Process: 50 Product Designs from Concept to Manufacture review

Jennifer Hudson's previous titles include 1000 New Designs and 1001 Buildings You Must See Before you Die.

This time she's gone for depth rather than breadth, and the result is a striking insight into the ways designers and manufacturers work together to bring products from conception to reality.

There's a fascinating book to be written about the industrial processes behind commodity products such as Tupperware, Pritt sticks and Ikea sofas, but this isn't it. Instead, Hudson has picked the most innovative and exotic objects. The likes of Ron Arad, Karim Rashid and the Bouroullec brothers are joined by less-familiar names in an incredibly varied selection, from Richard Sapper's Halley Light, a Calderesque desk lamp with a heatpipe cooling system borrowed from laptops, to Tokujin Yoshioka's Pane Chair, baked like a loaf of bread and emerging to resemble a Claes Oldenburg soft sculpture.

What links all these designs is an attitude perhaps best summarised in a quotation from Scandinavian group Propeller. Today's sophisticated consumers, they point out, want products that don't just function well, but create an experience. Using new materials and manufacturing processes is just a necessary means to this end.

Of course, the product as experience has become an empty marketing cliché; everything from iPods to drain cleaner is supposed to come with its own gestalt. Here, though, you can see what happens when it's for real. These are things that don't look, feel or work like any that have come before. Put one in your house and you'd keep wandering back into that room with a vague feeling that you'd forgotten something. Even among the chairs, there are all sorts of surprises. Satyendra Pakhalé's Horse looks like a SpongeBob SquarePants character mummified by Issey Miyake, and was made by piping coils of plastic composite onto a fibreglass model and casting the resulting form in bronze. Natanel Gluska, on the other hand, carves each of his pieces from a single tree trunk with a chainsaw. In every case, the process is documented with a detailed series of captioned photos.

It could be seen as a weakness of the book that so many of its subjects are one-offs, and therefore all but useless to crib from. Toms Gabzdil Libertiny's Made By Bees Honeycomb Vases, for example, are actually made by bees. However, if it's inspiration you're after, or just a voyeur's guide to how the edge of industrial design gets cut, this is a great book for the coffee table, even if it makes your coffee table feel a bit square.

Just one unintended note of gloom interrupts the aesthetic pleasures. Talking about an earlier incarnation of Fuseproject's Leaf Light, Hudson notes: 'These ideas were never put into practice due to the worldwide economic downturn.' She's talking about the dotcom crash. If the trend towards more beautiful and individual products is to be continued, designers will have to hope the world decides to spend its way out of today's deeper trough, rather than making good and mending.