The Material World

By Belinda Luscombe/Editor

It shapes the way we move and see and feel. It's an integral part of the way we articulate who we are and what makes us different. It's the realm of fashion, style and design, and increasingly, it's moving to the forefront of our culture and becoming a topic of critical discussion. From the ever more deafening hype surrounding the ensembles worn to the Oscars to the millions of people who have taken a vital interest in the proposed plans for ground zero, design is registering in people's minds. To take account of this growing phenomenon, TIME is launching, with the magazine you're holding in your hands, a series of semiannual special issues.

This is an apt moment for such a venture, since at present the design world seems poised at an intersection between a fondly reimagined past and a dazzlingly envisioned future--between cherishing what has gone before and vaulting toward something totally unprecedented. The creative friction between these two apparently warring tendencies has produced both elegant and unexpected reinventions of revered ideas as well as a host of bold new visions spurred on by new technologies.

TIME once quoted this exhortation by architect Eliel Saarinen: "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context--a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." Similarly, we hope that this issue finds a place in your eye, in your mind and in your life. But we'd be content if it simply had the same effect on you as design does on British tastemaker Sir Terence Conran. "Believing in good design is like believing in God," he has said. "It makes you an optimist."