The current retrospective of photographer William Eggleston at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art reveals a consuming addiction to taking pictures. One of the masters of the ordinary, his ‘Democratic Camera’ has always kept rolling, exercising the eyes of the voyeur who is in it but not of it.

The tentacles of Matthew Ritchie’s The Morning Line fit nicely outside the anti-pavilion big box. The artist’s original desire was to make a building that’s a map of the universe and can be played like a musical instrument, and it goes a good way to achieving his idea of doing something that includes everything.

There’s a design oasis around the corner from the souvenir shops of Prague’s old town. Qubus is both a store and a brand, with its two lead figures Jakub Berdych and Maxim Velcovský replaying Czech glass and porcelain traditions, while creating mongrel candleholders, marble palettes and cars covered in mobile phones.

Guest of honour at this year’s edition of the Stockholm Furniture Fair, Dutch designer Ineke Hans shares her thoughts and pictorial feelings about work, the future, materials and good old & new-fashioned fun: The Heart Has Its Reasons, of Which Reason Knows Not.

Working from the provocative assumption that democracy has become a brand and lifestyle symbol, a new exhibition at Parsons The New School for Design unites art, design and politics as it explores the international contradictions of agents provocateurs and agents of choice.

A new generation of street artists, urban designers and interventionists are reworking the visual language of the city, as their individual or collective urban desires respond to its rapid rhythm. From subway-gust inflatable animals to subverting the messages of advertising billboards, the possibilities seem endless.

Incisions and interventions, ‘urban acupuncture’ is the way that Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner of Urban
Think Tank describe their projects. Injecting an informal sense of structure into the freewheeling slum districts of Caracas, it’s an imaginative approach that travels beyond the borders of Venezuela.

You really don’t want to know what happens when the rotor blades of wind turbines go bad. In the Netherlands, a fissure means a one-way ticket to the scrap heap, but a new playground concept in Rotterdam by leftover lovers 2012 Architecten proves there’s life after crack.

No Discipline, the title of Ron Arad’s beast of a solo at the Pompidou Centre in Paris is tailor-made for a man who famously extolls ‘there are no boundaries’ between design, art and architecture. He hates the word ‘design-art’ but as one of his contemporaries observes, Arad’s approach was always personal before it was professional and his work was ready for that particular market explosion.

No hangover selection of products & places, this issue’s Productivity offers tasters of the year to come. From Prague, Sicily & New York, via 100% Design in London and Tokyo and Saint Etienne’s Biennial, it’s time to give those trend books a tickle.

Duravit, Poltrona Frau, Modular, Dedon, Bisazza, Bulo and TAG Heuer all opened showrooms at the end of the year. What, why & how are the questions DAMn°’s asks the industry.