With detailed profiles on over 70 creative studios in design, architecture, fashion and textiles, this highly visual publication is an educational reference and an inspirational guide for important materials and techniques in the years to come.

Divided into 12 trend themes, this bold book introduces the new makers in contemporary design, previewing a future of responsible production, circular thinking, ethical practice and organic aesthetics. It offers insight into how designers are giving shape to materials and process, from reviving the loom and recycling waste to social inclusion and growing matter. Their conscious philosophies will change our world with careful and considered choices that can ultimately reconnect us to nature and guide us towards a better tomorrow. Beautifully-designed by Mariola López Mariño at Anthon Beeke Collectief in Amsterdam, at more than 5 centimetres thick, the book’s broad format and open spine binding embody the solid feel of a raw slab of industrial material.

As Edelkoort observes “People know they need to slow down the pace of overconsumption and overproduction; otherwise our planet will be lost. The creative world gains insight and invents systems where values shift and design plays an activist role, developing ideas about sharing between designer and the worker, designer and the underprivileged, designer and the amateur, designer and the designer… This new era gives hope for other ways of perceiving what is considered success, renown and profit. Here, capital is strictly human.”

Fimmano notes how “Suddenly the machine is no longer the antithesis of unbridled innovation but the handmaid of the designer; enabling, embellishing and advancing production. Man and machine finally merge and become one. Places for creating, sharing and manufacturing will become veritable cottage industries where the designer is at once the farmer, artisan and custodian of our earth, enamoured with all the phases and facets of the process. A labour of love.”