A new venue has earned a place on the map of Passagen 2014, Cologne's annual Interior Design Week that runs concurrently with imm cologne with close to 200 exhibitions throughout the city. Set in a converted office tower, the t.a.t. new talents hosts two shows exhibiting works by the young and the restless: Designers Tower and Sensing The City/ Capturing Cologne. Designers Tower offers a platform for 15 selected studios and independent designers to show off their latest works. One of them is Markus Krauss with his rocking chair Sway (above), offering plenty of room for two people to lounge in sync, and featuring a patented telescopic mechanism that allows the chair to take on a number of positions.

We loved the graphic simplicity and purity of material of Prolog, by Daniel Rauch and Niklas Markloff. The two industrial design students of Folkwang University Essen developed the structure cast from pure tinted UHPC (ultra-high performance concrete) with their colleagues from the material sciences lab. It's one of the first applications of this material ever and elegantly shows off its amazing compressive strength.

Koelnmade is a label that takes pride in making products that are designed and produced in and around Cologne. Surfin Bird can be both a place for safely feeding your feathered friends in the winter, or a full-fledged birdhouse to provide a space for nesting and extending the family.

Poubelle by Otono Design is a playful take on paper recycling needs following writer's blocks and designer's dilemmas, and has been nominated for the German Design Award 2014.

Designed and made in Copenhagen, Agnes lounge chair by Annika Kunter is built using a technique similar to basket-weaving, and was inspired by the flowing shapes of van Gogh's paintings.

On the roof terrace, students from Köln International School of Design have set out to turn the Interior Design week inside out, and use the special location to create an experimental interface of the city at their feet. Visitors can experience how the skyline view turns into sound, listen to how their own heartbeat forms an intense acoustic landscape, or have a machine from outer space give them random instructions on how to get nowhere in Cologne.