For Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince Summertime may very well be a “Time to sit back and unwind”, for us Summertime is when our year finally, finally, gets going.

While others spend the long hot days of summer on the beach, in the mountains, riding around in their Jeep, their Benzos, Nissan or eating pizza at Lorenzos, we’re to be found either riding backwards in trains, our eyes fixed firmly on the past as we race into the future, terrified that a metaphor is becoming an omen, or wandering the corridors, ateliers and workshops of European design schools, considering and reflecting on not only the students’ semester and graduation projects, but contemporary European design education, the positions of the coming generation of designers, and questioning if the world, the society, laid out before us is one we we want to be part off? Weeks of travel, reflection and existential anguish sustained by no more than our endless curiosity, more water than we consume the rest of the year and the promise of a (near) daily falafel.

That’s our “new definition of summer madness”

Drrrums please…….

Lilla torg, the square in Malmö old town which the Form/Design Center calls home, traces its history back to Malmö’s hanseatic days, the former market of yore having evolved over the centuries to become one large open air food court, bordered as it is on all sides by restaurants, bars and coffee shops, which spill gregariously out into the ever narrowing square.

The functional, ordered, democratic supply of provisions, having become a self-satisfying celebration of the same.

What would Émile Zola say?

And would the projects on show at the Form/Design Center’s 2018 Vårutställning – Spring Exhibition – of student graduation projects help lighten his humour…..?

Form/Design Center Malmö

The Swedish town of Lund is famous as the birthplace of the Tetra Pak packaging system, and thus of a global revolution in food and drink distribution systems and consumption patterns.

If the new crop of Lund University School of Industrial Design graduation projects reached conclusions as simple, logical and resource efficient, if arguably, and ideally, without the associated post-use recycling problems, could be assessed at the institution’s 2017 Degree Exhibition.

Lund University School of Industrial Design Degree Exhibition 2017

Workaround by Sofie Aschan Eriksson, Lund University School of Industrial Design. As seen at DMY Berlin 2016

We’re not going to claim that DMY Berlin 2016 was a vintage year, for us the 14th edition of the