Ocad Furniture Design

[Dinah Lianes]

TheDESIGNwith studio at CF Toronto Eaton Centre will bring together a range of designers, students, and community members, and serve as a dedicated learning lab to explore the circular economy for creating lasting, social good.

Located on Level 2 (between the Dundas Street station entrance and Canadian Tire), the studio will function daily as an incubator space for OCAD University students, a student resident, designers and community members.

Delivered by design Workshop Architects, the 635-square-foot studio was built with 40 per cent repurposed materials from other CF locations and previously used store fixtures, including the front doors and windows as well as the track lighting inside.

Among the makers and designers who are part of the DESIGNwith studio are Katya Koroscil, DESIGNwith intern, and Ernesto Ramirez, a furniture design intern from Durango, Mexico; both students are in their third year of industrial design at OCAD University. Both students co-designed a furniture collection for use in the incubator space with Industrial Design Professor Ranee Lee and Lee Fletcher, the founding partner at Fig40 and principal at Fletcher Scott Studio. The studio furniture pieces are designed with sustainability, flexibility and affordance in mind, and are made with easy-to-use dimensional lumber and readily available fasteners. This achieves the goal of sharing designs that are producible for anyone, by anyone.

The Sharp Centre for Design, part of the Ontario College of Art and Design. Caroline Robbie, project lead for UCAD U CO, Quadrangle principle, and also an OCAD U graduate, was familiar with the design language, having worked on the Sharp Centre project previously. Image: Tom Arban

But as with the Sharp Centre, the colourful sections are not jumbled together, but set against a neutral base palette of the white walls and polished concrete floors. In other areas the design toys with the usual application of interior materials: a pale wooden expanse that might otherwise be flooring is flipped to provide a suspended ceiling; playing with it one step further, this is not a uniform and level plane, but one broken up and angled in places, the gaps between sections revealing the exposed soffit. As a twist on the industrial stripped-back look, the exposed parts are painted a bright orange. The wooden panels are strategically placed to hide the mechanical and electrical elements that really do want hiding.

Throughout, furniture, provided by Steelcase, Herman Miller and KI among others, helps to vary the feel and arrangement of the working environments. Elements such as bright yellow cable conduits marry flexibility with practicality, so that users might rearrange the furniture to suit their needs and still have a power supply.

Being driven by a fierce do-it-yourself ethic and curiosity for how things are made, while being inspired by the spark of alchemy that transforms something from matter into artifact is what resulted in me becoming an artist, designer, and maker of objects.

Object-making is largely how we have left our mark in the physical world as humans, and the resulting artifacts become a thread that binds us to the people who came before us. I am fascinated by the stories both personal and collective that a tool or piece of art can tell, often pondering what the things around us will reveal to future generations about the invisible forces that inform us and the greater world.

I studied Industrial Design at OCAD University (Ontario College of Art & Design) where I was trained in product design processes, but was spending a significant portion of that time perfecting skills in woodworking, furniture making, and fabrication in general. I came out of the program with a reinforced certainty that my interests lie largely in hands-on making in the studio building pieces in the realm of functional art, which I have since continued to create to communicate ideas. These objects that you can touch, hold, and interact with draw connections between things both tangible and intangible, forging relationships that oscillate between the opposite sides of perceived dualities.

What interests me most is work that asks questions, putting the spotlights on the absurdity of everyday norms, questioning what is taken for granted as commonplace, as well as creating things that bring people moments of delightful amusement to invigorate a new way of seeing the things around them previously gone unnoticed. I seek to examine what certain objects mean to us, the inherent symbolism of different object archetypes, the encoded messages that shape, form, and material can communicate in an instant. I tend to see everything as multifaceted and find myself drawn to the outlying and uncommon side of things- the hardware under a table, the stage set after it comes down, an abandoned church after the congregation are long gone. The side of things that continue on silently existing. And perhaps the sides of ourselves we hide as well as show.

Joe Carroll is a furniture and kitchen designer/ builder located just outside Picton in Prince Edward County. A trained cabinet maker and a designer, Joe takes the function of objects and how, where, and when they are used as important factors in creating furniture and kitchens.

Umm... I don't know if interior design discussions are welcome here...but this is the only forums i know thats even closely dedicated to interior design

Right now I'm a Canadian (studying at Dalhousie) first year community design student and I'm looking to transfer into Ryerson's interior design program. This is something I personally really want to do, but my parents are extremely opposed to me going into interior design because they think that it would be extremely difficult for me to find a job once I graduate with a degree in interior design.

I'm just looking for some perspective from people who are experienced in the field. Coming out with a degree in interior design, honestly, is it really that hard for me to find a job? Are interior designers really looked down on so much?

welcome, endon927.

be ready, because interiors posts have been targets for criticism in the past, a subject of some architecture-folks ire. it's not so much that interior designers are looked down upon, as it is that they are perceived to come in late in a project, with no inkling of what's come before, and do their work with no understanding of the goals of a project - often completely undermining those goals. i guess you could say that the perception is that they look down upon us, despite their much more limited role in the project.

but this doesn't always happen. good interior designers understand how to work with the larger design team.

my own (architect's) opinion: interior design programs, depending on which you choose, can be limiting. if they're taught from the perspective of 'interior architecture', you can get a bigger picture understanding of what goes into the realization of a project and how you can be an integral part of it.

if it makes your parents feel better, you might consider an architecture program, from which you could switch to a focus in interior design later. the basic architecture program is a valuable background to have.

there are some interior design people around here, so keep checking back. you may not hear from them right away.

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we have many id's in our office. in fact, it started out as an id office. the id's seem to work long hours picking out carpet samples and wall coverings. the newest id's we have do 3d work and go down to the library to dig out samples of the material choices made by the project managers. they sometimes ask us questions about wall ratings. i think you have more future in id as architecture is being marginalized to death, but people still seem to be willing to pay for people to choose pillows for them. also, you don't need to jump through as many hoops to become a licensed professional. as far as finding jobs in the field, it seems to start in school. is the school well connected to id community? i ask this because id firms, at least ours, hires summer interns, brings in id studios etc, mentors high school kids etc. to a much greater degree than architecture firms.

I've always loved interior design and debated pursuing it over architecture, but ultimately chose architecture becuase I could do both with an arch degree.

I am not familiar with those schools, but I can't see why you wouldn't be able to get a good job. Good, though, is subjective - does it mean reasonable enjoyment/fulfillment? reasonable hours? reasonable pay?

I'd just look on some of the job forums for ideas of pay. ID's usually make more money than architects and the biz is generally more profitable than architecture.

They reason people look down on it here is becuase there are so many interior 'decorators' out there dancing around with curtains and table clothes - you do not want to be an interior decorator!

There is more good interior design out there than good architecture. I'd suggest getting a subscription to Interior Design. Its' got great stuff in it and you could call most of what they publish interior architecture.

endon927, you might need to educate your parents on the differences between interior design, interior architecture, and interior decorating, as trace noted above. Also get a feel for the difference between residential interior design and commercial interior design.

I work for a commercial architecture firm. About a third of my colleagues are interior designers; sometimes the work on their own projects, other times they design the interior spaces for tenants who move into the base buildings that the architects design.

From my experience, it seems like residential interior designers have to contend with interior decorators more often (i.e. the wife thinks she knows how to pick the pillows). In commercial design, there are fewer pillows to be picked.

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