ICFF: Top 5 Favorites

Gregg VanderKooi, Herman Miller’s Classics product manager traveled up and down every aisle of ICFF this morning to give you a taste of what lies beyond the wall’s of Herman Miller’s booth. Here are Gregg’s Top 5 Favorite pieces.

1. Nina D’Amario, “Parachute: Kinetic Color Wheel System” “I like the way the color wheel is explored in this really simple design. The discs slip together and are held by magnets and you look at it from different angles and color changes. The blue and yellow make green, red and yellow orange. Plus Nina thought through the packaging of the toy which uses a minimum of plastic. It’s a really great piece. The humanitarian side of the design is also really cool – the idea is to support communities that don’t have access to educational systems – it’s a toy and way of learning. ” (This is part of the Herman Miller/Pratt collaboration called “Empathy for Culture” where students explored culture and created designs that showed what they’d learned over a semester.)

2. Suberra, “High Density Cork Composite” “It’s taking such a simple material and using it in a new way. You think of a cork being associated with wine and liquids and here you use it is a bench top, or cutting block or even a sink.”

3. Martin Blum, Black + Blum, “Box Appetit Lunchbox” “I liked this lunchbox so much I bought two! Really nice design, sustainable material, easy to clean. There are really cool design aspects to it – like the knife/fork – should we call it a kfife? It’s a fork with a serrated edge for cutting. ”

4. Scot Herbst,”Zen Wagon” “There’s such a big market out there for well designed children’s pieces and I think this one sits in that niche really well. It’s well-crafted, uses sustainable, low-toxic materials and uses bent plywood – which of course we are always interested in seeing.”

5. Philippe Starck, “Parrot Zikmu Speakers” ‘These are so cool. It’s a really simple design that executed beautifully. It’s moved beyond the box speaker and created a stand alone object that functions as a piece of art as well as a speaker.”