Icon 108 is devoted to Sacred Spaces. The designer Thomas Heatherwick is building an aviary on top of the “Towers of Silence” in Mumbai, where the city’s Zoroastrian community practises its ancient custom of “sky burial”, which involves vultures and other birds of prey stripping cadavers to the bone in as little as three days.

This month, London is abuzz with excitement for Clerkenwell Design Week. Also in the capital, a major Bauhaus exhibition opens at the Barbican and fashionistas flock to a Christian Louboutin retrospective at the Design Museum. Across the pond, Frieze New York takes over Randall’s Island Park, Manhattan, and Tomás Saraceno creates an urban utopia on the roof of the Met.

José María Sánchez Garcia’s renovation of a square around Roman ruins in Spain weaves a modern layer into the fabric of an ancient city.

Here is Icon’s preview to the biggest design event of the year, Milan Design Week 2012. We take a look at Tom Dixon's ambitious venue MOST, the launch of a new brand by Renato Preti, and the rest of the city’s must-see events.

A bad DIY experience prompted the designers at Founded to redesign the humble paint can as a container that saves space, time and effort, as well as being easy on the eye.

Icon 107 is devoted to Theatre. Our cover stars are Rodarte, the fashion duo, who are designing costumes for a production of Don Giovanni in LA, with sets by Frank Gehry, in Gehry’s own Walt Disney Concert Hall. We also talk to a choreographer who has commissioned sets from a roll call of architectural superstars, and we visit three very different theatres – in Cartagena, Spain, Kilden Norway, and the art deco Smith Center in Las Vegas.

A new show at MoMA takes the foreclosure crisis as the starting point for imagining an alternative, but not necessarily better, future for America's suburbs. Here's our review.

This month London’s RIBA hosts a show on Norwegian architecture, 30 of Sol LeWitt’s legendary wall drawings are recreated at the Pompidou-Metz, experimental fashion designs go on display at the Art Institute of Chicago and Peter Cook creates an “immersive, dreamlike space” for Sci-Arc.

For our mobile phones special, novelist Will Self muses on signals - are teenagers who use phones to navigate the city and co-ordinate liaisons like bats who find each other in the dark using echolocation? For more on the meaning of the mobile phone, pick up a copy of Icon 106.

The designers at Toormix are big fans of their local tipple, but worry that it suffers from a lack of coherent branding. Here’s their solution.

100% Design has announced the launch of 100% Future Living, a showcase of the best in design, technology and innovation. 100% Future Living will be the theme connecting each of the four new show sections: Interiors, Eco Design & Build, Kitchens & Bathrooms and Office. To read more click here

The V&A opens a major exhibition on British design in the postwar years, Budapest hosts a four-day architecture film festival, SFMOMA surveys Buckminster Fuller’s influence in the Bay Area, John Pawson’s exhibition travels to the Pinakothek der Moderne and Pick Me Up, the graphic art fair, gets underway at Somerset House.

Over 22 pages of this special issue of Icon, we bring together designers, writers and experts to consider the meaning of the world’s most important object, the mobile phone.

In Icon’s ruins issue (Icon 105, March 2012), we accompany the Architectural Association’s Unknown Fields Division on a trip to the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Animator and filmmaker Jonathan Gales was also on the trip, and made this short film with his studio Factory Fifteen from footage shot in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Solitary, decaying and useless, London’s favourite derelict building stands proud and aloof amid legal wranglings, property speculation and the soulless transformation of its surroundings. For the “Ruins” issue, we made Battersea Power Station our Icon of the Month.

Thomas Heatherwick will be hosting an evening talk at the Victoria and Albert Museum on Friday 11 May and 100 tickets have been reserved exclusively for Icon readers.

Yayoi Kusama’s psychedelic dot installations go on show at the Tate, New York’s MAD Museum looks at artists who work with dirt, Design Indaba kicks off in Cape Town, London’s Design Museum showcases its Designs of the Year and Inga Sempé is Guest of Honour at Stockholm Furniture Fair.

Icon 105 is devoted to “Ruins”. For this month’s cover story we visit the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl power station in Ukraine, where in 1986 a nuclear reactor exploded sending clouds of radiation over northern Europe, and the nearby town of Pripyat which is one of the hardest ruins to gain access to.

French designers Thibault Zimmerman and Lucie Thomas (Zim & Zou) made Icon a neon-coloured paper hamburger for issue 104: The Future of Food. We had to settle on just one shot for the cover, but you can see more photos of their incredible paper-craft creation by clicking here.

The February issue of Icon is devoted to ‘Food’. We look at the overlooked world of food design – why are there Alessi jugs and Starck lemon squeezers in MoMA’s design collection, but no Kinder Surprise eggs? – and at the architects and designers who ask important questions about why industrially produced food looks the way it does.