The Young Creations Upcycling Award display held as part of last week’s 2014 Heimtextil show in Frankfurt was a lot of fun.

There were inevitably toilet units and old tyres turned into furniture, the heavy duty clothing of outdoor workers became new bedding and the winning entry turned fabric off-cuts into bold flower arrangements.

My favourite was the striking storage cabinet constructed from hollowed-out old music players, pictured above . Tape decks, ghetto-blasters and CD consoles – all of which are largely obsolete music delivery systems these days – served to underline the transitory nature of many household goods over the past thirty years.

Yet carpets and curtains, wallcoverings and soft furnishings have barely evolved at all over this period. The fibres they’re made from may be a little bit smarter and their construction more sustainable perhaps, but the only real difference between what was on show at this year’s Heimtextil compared to that in 1984 was largely down to style and colour trend changes.

Hence the sustained interest in Heimtextil’s always busy Trend Show to designers. It remains about tactility and visual aesthetics and imagining the possibilities.

But the Young Creations display stood out at Heimtextil – among the elaborate stands of some 2,718 exhibitors from 61 countries spread across some 15 separate halls – simply because it had a story to tell.

And it got me thinking about how a company can best draw attention to itself at such an exhibition, especially when the products it makes are very similar to those of many others. It’s something of an impossible ask. One quilt looks pretty much like another and a hall full of curtains or cushions doesn’t really give you a sense of how they’d slide into your personal space.

Maybe that’s the thing – perhaps it’s a question of somehow ‘internalising’ items from such a vast range of displayed products? Which is something, of course, your screen can now do better.

At a session of the well-received WTIN European Digital Textile Conference held alongside the show, John Philip Reynauld of the software designer NedGraphics made some interesting remarks about modern selling techniques. There are now around 3,500 companies using dedicated NedGraphics solutions for fashion, flooring and home textiles, where its benefits start with design and extend to sampling and mapping and then on to selling.

Companies are now carrying their entire collections around on iPads, Reynauld said, with the ability to link directly to their manufacturing plants in order to confirm yarn and fabric inventories and tailor orders accordingly, to guarantee 100% satisfaction. They can move everything around too – show a room from every angle and in any conceivable combination of shades and fabrics.

This is the way a lot of business is being secured in 2014.

And consumers, of course, can also design their perfect rooms on a host of available apps and websites; transforming the colour schemes and fixtures with a single click.

Walking around the halls of Messe Frankfurt, I suddenly started to notice an awful lot of people were staring at iPads and tablets, or if not, consulting the interfaces of their mobile phones.

So what are all those elaborate stands for, in the end, if taking a few fragments from them and fixing them inside a screen personalises things so effectively?

Could all of those Messe Frankfurt halls just be empty white spaces ready to be filled with people and their gadgets designing perfect interior spaces for themselves?

The success of attracting over 67,000 visitors from 133 countries to Heimtextil 2014 would seem to suggest not.

It’s very unlikely that these vast and successful exhibitions will morph into anything different in the coming years because more than anything they remain about making new contacts and sharing ideas.

If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, as the saying goes, and Heimtextil remains the premier event for the home furnishings market.

Adrian Wilson