The dovetail joint is an ingenious and simple solution to the problem of holding together two pieces of wood without using nails or screws, only the wood carefully crafted and wedged together in a functional and stunning detail to be discovered. 

I'm not in love with the final shape and the proportions of this chair, but the idea is simply brilliant. 

Upholstery is a technique that hasn't changed much with time and remains a highly handicraft process. Gilli Kuchik from Israeli design group Bakery explores the opportunities of industrializing upholstery and comes up with a fantastic idea where structure and upholstery become one. The textile is arranged in layers, which are sewn with each other creating a pattern that is also a path; the interstitials in fact are filled with different density polyurethane that structures the chair body and donates the needed softness.

Curved, tensed, loose, wrinkled, fractal, symmetric, random, sleek, textured. The many ways in which surfaces are brought to us by designers. Here's a selection of beautiful pics, enjoy!

The Mummy chair is exactly what the name says, a regular wooden chair covered by a light polyurethane layer and wrapped with a large elastic band. Designed by Peter Traag, the work of this Dutch designer often starts from challenging manufacturing processes; and is probably safe to say he was exploring his way into simplifying upholstery techniques when he came up with the wrapping solution.

Inspired in rapid prototyping processes, Mathias Bengtsson creates a beautiful piece half way between furniture and art. He first modelled the final shape of the armchair in clay, and then sliced it into two thousand layers of recycled paper coated with a thin film of glue, later assembled and glued together with pressure and heat.

The final output has the richness of forms and shadows of a textile, and the use of both white and black paper sheets donates the chair with a double face: a soft, lighter one when only the edges of the layers are visible and a stronger and somehow more agressive one when the edges do not coincide.

Eindhoven based italian designers Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin from Forma Fantasma asked themselves these questions and decided to answer them.

Autarchy is an installation that proposes an autonomous way of producing goods, using a 100% biological material made of flour, agricultural waste and natural limestone and coloured using the natural dyes extracted from spices, roots and vegetables.

The designers propose a perfect production process that generates no waste; the cereal is harvested and used for food and to generate tools and vessels. For such a production system to work information and knowledge need to be shared and common to the community, open source as we would say in the digital era. This is why the designers wanted all the steps of research and manufacturing presented and explained through the exhibit. 

But what I like most about it is the strong architectural character; the sculptural tense-structures inspired shapes are fluid and visually lightweight, yet structurally resistant, and the choice of material with its rough concrete texture is rather unique in the furniture world.

Have you ever noticed the way brands, product names and designers are engraved, embossed, printed in objects? I have, and I want to share it with you.

Half sculpture half chair, the Spun seat was born out of pure creative curiosity: can a functional chair be shaped from a simple profile rotated 360 degrees? 

The answer first came in a limited series of metal chairs (don't miss the making-of pics taken from Heatherwick's website) and ended up this spring being mass produced with rotational moulding by Magis. 

The unusual shape and the superficial texture enhance the sculptural nature of the chair, which is by no means a secondary feature but one of the two equally convincing faces of this object. 

Black is definitively the new black, and there was also some white, both high gloss on any surface. But the accent colour, or should I say colours, were doubtless the florescent ones. Orange, acid green or fuchsia; striking and luminous as only fluorescent colours can be. 

Kartell, Tom Dixon, Established&Sons, Normann Copenhagen, Arco are some of the companies that chose them. More pics after the jump.

Paper and light isn't a new pairing, in fact paper has been used since ever for making lamp shades; but the Lamp paper by Claesson, Koivisto and Rune for Sodra is a completely different story. Why? Because the swedish creative group uses paper to build the entire structure of the lamp, not just a shade. 

Getting the best out of Durapulp, a fully recyclable material made of paper and renewable biopolymer (PLA), they generate a tridimensional origami-like structure that integrates the wiring, which is laid between the different layers of paper and merged together by a hot-pressing process.

The result is beautiful in many ways: lightweight, intelligent, sustainable, performing and appealing. I love design when is capable of delivering such holistic products.

Mr. Impossible is not yet another chair, well I guess it is, but is a beautiful and challenging one. The concept is rather simple: a seat that floats in the air as if the legs didn't exist. 

The legs do exist of course, in the shape of a completely transparent one-piece shell that is welded with the coloured one-piece shell that makes the seater.

Mr Impossible represents the most advanced plastics manufacturing technology, the two pieces are invisibly weld thanks to the first application of laser in the world of design. Nothing world-changing, but impressive and appealing; a strong statement from the company that turned plastics into jewels and the designer that makes us always look.

Screws are one of the most frequently used and needed functional elements of products, making out of them a remarkable detail or an anonymus spot is often a decision every designer faces and a great challenge. Here's a selection of some I've spotd.

The wooden cases are hand woven and printed with beautiful hand drawn illustrations: 'the life of a tuna fish', 'the life of a turtle' and 'the life of a tree', raising the environmental implications of over farming and deforestation. The inside and the cover is painted in a striking fluorescent orange, blue or pink. I want one.

The dual condition of manufacturer and designer of products puts Tom Dixon in a very special place; he deals with the physical and economical constraints of the industrial production but also gets the chance, as a designer, to get inspired by the manufacturing processes themselves; and the results of this "contamination" are pretty interesting.

The Etch lamps are a perfect example. How to make the best out of an extremely thin, hence  weak, metal sheet? Dixon uses old good geometry to give it the needed structure, along with sophisticated and precise metal working techniques. Employing a process often used in circuit boards and electrical equipment, microcopically detailed patterns are cut into the metal, which is later folded into a geometric shell-like structure.

The graphic filigree etched in the metal filters light creating a delicate halo of shadows.