The Design Dozen: Newsweek Picks the Most Stylish Products

In Special Package on Design, Newsweek Picks the Most Stylish Products, Places and People of 2005
Designs Demonstrate A Return To Personality And Craft And A Rejection Of Slick, Mass-Market Esthetic

In a special package on design, Newsweek's editors reveal their picks for the most stylish products, places and people of 2005, and profile a movement away from cookie-cutter goods and toward the cutting edge. "The Design Dozen" lists 12 top items to covet, including the Mario Batali basting brush, the Krups espresso maker, the redesigned Polaroid camera, Target's new color-coded prescription bottles, and bamboo plates, fabric and flooring. Other highlights of the special section, which appears in the May 23 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, May 16):

* Contributing Editor Chee Pearlman reports that at this year's Milan
Furniture Fair, an annual mecca of design innovation and bravado, the
message from international design gurus amounted to a backlash against
cold, slick, mass-produced and mass-marketed consumer goods-and an
embrace of personality, authentic materials and the very process of
creating.

* Senior Editor Cathleen McGuigan profiles Pritzker Prize winner Thom
Mayne, who is the first American to earn architecture's highest honor in
14 years. The radical L.A. architect, known for his edgy designs and a
rebellious career outside the architectural mainstream, has a surprising
new client: the government. So has the establishment finally caught up
to Mayne-or has his work mellowed as it's matured? The answer is a
little of both, McGuigan writes.

* When you hear "modular home," you think "double-wide." But today's
prefabricated-housing designers want you to think again, report McGuigan
and General Editor Anna Kuchment. Designed in reaction to the overblown
developer houses that dominate the market, quality modern prefab houses
tend to be smaller and more energy-efficient, with open, flexible
spaces. They represent the first revolution in American housing in
decades, and consumer interest is rising fast.

* Since 1996, when John Christakos, Maurice Blanks and Charlie Lazor
started Blu Dot, the company has bloomed into an unlikely success,
averaging 60 percent annual growth and becoming perhaps the only label
to have items on sale at Murray Moss's famed Manhattan boutique and at
the Home Depot. Making its name was Blu Dot's first challenge. Now comes
its second: staying small, no matter how big it gets, reports Senior
Writer Devin Gordon.

* Procter & Gamble hasn't just tweaked its packaging. It's rethought how
you use what's inside, reports Executive Editor Dorothy Kalins.

* British designer Peter Horbury, Ford's new U.S. design director, is best
known for having given Volvo a Swedish-style makeover; now he's bringing
out Ford's American spirit. Horbury's charter is to draw up a bold new
look for the automaker's mainstream cars to help reverse a decade-long
skid in sales, reports Detroit Bureau Chief Keith Naughton.

* General Editor N'Gai Croal reports that Will Wright's Spore videogame
lets players simulate the creation itself, starting from a single cell.
What kind of deity would you be?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7856562/site/newsweek/ - lead article
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7844009/site/newsweek/ - the 'Design Dozen'

(Read full package at http://www.Newsweek.com.)

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