Born in Germany, she came to England aged 17 fleeing from the Nazi persecution. Encouraged by her brother to become an artist, she studied at Liverpool School of Art for four years and later at Kennington School of Art. She married Aidron Duckworth in 1948. After art school she mainly worked as a sculptor in wood and stone even sometimes as a tombstone carver. Having become interested in ceramics, she was encouraged by her friend, the Austrian émigré potter Lucie Rie, to take some formal training in ceramics. She attended the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London (1956-8) where she later joined the staff. For a number of years she produced functional wares but after 1960 she followed her earlier preference for sculpture creating modernist abstract works inspired by organic form. Unusual for the period she used hand-building methods of coiling for her large stoneware vessels and pinching for the more delicate porcelain pieces.
 
In 1964 she was offered a teaching job at the University of Chicago, and she moved to the USA where she has worked and lived ever since. Over her long career she has had many commissions for architectural murals as well as continuing to produce small scale pieces. Now in her late 80s, she still makes ceramics, working a 40 hour week. She is one of the few artists who has successfully straddled the divide between sculpture and ceramics. - http://www.ceramics-aberystwyth.com/ruth-duckworth.html

LaGardo Tackett (1911-1984) was born in Henderson, Kentucky. His father was a grocer, and later in life Tackett, who preferred to be called Tack, explained that his unusual first name came off a can of tomatoes from his father's store.

As a young man, he entered Indiana University to study geology but left school after two years and married Virginia Lee Roth, whom he had met there. In 1937 they moved to New York, and Tackett got a job with the department store giant The May Company. By the early 1940s, he became the interior promotion director, which necessitated a move to the company headquarters in Los Angeles.

He was drafted during World War II but returned home in 1945 and used the GI Bill to take formal pottery classes. He later taught at the California School of Art, including a course he taught at his own kiln in Pasadena. He mentored several of his students, including John Follis and Rex Goode. His work, along with that of Follis and Goode, as well as Malcolm Leland and David Cressey, was discovered by entrepreneurs Max and Rita Lawrence, who started Architectural Pottery. The pieces designed for this company became favorites of the architects who designed Case Study houses. Architectural Pottery is still available today through VesseL USA.

Tackett Associates was started in 1953, and Tack and Virginia began a large-scale pottery business. For a brief time in 1953, Kenji Fujita joined the company. Later the Tacketts became friends with Paul Schmid of Schmid International, a porcelain manufacturing company based in Boston. As a result of this friendship, in 1956 the Tackett family moved to Kyoto, Japan. During the two years they were there, Tackett moved his focus from hands-on production to design. The Tacketts returned to the United States in 1958 and started a design firm but moved back to Japan in 1960, this time to Tokyo.

His earliest foodware design was the chocolate brown Rockingham line with accompanying fish motif plates. He soon moved from terracotta to porcelain, for which he had a special respect. He created a number of  sets for espresso and coffee, as well as liquor decanters. His Sandpiper cruets took the form of stylized birds. He designed canisters in the form of globes and cylinders, many with a characteristic toggle handle. Many of his designs for Freeman-Lederman were white glazed spirit bottles, often with a large red dot and whimsical script. His anthropomorphic Black Russian was a decanter created to promote Kahlua. His humorous Eggheadcontainers were sold in the back of Playboy and Esquire magazine as bedside condom holders; they stand about 9" tall and are sometimes referred to as "stash holders." One of his last collections was an ice cream and candy service in white with brightly colored vertical stripes.

In 1961 Tackett and his family returned from Japan and settled in Connecticut. He still had a business arrangement with Schmid International and commuted to Boston for meetings. He also became active arranging programs at the Brookfield Craft Center, which had been founded in 1954 to preserve and encourage fine craftsmanship in Connecticut. In the late 1970s, Tackett suffered a stroke, and his wife Virginia was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

Biographical information about Tackett is difficult to find, but Dr. F. Peter Swanson wrote a fascinating article about his life that I used for this post. If you want to know more, I encourage you to read his fascinating account. - http://blog.mid2mod.com/2012/07/lagardo-tackett.html

When Audi commissioned Konstantin Grcic to design a stand for them at Design Miami/ Basel 2014, the designer’s proposal was informed by his experience of visiting the fair in previous years. “Audi are sponsors of the fair, and they always have a stand, and they always bring a car that needs a scenography – that’s what this project was,” he explains. “In a way I did what they asked, but rather than designing an elaborate trade fair stand, which I felt was something that was not really my domain, I thought we needed to create a different story and to put the money into making an object.” - See more at: http://www.designmiami.com/designlog/basel-shows/basel-show-information/konstantin-grcic-audi-pavilion#sthash.vzu1D4RA.dpuf - http://www.designmiami.com

Axel Salto (1889-1961) is counted among the masters of Danish design, although his tenets for creative work often went against the functionalist aesthetics of his contemporaries and successors. Salto's decorative ceramics were couched in sculptural, rather than functional, forms. His outcome was highly respected, and his pieces were bought during the height of his career for the collection at the Copenhagen Industrial Arts Museum. Formally trained at the Copenhagen Academy of Art, his style evolved from heavy, somber woodcuts, to painting and ceramics. He painted his entire life, illustrated several books of children's stories and poetry, designed textiles for L.F. Foght and was one of the founders of the journal Klingen, in 1917. It was his sensual and unprecedentedapproach to ceramics, though, that brought his career into the international spotlight.  from www.r20thcentury.com

Swiss architect, sculptor, painter, industrial designer, graphic designer and writer. He attended silversmithing classes at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich from 1924 to 1927. Then, inspired by the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925), Paris, by the works of Le Corbusier and by a competition entry (1927) for the Palace of the League of Nations, Geneva, by Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer (1894–1952), he decided to become an architect and enrolled in the Bauhaus, Dessau, in 1927. He studied there for two years as a pupil of Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky, mainly in the field of ‘free art’. In 1929 he returned to Zurich. After working on graphic designs for the few modern buildings being constructed, he built his first work, his own house and studio (1932–3) in Zurich-Höngg; although this adheres to the principles of the new architecture, it retains echoes of the traditional, for example in the gently sloping saddle roof.    SOURCE: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS