When you’re surfing the Web for information about the prestigious Milan International Furniture Show, you will find some interesting stuff if you must rely on your search engine to translate the Italian. “Every plan must have a story to the shoulders, must furnish the house with the poetry,” for example.
Ferris’ Kendall College of Art and Design students who took Gayle DeBruyn’s Collaborative Design class might say that they got themselves in deep to take eight innovative furniture designs to the international show. More story below photos.

Where the Elite Meet
Kendall was one of only two American universities, and one of only 30 world-wide, to exhibit at Salone Satellite—a section of the fair devoted to young, progressive designers. Usually a school has to compete to get into the Milan show.
Usually.
Kendall was assured of a place at the exclusive exhibition thanks to an invitation from Vladimir Kagan, one of the world’s top designers, who was impressed by the work he saw when he visited the school. Kagan’s clients have included Marilyn Monroe and Gary Cooper, and his work is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the private
collections of such celebrities as film director David Lynch and the late violinist Isaac Stern.
To choose just whose work from Kendall would be exhibited in Milan, four judges who work professionally in the field of furniture design and production selected eight designs out of 23 submitted by students. It was the first step into uncharted territory not only for the designers, but fellow students, faculty and administration.
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t know when the jurors came if we’d end up with anybody at all going, or whether we’d end up with a vast number,” says KCAD President Oliver Evans, who recognized early in the process the learning opportunities that going to Milan presented.
“We had the issue of how our booth should look, the whole space,” says Evans. “What those issues allowed us to do was give a class on collaborative design. We had the students with pieces to be exhibited engaged with other students wrestling with the questions of how to put the whole thing together.”
Or, as Kendall student Nick Andrews puts it, “What we did was like [the MTV show] The Real World. We took nine strangers, put them in a room, and we created something special. As a collaborative team with six different majors, it gave us all these different ways of creating the space, which was like the ninth piece in the exhibition.”
Sometimes, that collaboration meant keeping things simple.
“We had this class all semester and we came up with plain white cubes to display the models on,” explains Tim Murphy, whose bench designed for public use was one of the eight pieces selected for the show. “The cubes were underlit, so they had a little glow to the top. We got a lot of attention. Someone from a media group came up and said, ‘You can tell the other students design for students, while Kendall students design for professionals.’ So the white cubes were not a mistake.”
That professional look meant taking care of the details. The pieces themselves were produced as half-scale models for the show, and the display cubes were collapsible for shipping. Such care helped assure that all the materials arrived undamaged, and when fully assembled gave the Kendall booth a clean, museum-like appearance, which kept the focus on the furniture itself.

Epositivo de iSaloni
How do you measure the success of something like an appearance at the world’s largest and most prestigious furniture design show? Perhaps by the visibility it gives the school.
Journalists and media groups from 27 countries received KCAD press kits, and scores of CDs about the school were distributed as well.
Or perhaps it’s the attention the designs themselves received from designers and manufacturers.
“I was told that a German who was interested in Tim’s bench came up to the booth,” says Phil Rassi, whose multi-purpose lamp is designed for either floor or table use. “An Italian was interested in Steve Rigrish’s wine rack, and after we got back I was told that someone from Copenhagen was interested in my lamp.”
The students alternated shifts at the booth—from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., and from 2 to 7 p.m.—plus everyone got a day off. This gave students enough time for some sightseeing, including a group who took a train to Florence, and a lucky couple of students who attended an evening party thrown by Kagan.
A lot of people saw the work of the next generation of furniture designers, thanks to the fact that Salone Satellite was, according to a Web browser translation program, “the only epositivo space de iSaloni opened to the public for all the days of the manifestation.” Read, free and open to the public. The other sections of the exhibition required tickets for entry.
Kendall students may have future opportunities to exhibit at Salone Satellite. “The Milan show student exhibits are rotated every two to three years, and we’ll certainly pursue that,” says DeBruyn. “What we’ve learned this year would be very helpful if we went back.”
If Kendall students do go back, they’ll know the importance of translation—especially of translating function into form. And like the first group of students, they’ll make that happen by letting their designs speak for themselves.

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