For over 30 years, Hella Jongerius has been combining traditional craft techniques with contemporary processes, looking to the past to seek out innovative ideas. With her design studio, Jongeriuslab, she has worked at every scale imaginable, from designing Vitra’s tiny yet iconic Coat Dots to the cabin interiors of the airline KLM. She is also an influential color theorist and the author of  I Don’t Have a Favourite Colour: Creating the Vitra Colour & Material Library. 

For Jongerius, who lives in Berlin, design is rooted in the sort of personal inquiry that is also relevant to urgent societal questions, tackling the economy, culture, manufacturing and the human condition. Her most recent exhibition, Woven Cosmos at Berlin’s Gropius Bau, asked questions about design in an age i...