who was the best?  

I nominate James Brown
for the best Boogaloo, best Funky Chicken, and the BEST pre-hiphop Robot ever.
Michael who?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zdz88MBWomo&feature=player_embedded

Koen de Winter...
Every piece of his I have seen is a subtle tour de force of design, not about the auteur, but about the thing designed. His signature is that the product looks simultaneously like the latest rationally beautiful evolution of a product (no matter how big or small, complex or simple) and, simultaneously, as if it had always existed--as if it had always been waiting to be revealed. He can look into any product more deeply than thought possible, discern the legacy principles of its design, work through and improve upon them, and yield a product that looks, as I said, both new and as if it has always existed. It is a remarkable skill capable of being exercised only by a first rate mind with the antennae of an artist, the conscience of a humanist, the will of a master, and the heart of an angel.
So many great creative artists work by literally destroying what has come before, or by the aesthetically violent means of dialectical destruction of the thing they work on. I am thinking here of someone like Picasso and his product design equivalent, Wegner. The old--the legacy--is brought into the blast furnace of their imaginations, like so much scrap steel being recycled, and transmuted into new forms that leave nothing in their wakes. These artists can be incomparably great (certainly Picasso and Wegner were), but there is no mistaking that a fundamental part of their technique is destroying what came before to break through to the magnificience of some new thing. There is a certain majesty and intoxification that goes with witnessing and admiring the products of their destructive brilliance. But there is also the obliteration and disconnection from the legacy that comes with what they do.

cont.
In constrast, Koen is the designer as healer, as shepherd, as loving coaxer of what can be from what was. With Koen there is no annihilation of the legacy. There is extention of it. With Koen there is not slaughtering of lambs, no ritual sacrificing, no primal murder of the past. There is
embrace of it, understanding of it, learning from it, winnowing from it, the separation of wheat from chaff, there is the sacrament of development, of real ritual of concrete, verifiable progress, in whatever increment is feasible, given skills, materials, technologies, and resources. There is brilliant continuity between the legacy of the thing and the thing itself. There is laser like acuity of thought and analysis, rather than hide bound conventional wisdom, or trendy hustling. There is wisdom you can touch and use. And from all of this flows a culture that carries on showing through its love for the continuity of things a concommitant love for the continuity of people and all living and inanimate things.
Koen has with his life and his work offered us all an example of each person's innate capacity to make the humane choice, to nurture and coax people, society, materials and reality itself, rather than rape the beauty from the aforementioned.
Picasso stood like an eternally young man, performing the same fete of brilliance again and again: "See, look at how I can make the grass more verdantly green than you ever dreamed possible by burning it off before every spring, not just when the lightening strikes. I can be the lightening."
Koen stands like an eternally mature man, performing the same fete of brilliance again and again: "I have come to understand the grass and how to fertilize and water it and care for it and cross pollinate its seeds and keep it green the year round for you. The ritual of fire produces one kind of beauty, but burning it every year kills off so much other diverse beauty in the process to gain the narrow green shade you think you love. I offer you the whole meadow, not just the color green."
We are more fortunate than we know to have met him.