Tastemakers from around the world have begun to descend on the city for New York Design Week, which accelerates with the opening of the International Contemporary Furniture Fair on Saturday at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. Increasingly, they turn an especially keen eye to Brooklyn. The festivities kicked off last weekend with Bklyn Designs, a three-venue fair held in DUMBO, featuring furniture, lighting, textiles, jewelry, and tabletop items all produced in Brooklyn by Brooklyn designers.

Although the borough has long been home to designers and their small manufacturing businesses, over the last several years the borough has witnessed such a critical mass of innovative design that a legitimate and influential Brooklyn scene has emerged. Characterized by a homegrown aesthetic mixing conceptual art, a mix-and-match approach to materials, and impeccable craftsmanship with a deeply held belief in communal responsibility — such as generating “green” products using “green” methods — this Brooklyn scene is now considered by many designworld cognoscenti as the first place to turn when trend-hunting for the next big thing.

Five years after its inception as a scrappy, do-ityourself event, Bklyn Designs has grown to include more than 60 exhibitors, including 29 newcomers —most launching their new lines for 2007 here — and has positioned itself as the one-stop-shopping event for the best new products by Brooklyn designers. Augmenting the weekend’s events was a fairly impressive schedule of lectures, panels, and public demonstrations, all focusing on Brooklynrelated topics. New to the event was a cash-andcarry section, Bklyn Designs+, where small pillows, shoulder bags, necklaces, and shiny aluminum gnomes were for sale.

Taken as a whole, the products all had a consistent quality level both in terms of production value and display. That was most likely the result of the curating of the exhibitors in the show. Robert Martin Designs’ end tables, vitrine, and cleverly expandable dining table mixed crisp lines, unexpected material combinations, and a high level of economized function. Furniture maker Michael Puryear — brother of the well-known sculptor Martin

Puryear — presented an elegantly simple task stool richly stained a dark maroon, which comfortably pivoted on a rounded base. Brave Space Design’s Tetrad Shelving was a witty interpretation of video game-cum-furniture. Brooklyn Glass and Mary Clerkin Higgins approached the medium of glass from different, equally fresh points of view.

What was slightly disappointing, however, was the general absence of the trend-setting, cutting-edge designs one comes to expect from Brooklyn-based designers. But two designers did attempt at least to think at the edges of the box, if not completely outside it.

Longoland’s bizarre lineup was part art installation, part design and was as wonderfully confusing as itwas engaging. On the floor of the booth, the skin of a foul-toothed monster covered in white cashmere scales turned the fad for animal-skin rugs on its head, while a nondescript wingback chair upholstered in a fur of the same white scales sat off in the corner. And Paul Loebach’s “Chippenchair” was possibly the best design at Bklyn Designs. He transformed the back of a traditional Chippendale chair with a beautiful water-jet cut design of parakeets, dolphins, a heart, an oil tower, and the letter “W.” His “Yee-Ha” wallpaper — surprisingly, one of only a handful of wallpaper designs at the event — tucked images of gun-toting cowboys on bucking broncos, football helmets, and oil towers, into a pleasing, repetitive pattern.

The two buzzwords were “sustainability” and “repurposing,” both of which feed into the larger idea of green design. Products such as Daniel Moyer’s limited edition skateboards, made from rescued leftover hardwood, and Uhuru’s “Stoolen” stools, created from collected wood scraps, are both examples of repurposing, and offer innovative solutions to the problem of what to do with waste created during the manufacturing process. Other designers, such as Elucidesign — whose lime-green “Mantis” table lamp resembles a crab’s stalk-eyes — incorporate broader sustainable practices such as using wood sourced from well-managed forests and eliminating toxic materials from the production process.

One major aspect of sustainability important to Brooklyn’s vibrant design community is the maintenance of affordable work space — an urgent concern in New York’s hot real estate market. To address this, the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center has been rehabilitating industrial buildings across Brooklyn for the past 10 years, encouraging micro-communities of glass-blowers, ceramicists, woodworkers, and others to flourish throughout the borough. Now that the design spotlight has found Brooklyn, the GMDC is seeking to ensure that the borough’s future as a center for design is secure. The all-grown-up Bklyn Designs is a marker of success for independent, entrepreneurial designers everywhere.