5 Year Update

A summary of the things I’ve done between 2017 and 2022:

In May 2018, I was selected as a participant in an exhibition curated by American Design Club titled Built.

Photo by American Design Club

Clothes Rack exhibited at the Built exhibition as a part of NYCxDesign 2018

In January 2019. I organized and curated a show at the Ann Arbor Art Center along with Matt Rosner and Chris Czub titled Works in Progress.

Photo by the Ann Arbor Art Center

WIP poster designed by Matt Ross

Works in Progress celebrates the beauty and chaos involved in designing and bringing functional works to life through fashion, graphic design, furniture, architecture, industrial design, and more. The 24 selected participants include working professionals, students, and internationally exhibited designers. The exhibition includes finished works, sketches, experiments, jigs, and process materials that provide a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on in the studio.

For exhibition photos and photos from the opening event, visit the Ann Arbor Art Center’s website here.

In April 2019, I was selected to participate in a show curated by Form&Seek called titled Tactile Matter, which was exhibited during Milan Design Week at the Ventura Future design fair. For more info on the exhibition, visit the Form&Seek page here.

Knottoman 2.0 being shown at Tactile Matter during Milan Design Week 2019.

In 2019, I collaborated with Bilge Nur Saltik to organize and curate a show for Detroit Month of Design titled Substance, which centers around the processes of material exploration as a driving force of design.

This exhibition and opening event was a featured event for Detroit Month of Design 2019. For more photos of the exhibition and the opening event, visit the Form&Seek page here.

Substance poster designed by Bilge Nur Saltik

Photo by Ray Im

In 2020, I collaborated with Form&Seek again to organize and curate a show titled Never Normal, in partnership with Wasserman Projects for Detroit Month of Design. From the exhibition text, “the works in this exhibition seek to reexamine and reevaluate our personal relationships to our domestic landscape. Through craft or making, these designers are able to express value, preciousness, and care that offer intuitive moments of clarity on contemporary issues in response to the needs of a society in flux.”

Photo by Clare Gatto

Photo by Wasserman Projects

For more photos of the exhibition, along with a video recording of the virtual opening, visit the Wasserman Projects page here.

I participated in the show as a part of END Studio, an architecture studio where I currently work full time. We exhibited an installation titled Pop-Up Repair Shop / Unlearning Studies, a two-part design-as-social-practice / design charrette combined into one installation piece.

Pop-Up Repair Shop is a free furniture repair service that we offered to our surrounding communities. We put up flyers calling for people to send us photos of broken furniture that they would like to have repaired. We then selected seven pieces of furniture and surveyed each client on their desired functionality and aesthetics of the repaired piece. Thinking creatively about the memories and desires of every day objects, the interventions playfully reimagined the objects for the future. For before-and-after photos of the pieces, visit the END Studio page here.

Unlearning Studies is the result of a design charrette where we collected broken, discarded furniture and homegoods, and reconstructed them into new designed objects. Going into the project, we wanted to create a dialogue about inclusion within the design field, questioning who and what was included in the category. By working intuitively and limiting our material palette, we wanted to rethink the western design ideals that we had absorbed as a part of our design education. For more photos of the finished installation along with progress photos, visit the END Studio page here.

DESIGN PROCESS - SHEEP LAMP

The Sheep Lamp grew out of intuitive material experimentation. I had come across a large amount of waste material from an industrial felt processing facility and wanted to make something with it. With this project, I was pushing myself to work intuitively so I avoided assigning a function at first. I had a few ideas - a cape, a lampshade, maybe a vessel. I wanted this to be ambiguous to see what forms I could generate from working this way. 

Then I made some samples of fabric and forms by stitching together the new yarn that I had made. I found that the material grew wider as I was mindlessly stitching it in the round. 

Is it a lampshade?

The raw material is waste from an industrial felt processing facility. It was originally a wide ribbon of felt that is fed through an automatic die cutter. I made some yardages of yarn by folding and stitching the sides of the ladder-like shape together. The "rungs" of the ladder shape formed U-shaped loops. 

A vessel?

I added strips of cut felt near the bottom because I was running out of the loop yarn. The resulting form resembled most like a garment. I then made a simple wire stand to hold up the shape.  At this point, the object resembled a lampshade so I went with it and added a light. 

Drying on the form with plastic to protect the wood. 

Felt and steel seemed too jarring of a combination so I went with a simple bent-laminated wooden structure that follows the shape of the shade. I dipped the shade in a mixture of warm water and fabric stiffener and stretched it over the wooden form to set its shape. 

Donzo.

DESIGN PROCESS - CLOTHES RACK

The first model for the clothes rack. I later decided to go with an equilateral triangle footprint for more efficient production. 

 

The Clothes Rack grew out of a frustration of mine about my clothes always being on the floor of my room. I wanted to design a lightweight piece of furniture that could hold all of my clothes that are in rotation. I was inspired by tent structures and designed these racks without any conventional hardwares. The nylon cord at the bottom holds the vertical dowels in tension while also supporting a canvas basket. 

More larger models for testing out different proportions

Smaller models for testing out alternative designs

Initially, I thought that tension would be necessary at the top for the structure to be stable. Later, I found out that this was a false assumption.

The first full-size model. One of the vertical members is longer to accommodate a light. I then decided to enlarge the footprint and shorten the verticals for more stability. 

DESIGN PROCESS - KNOT RUG

Sample in progress on a frame loom - experimenting with different weave structures. 

A sample of a knotting technique that I discovered while researching basket designs. I wanted to accentuate the sheen of the material by interrupting the knots but it warped the fabric. 

The Knot Rug initially started as a tangent from a previous project - the Shelter Chair. I had a lot of leftover rubber strips that I made by shredding punctured bicycle inner tubes with an industrial paper shredder. I made several simple frame looms in different sizes and and experimented with weave structures.

Another sample off the loom - herringbone weave with a messy edge that I didn't like.

A sample of the same knotting technique but with the reverse showing in one section which also gave the fabric more dimension.

Once I developed a weave structure that I liked. I decided on the format of a rug in order to show the texture and dimensionality of the weave. 

Frame loom prepped with cotton cord.

After weaving the reverse sections, the ends all have to be tucked in.

Detail showing the knots over the woven cotton cord. The left over sections will be knotted on the reverse side. 

This knotting technique works like pixels and therefore any shape can be accomplished. I chose an orthogonal design to help make the tedious weaving process more efficient.

Overall I spent a total of ~90 hours to complete this piece. Here is a short clip of the process: 

Finalist for Dorothy Waxman Textile Prize

I'm honored to be selected as one of the finalists for the Dorothy Waxman Textile Prize 2016. I entered a sample of the Knot Rug and it was shown among many other awesome pieces at Wanted Design during New York Design Week. 

Sweater Pots at AmDC's Growth Show

In May, I was selected to show among several other designers for the American Design Club show titled "Growth" during New York Design Week. 

Fine Design for the End of the World on Core 77

In May, I exhibited along with my fellow Cranbrook 3D peers at Collective Design Fair in NYC. Our show titled "Fine Design for the End of the World" was centered around growing concerns about social, economic, and environmental issues of the world and the contributions of industrial design to those issues. 

Photo Credits: Charlie Shuck

Thanks to Core 77 for writing a piece about the show!  Link here. 

Also, all the pieces in the show plus more information about the ideas behind the show can be found on the show website. 

RO/LU Workshop

Spring Semester kicked off with a workshop with Matt Olson of the recently disbanded RO/LU Studio (and now of OOIEE). 

We started with several group readings including: "Pierre Menard author or Quixote" by Jorge Louis Borges, "Compatibility Mode" by Seth Price, "Art Which Can't be Art" by Alan Kaprow, "I (not love) information" and "Take Care" by Anthony Huberman. 

The idea was to recreate a collection of pictures of the artist Anthony Caro at Bennington College amongst a collection of sculpture spare parts - translating that moment in time to the now. 

The originals: 

View fullsize

The result: 

Marinating these discussions/ideas of appropriation in contemporary art and design in my head... more to come later.