The Design Tokujin Yoshioka
Tokujin Yoshioka is a designer that I am not extremely familiar with, but in 2007 he was named Design Miami's Designer of the Year, and in 2008 he was named best furniture designer of the year in the Wallpaper Design Awards. So when I started to explore his work it was as if a creative shroud had been lifted from my eyes. His work is punctuated by his extremely acute sense of drama and his ability to take simple materials or modular units such as a drinking straw or a crystal, in the case of his work for Swarovski, and turn it into something yet unknown until Mr. Yoshioka revealed it.
Tokujin Yoshioka is a renaisance man who works in every medium of design, so paring down projects of note to two is quite impossible, however, I'll try. The first I'm picturing above is his work for the design Miami Designer of the Year show. The medium he chose was a simple translucent drinking straw. Multiplied by tens of thousands of times, and this straw takes on the form of a wintery crystal world where walls and floors are blurred into a dream.
His work for Swarovski is equally dreamy. Each year, Swarovski invites a number of designers to undertake the most ambitious use of crustals they can dream up. Last year, Yoshioka went to extremes as he created an interactive, three dimensional television using thousands of the crystals as the pixels of the screen. The effect he created was unlike anything every seen because of his design to layer several images at once through different levels of the crystal matrix. 
Future projects include a Swarovski showroom where the designer uses thousands of crystal tubes to make up the facade of the building.
