Furniture from Sinclair Smith’s BFA ID:BE course shows at Wanted Design

For three years, Sinclair Smith, Acting Chair of MFA Products of Design and Director of the VFL, has taught furniture design to students of the SVA BFA Interior Design : Built Environment. Select works from the course were presented at this year’s Wanted Design at ICFF adjacent to the MFA Products of Design “Lost Wax” exhibition. It was a strong showing from SVA.

When he began teaching the course, Smith took a novel approach. Teaching furniture design and craft to interior designers is not the same as teaching it to industrial designers. Whereas industrial designers focus heavily on the sole product, its nuts and bolts and the means of production, interior designers tend to take a wider view, considering the social context of the entire interior as well as its furniture and fixtures. Therefore, Smith says, “I felt it was less important to teach them how to make furniture than it was to inform how they see and think about furniture and how they understand it fitting into the style of a particular space.”

The course spends 10 weeks developing a seat, table and lamp for a historic interior of each student’s choice. Students explore how they envision people using the space and create anatomical sketches to develop behavioral ergonomics. Then they start drawing ways to support the body in those distinct postures. Simultaneously, they make sketches of details from the interior to explore design language. Those elements of design language are applied to the “supports” to develop pieces of furniture that are styled to suit the existing interior. This process develops a student’s eye, says Smith. “From a practical and professional standpoint, it is more likely that a budding interior designer will need to spec furniture from the market for a client or sketch something out for a workroom to produce than it is of them to make something themselves in a shop. So we put a lot of time into seeing, culture and talking about design history and design language. They need to be able to recreate what they are seeing and complement what exists.” Students develop their furniture collection in the computer and render it into their historic interiors accompanied by a set of mechanical drawings illustrating that they have fully thought through how the pieces would be manufactured and assembled.

In the last five weeks, students of the course move out of the classroom and into the Visible Futures Lab where they make small stools based on the design language that emerged over the previous weeks. The variety of from and styling derives from the varied interiors students initially chose to work within.

On view at Wanted Design were ten stools from three years of the course, conceived and fabricated at the SVA Visible Futures Lab by the following designers: