hadid has taken up Taut's utopian idea of architecture blending with nature and has transformed Innsbruck's Hungerburg rack rail track into an art-scape par excellence.

It was the end of the 1960s. They were young and they were wild. At least, they were hell-bent. They wanted to change the world. To change the world with furniture. The kind of furniture that would be really true to its name, flexible and ready for action, furniture that would adapt dynamically to its spatial conditions and to the needs of the people who bought it, allowing its users complete freedom in what they did with it.

If architecture approximates to the outer covering, i.e., the skin of a room, then the interior and the people who use it are its inside. It is only these that give the room its definition. Accordingly, design is the interface between a building and its inside. This is the disarming logic used by Cologne-based designer Eric Degenhardt to explain his move from one design discipline to another.

When architects design furniture and utility items, their love of things is often animated by a certain desire for absoluteness. By designing the atmosphere right down to the smallest detail they hope to produce a harmonious whole. This applies particularly to modern architects who, in schools such as the Bauhaus and De Stijl, were aiming for a kind of universality.

The way design in the West references the Middle and Far East is often influenced more by economic and less by creative transfer.The furniture company e15 has shown that there is another way, having won the Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany 2008 for its sofa system SF03 Shiraz, which represents a successful synthesis of the Oriental culture of seating and communication, and the minimalist formal language of the Occident.

The spring fairs in Paris and Stockholm make important marks.

Good design is everlasting. But it does not need to be carved in stone. On the other hand it can be, and this precisely is the idea of design-mad Murat Patavi, the owner of the Haaz Gallery in Istanbul. He came up with a very special idea to mark the first anniversary of the art and design gallery for young Turkish and international creative talents: he invited 18 well-known designers to each make an exclusive design for the occasion - and what's more, in marble.

If one and the same chair looks as good in the living room as it does in the office or a hotel lobby and in each location looks as though it were tailor made, it could well be a chair by arper. The company, founded in 1989, is one of the most innovative furniture manufacturers in Italy and specializes in seating.

Foscarini is not only an Italian luminaire manufacturer but also a supplier of insights into the multifarious aspects of light, which they gather in a variety of ways and, time and again, show that light is not just light: lighting determines the character of a room and interprets it in a certain way. Foscarini are extremely sensitive when it comes to registering these different moods and in moulding them into luminaires, the designs of which embody the different requirements placed on them with great clarity and precision.

To date, when buying a new kettle you could choose between various stainless steel or plastic models. Indeed, while current models display greater differences in terms of the quality of production and material, as regards form, they do not differ considerably from one another. They are all based on a water boiler or a cylindrical pot, have a handle, a spout on the opposite side and a water gauge.

Be it touchscreens or kitchen units with no handles or doors that open automatically, with the digitalization of our everyday surroundings the surface has increasingly gained importance. Yet they are still about, analog operating devices. Berker, a company which manufactures switches and electronic systems, offers them both as new products and re-editions.

In Italy, the institution of the family traditionally has a high standing, and keeping it together requires a constant, active entrepreneurial spirit. As such it is no wonder that precisely in Italy there is an above average number of family-run companies - and extremely successful ones at that. In the case of Molteni & C, with a payroll of 250 the family business has long since reached corporate size, and is one of the most important manufacturers in the furniture industry. Its history is typical of such firms.