The future is being designed. That is one funny idea. But that’s precisely what the 50 designers, educators, and exec­utives in this year’s Co.Design 50 are doing. The Co.Design editors have chosen a group of people who are pushing the boundaries of their discipline into promising new directions. They are experimenting with new ideas about business, sustainability, and usability. Some work with brands that are familiar today; others, we expect, will become household names in the future. Significantly, they’re all masterful collaborators. And what unites all of them is that their projects will affect not only how we live today but also what life might look like just a few years down the line. Click here for an infographic overview and here part 1 , 3 , 4 , 5 .

Matias Duarte

Director of Android user experience, Google

Interactive design

Early Android was plagued with design problems, including hard-to-read menus and navigational dead ends. Since taking over design for the now-ubiquitous mobile OS two years ago, Duarte, who led UI development for the superb but doomed Palm Pre, has steadily made Android more beautiful and user-friendly.

Jake Dyson

Founder, Jake Dyson Products

Product design

Who’s going to be the next James Dyson? Maybe his son, Jake, who inherited his father’s keen eye for translating tidbits of tech know-how across product. For example, his latest lamp keeps LEDs from getting too hot with a liquid-cooling system borrowed from laptops. Now he’s trying to reinvent the mundane and fundamental. One concept: a sunscreen applicator that easily reaches your entire back.

Adriaan Geuze

Founder, West 8

Architecture

Rotterdam, Netherlands–based West 8, one of the world’s most daring landscape-design firms, arrives stateside with a revamp of New York’s Governors Island. The 40-acre park show­cases its approach: whimsical, dramatic, and rooted in rigorous studies of how people use public space.

Kenya Hara

Art director, Muji

Graphic design

Product design

Educators and curators

Hara advocates the “super-normal”–that is, ordinary objects made extraordinary by fastidiously careful design decisions. He is a guiding spirit of the Japanese lifestyle retailer Muji’s inspiringly spare design ethos. And his numerous books have made him an influencer in the league of Dieter Rams.

David Eulitt/Kansas City star/MCT via Getty Images

Thomas Heatherwick

Founder, Heatherwick Studio

Product design

Architecture

Transport Design

A Leonardo da Vinci of contemporary design, Heatherwick blends technical wizardry with flights of conceptual fancy. Among his London studio’s creations: a boat shaped like a Möbius strip, the British capital’s new double-decker buses, a bridge that rolls up like a pill bug, and the multipetaled cauldron that lit up the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.

David Holz

CTO, Leap Motion

Interactive design

Holz’s startup will soon release a potentially paradigmatic gestural interface that can detect movements as fine as 1/100th of a millimeter. Forget Kinect-style waving of arms and legs; Holz wants you to control your TV and computer with the twitch of a finger.