&Fork Highlights the Next Class of Hot Shots

By Steve Delahoyde on April 23, 2007 11:16 AM

BusinessWeek’s Reena Jana has a review up of the career-making design book & Fork, the sequel to Phaidon‘s 2002 Spoon. If you’re unfamiliar, both books (the new one is due out in May) feature 100 up-and-coming designers working in all things product design. The big push for each of them is that they’ve been chosen by a handful of super famous designers, including Jonathan Ive, who himself was included in the 2002 Spoon. Here’s a bit:

But why should executives pay attention to an artsy coffee-table book such as & Fork? The tome’s predecessor, Spoon (get it?), published in 2002, also featured 100 young designers, many of whom went on to become well-known, even iconic design stars — such as Apple’s Ive; Hella Jongerius, later tapped by IKEA to create home accessories; Konstantin Grcic, recruited by Braun to design kitchen appliances; and Marc Newson, who became creative director of Qantas Airlines and designed goods for Dom Perignon and Samsonite.

Phaidon editor Emilia Terragni used the same formula for & Fork to predict design stars of the near future. Today, Spoon reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary industrial design, while & Fork reads like a Who’s Next, although it does feature a couple of established designers, such as San Francisco-based Yves Behar, who has already worked with Toshiba and Nike on high-profile projects, and New York’s Antenna Design, which created JetBlue‘s check-in kiosks and a PC for Fujitsu.