After the dust has settled on LDF 2026, the exhibitions and installations demounted and the talks archived, it would be nice to have a physical keepsake of this particular moment in time.
That’s the intention behind Design Burger’s new monograph, The Product Design 100, published to accompany an exhibition and event space held as part of Shoreditch Design Week. Billed as the first volume in what will hopefully be an ongoing series, it’s a handsome hardback monograph that neatly encapsulates the current design ‘scene’, and the products and studios we commonly associate with good contemporary industrial design.
A spread from The Product Design 100
In the days before our feeds were swamped with memetic examples of ‘design’, old and new, retro and futuristic, classic and contemporary, such books were two a penny, but as the appetite for print tailed off, so did the desire to publish compendiums of consumable objects when all that imagery could be sourced for free.
A spread from The Product Design 100
These days, if something is being piped into your socials sans commentary or attribution, it might not even be physically real, let alone be shaped by a human hand. That’s why a return to a curated, edited physical compendium is so welcome. Admittedly, you’ve probably spotted a fair few of the inclusions in the real (and virtual) pages of Wallpaper*, but Design Burger can’t be faulted for their diligence in putting together these 100 projects across 324 beautifully presented pages.
A spread from The Product Design 100
The studio was founded in 2018 by industrial designers Alex Philpott, Oscar Pearce, Kester Page and Joe Slatter in order to connect designers, promote their work to a growing international audience and organise studio visits, interviews and gatherings and exhibitions.
It’s taken those eight years to knock this book into shape, with graphic design undertaken in collaboration with Collaborate London. The 100 featured products come from big brands and small consultancies, the studios of established star designers and fresh-faced start-ups.
A spread from The Product Design 100
There’s no common theme save for a consistent thread of quality. Yet out of this curation emerges some of the headline trends of the modern era, from a focus on contemporary luxury craft to idiosyncratic, highly focused single-use devices, as well as environmentally driven solutions that seek to re-shape and redirect existing categories.
There are more focused sections on several key players, ranging from big names like the now defunct Barber Osgerby, Naoto Fukasawa, Jasper Morrison, Konstantin Grcic, Marc Newson, Cecilie Manz and Tom Dixon, alongside those companies who have become a byword for a relentless fixation on the integration of function into aesthetics, such as Rimowa, Vitra, Nothing and teenage engineering, amongst others. Finally, there are those firms whose influence is inescapable – Nike, Google, Meta, and Microsoft – yet who still manage to make a meaningful contribution to material culture.
A spread from The Product Design 100
Not all the featured products are slam-dunk commercial hits and not all will be able to deliver on their promise. In fact, some have already fallen by the wayside thanks to the modern era’s chaotic hybridisation of entrepreneurship, media hype and slick imagery.
Whatever the outcome, The Product Design 100 is a welcome snapshot, a compilation of a moment in time ripped from our fast-moving visual culture. Not every product can look like these, but it’s always good to have to have something to aspire to.
The Product Design 100: A Snapshot of Industrial Design Today Vol.1, Design Burger, £48, DesignBurgerShop.com, @Design_Burger
The new book is being launched alongside an exhibition at Kachette Annex, 1 Kingsland Road, London E2 8AA, during Shoreditch Design Week, ShoreditchDesignWeek.com