Everyone in home furnishings tells me we need to bring more creative young people into our industry. To meet this need, my organization, the International Society of Furniture Designers (ISFD) has made creating connections for talented young designers part of our mission. In pursuit of that mission, I visited the furniture design program at Appalachian State University, viewed the seniors’ Capstone exhibit, helped judge the Appalachian Hardwood Manufacturers and Real American Hardwood Student Furniture Design Competition, and interviewed some of the students. Here’s what I found out.
The good news is there is no shortage of creative young people who want to be professional furniture designers and makers. The students at Appalachian State do excellent work. Their design briefs are well thought out. Some show exceptional skill in crafting fine furnishings. All see the potential of furniture as an art form. They all understand that the furniture industry is a business, and, as much as they would like to create furniture as art, they know that is a very narrow niche. They are all champing at the bit to create, and they are searching for opportunities to be creative.
Some see those opportunities as very few and far between. They see too many companies chasing trends downstream to “a sea of overwhelming sameness.” They know that trends are what consumers are buying, and to stay in business, you have to sell people what they want. However, they think the “trend-to-trash business model” does too much environmental damage to survive over the course of their careers.
How much damage? Speaking at a panel discussion during Spring High Point Market, furniture designer Jerri Hobdy of MENO HOME noted that, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, consumers dumped about 9.7 million tons of home furnishings into landfills in 2018. Take a little more than 3.2 million large SUVs, put them in a pile, and you’d be looking at one year’s worth of discarded furniture. On top of that goes all of the packaging waste from the new furniture that replaced the old. Perhaps creating a circular furnishings business model is the most important design challenge for the next generation. And solving it will take creativity at all levels of our industry, not just in product design, but in finance, sourcing, manufacturing, logistics, and even retail.
Product design is a huge part of that solution. As Hobdy also noted, she learned from the MacArthur Foundation that “80% of sustainability challenges can be solved in the design phase.”
The young designers I spoke with saw this solution in terms of designing products that people don’t just want to buy, but want to keep. Making products that are built to be refurbished, reused, and recycled–and bringing back the trades that refinish, rebuild, and reupholster furniture as consumer needs and tastes change. It’s a challenge they want to take on, but they know they can’t do it alone. They can make the right product design decisions, but somebody has to design the business model into which those products fit. They don’t expect the world to change tomorrow, but they do think the change must come–and they do want to be among the drivers of that change. In the meantime, they’re happy to get started designing furnishings that people want to buy–and keep.
There is no shortage of creative young furniture designers. The ISFD Student Pinnacle Awards showcases excellent work from students at Appalachian State, Savannah College of Art and Design, Kendall College of Art and Design, the University of Houston, Purdue University, and a host of other schools around the country. If we want to bring more of them into the industry, the ones I spoke with at Appalachian State told me we need to give them more opportunities to be creative. We all know those opportunities exist. The next generation needs to see not only where those opportunities are, but how to get to them. They need to see the path that takes them from that entry level job in the product design department to the creative director’s position. If they can see that, they’ll choose to join us, and we will no longer be wondering where the next generation of creative designers will come from. We’ll be working with them.
David Blair is the executive director of the International Society of Furniture Designers (ISFD). This opinion piece first appeared in the May issue of Home Accents Today.
