Another pleasant discovery at ICFF was a small exhibit called Lines of Unexpected Origin showcasing the products of five Salvadoran designers.

The group’s participants were all winners of Contempo 2008, a national competition aimed at scouting and then promoting young Salvadoran talent abroad. Thus they were proudly presenting their design furniture works with a just sense of pride and respect for their common cultural heritage, and the differences and similitudes that marked their design work versus the other pieces at the show.

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We’ve been following Council since they launched at ICFF three years ago, always curious what the small American furniture maker has to offer that differs from what the European companies have lined up (always rooting for the underdog). It’s encouraging to see them persevere, thrive and show up year after year with new stuff, especially in such a tight and tough market. Here’s what they launched at the ICFF this year.

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Great constraints seem to trigger great creativity. Pratt students were showing off their creativity at ICFF last weekend with an excellent and refreshing exhibit of works titled Design for a Dollar. The student exercise was, as the title suggests, to design an object that could be made for the cost of a dollar. Exploring and finding different creative solutions to the constraints, the results were quite ingenious and attractive, two elements that (unfortunately) don’t always go hand in hand.

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As far as affordable contemporary design goes, Ikea pretty much is tops. And every few years since 1995 they have strengthened that idea with their Post Scriptum (PS) collection of works, a bold addition to their existing product range at the same affordable prices. The seventh and latest PS collection was exhibited in Milan a few weeks ago and we got to see it displayed at ICFF in New York this past weekend.

(To wit, above: IKEA PS MASKROS pendant lamp $89.99 by Marcus Arvonen. IKEA PS AUGUST bench $499 Solid pine and leather by Nike Karlsson)

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This weekend MoCo Loco visited the Centre de Design at the Université du Québec in Montreal’s school of design for their annual end-of-year exhibition where grad students from the Environment Design program presented their final projects. The exhibition was entitled Poupées Russes (French for “Russian Dolls” or more commonly known as Matryoshka dolls), evoking the many layers of intervention of environment design and how each of these forms is always related and tied to the other (larger or smaller) by their common context of integration; it’s a spoon on a table in a room in a building on a street in a neighborhood in a city. The exhibition was thus showcasing numerous architecture projects, a few larger scale urban planning projects and several furniture and industrial design prototypes. Snapshots of our favorites after the jump.

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