All briefs

Diller Scofidio + Renfro is a New York design studio that works across architecture, the visual arts and the performing arts.

Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer, curator, writer and educator known for her love of typography, who directs the Graphic Design MFA program at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Kartell is an Italian company, headquartered in the Metropolitan City of Milan, that makes and sells contemporary plastic furniture.

Ordinariness is not neutral—it’s a design decision with teeth.

An experimental office machine belongs to the history of prototypes, not just products that reached shops.

A light that blends into a tiled wall makes disappearance a design decision.

Screens, low furniture and an adapted table connect an interior through light and proportion.

A family of cushions turns seating into a question of arrangement.

Large openings make the boundary between shop and city part of the retail experience.

Colour becomes a relationship to investigate rather than a property to name in isolation.

A postal horn and a letter share one compact sign.

A compact signature gives changing audio products a point of continuity.

The arrangement of an exhibition becomes part of its account of a school.

The small vessel's geometry serves concentrated tea rather than a conventional potful.

A documented wall hanging makes weaving technique inseparable from an abstract composition.

Simplifying a familiar bell allows continuity across a very large organization.

Moving artworks make navigation and interpretation part of an evolving spatial encounter.

Crossing axes organize a capital, but the diagram is only the beginning of urban life.

A shared approach connects products that perform very different tasks.

Product information can share an identity without losing its distinct instructional job.

A repeated circular badge gives a diverse industrial group a common signature.

Physical demonstrations turn mathematical relationships into things a visitor can investigate.

The art-school campus treats connections between buildings as part of the architecture.

Costume makes the body a changing image of desire, violence and identity.

The platform asks who design serves and who gets to define its terms.

A magazine layout can carry an editorial attitude before its text is read.

Hara asks designers to make familiar things available to attention again.

A curated group of ordinary materials and unexpected objects challenges the language of product design.

Cyclonic separation changes the machine's dust collection and the story it tells its user.

Selecting and reissuing furniture becomes a design practice with its own responsibilities.

A government programme made design a matter of administration, hiring and public service.

Colour and pattern give furniture and office interiors a different expressive register.

The founder's contribution was connecting material possibilities with designers and production.

A potter's collected objects reveal how a personal practice draws on many places.

Serial tableware becomes a place to explore material variation rather than erase it.

A catalogue can explain a design programme rather than merely list products.

Simplicity describes several different relationships between material, space and use.

A sculptural household object exposes a practical question about size.

A presentation sells relationships between objects, materials and rooms.

Combining a school and a crossing makes a small building operate at village scale.

Lettering, symbol and architecture make a transport network recognizable across many places.

A crane, a typeface and a printing grid make an airline recognizable across different surfaces.

A small exhibition print brings experimental graphic language into circulation.

Natural motifs become repeatable surfaces through demanding print processes.

Hara's idea of emptiness leaves room for the user to decide what an object becomes.

One continuous curve gives the supporting structure a strong visual role.

The 1970 manual turns subway wayfinding into instructions that other people can build and maintain.

A revised wordmark becomes one part of a documented identity spanning many kinds of communication.

Numbered parts connect a compact document to a complicated physical machine.

An expandable graphic language also carries the political tensions of the event it identifies.

The chair's embracing shape depends on a constructed upholstery system beneath its covering.

A series cover balances the identity of one book with the order of a library.

A name can hold together independent practices without prescribing one visual style.

Layered reflectors organize the light instead of treating the shade as decoration alone.

Seasonal change becomes part of the composition rather than a period between displays.

Kandinsky proposes a language of visual forces, starting with the smallest graphic element.

Record packaging belongs to a wider visual world around the music.

A theoretical structure makes the ambition to impose order visible at an extreme scale.

A house's interior can organize the approach to its landscape.

The dial's graphics and the handset's shape are decisions about human behaviour.

A planned break becomes part of a studio's creative process rather than its opposite.

Piled colour makes fibre operate at the scale of a room.

A fixed wordmark gains a variable entrance suited to moving images.

An external metal grip makes upholstery and restraint the visible subject of the furniture.

An exhibition asks whether familiar objects become better companions than conspicuous designs.

One administrative signature makes many offices identifiable as parts of the same government.

A national emblem becomes a graphic sign of movement.

Reducing dimensional effects makes an established monogram easier to move between media.

A series treats typographic organization as something to test rather than merely obey.

Six woven panels turn material structure into a form of commemoration.

Small differences of profile give related utensils their separate jobs.

Pictograms, colour and typography coordinated a large international event.

Aaron Koblin's practice connects data visualization with participation and digital media.

Behrens connected a company's graphics, products and buildings within one design practice.

Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf made mesh the defining material of Herman Miller's 1994 office chair.

Isamu Noguchi adapted Gifu lantern-making to electric light and sculptural form.

Anthony Dunne's collaboration with Fiona Raby connects design practice, writing and teaching.

Rob Janoff's bitten apple retained its outline through changing colour treatments.

Mollino's occasional table brings shaped plywood into dialogue with a glass surface.

Athos Bulcão's career connects painting and sculpture with the construction of Brasília.

An oscilloscope-derived curve gives a broadcaster an abstract, technically grounded symbol.

Bavarian colours came first; the propeller interpretation came later.

Bořek Šípek provides a route into expressive form and the relationship between design and public memory.

Dieter Rams and Hans Gugelot's radio-phonograph puts a transparent lid over domestic audio equipment.

The Braun T3 offers a compact case study in the relationship between a handheld enclosure and its controls.

A symbol, typeface and colour scheme made a railway organisation visible as one system.

Sori Yanagi gives each curved wooden half of the Butterfly Stool both a seat and a leg.

Root Glass developed the contour bottle through a team effort led by a distinctive packaging brief.

Frank Mason Robinson connected a product name with the flowing forms of Spencerian script.

Robert Venturi uses architectural examples to argue for complexity in composition.

Courier New shows how transferring a typewriter face to a digital font can change its apparent weight.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp's painted wooden head connects craft training with geometric abstraction.

Deborah Berke connects architectural practice with a sustained commitment to design education.

Papanek asks designers to account for the social and ecological consequences of what they make.

Rams turns the evaluation of a product into questions about usefulness, honesty and lasting value.

Charles and Ray Eames developed a children's elephant alongside their experiments in moulded plywood.