Design Miami/

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Inspired by Art Basel Miami Beach, Design Miami/ began life as Design.05. Founders Ambra Medda and Amy Lau envisioned a commercial and cultural forum that would capture the thriving interest in design and elevate appreciation for limited-edition, experimental and historically significant design work. Design.05 premiered in the Miami Design District in December 2005. Immediately following the first show, the founders were urged to take the show to Switzerland for the next Art Basel. Changing the company’s name to suit the new plan , Medda successfully launched Design Miami/ Basel in June 2006. From its inception, Design Miami/ has always been more than just a marketplace for high-end design. Design Miami/ balances professional business activity with progressive cultural programming. Each Design Miami/ show includes four components:

1. The Design Galleries must exhibit and sell valuable work and present their pieces in highly curated, beautiful installations
2. The Satellite Exhibitions consists of curated installations that communicate key themes in contemporary design practice and are organized by individual designers and museums.
3. The Design Performances demonstrate emerging and established designers’ creative processes live on-site.
4. The Design Talks bring together international luminaries to tackle current issues in design today, offering extraordinary opportunities to hear designers explain their work in their own words.

Design Miami/ ’07
Recently, designers seem obsessed with instilling their furnishings with the capacity to create the type of strong aesthetic experience usually associated with artwork. This trend has led to skyrocketing furnishing prices; greatly increased design’s profile on the cultural landscape, and captured a whole new audience of aficionados. Recognizing this, Design Miami/ wanted the 2007 edition to appeal to a broader range of visitors.

For collectors and connoisseurs, the Design Galleries presented museum-quality historical and contemporary design. The pieces this year represent significant examples of Modernism as well as cutting-edge new pieces created exclusively for our venue.

WOK media presented a new shelving system called Between the Lines. The one- off is the first in a production line that will be launched in Milan 2008. The work consists of seven mirrored, polished stainless steel letter strings. The letter strings can be coiled, unfolded and reshaped to a wide range of configurations

For those interested in the processes shaping contemporary design, it’s the Design Performances.

Studio Libertiny, a Dutch design collective founded by Tomas Gabzdil Libertiny, believes that contemporary product manufacturing needs to be challenged. For Design Miami/ 07, they applied this design thinking to discarded printed pieces of paper. The collective glued and pressed thick stacks of paper until they become like solid blocks of wood. Through this process, the paper is returned to its natural state, but retains its printed imagery. The resurrected wood is then turned on a lathe and carved into bowls and urns.

Chair felting transforms an industrially made, institutional chair into a unique work of handcraft. Celebrating the inherent delicate and organic quality of the wool as well as the rigid, functional form of standard metal folding chairs, this process yields a domestic object with a cheerful split personality.

At Design Miami/ 2007, show visitors helped Tanya Aguiniga create felt skins over the surface of preexisting chairs by hand rubbing natural fleece with ecologically friendly soap and water.