“What really struck me about the brief was that it was an opportunity for collaboration,” says senior industrial design student Alexander Bennett. “Throughout my time at RIT, collabroation was a guiding force behind all of my projects. This inspired me to try to say ‘collaboration’ in an object.”

Bennett was interested in encouraging the sort of spontaneous interaction that drives creativity in the workplace. His solution—a chair that splits in half and offers two people places to comfortably perch while sharing a screen—was the result of a highly iterative process. To get to a place where the chair was both comfortable and structurally sound, Bennett built cardboard mock-ups, crafted full-scale prototypes out of wood, and made further refinements in CAD.

The design’s success lay in this process of refinement. “When I was pitching the idea for my design, it was really Dan Rucker and the rest of the team who allowed me to feel comfortable in constraining the solution a bit and really defining where it would have an appropriate use,” says Bennett. “They really helped me define the use case so I wouldn’t try to solve all the problems but solve one problem really well.”

After completing their projects, the students’ designs were juried by the Herman Miller team, who appraised the work on craft and performance, aesthetics and implementation of concept, and the relevance of the project to the initial brief. According to Rucker, Bennett’s design was exactly what the panel was hoping for.

“When we speak about building and enhancing relationships, we can't overlook how sensitive and empathetic the design must be—and the winning design was no exception,” says Rucker. “Sharing your personal technology with another individual is often addressed through software and display technologies. We typically default to the belief that amplifying the experience is always ideal rather than allowing it to remain intimate. In a sense, this chair exists as a counterpoint.” 

Bennett’s project, along with the work of seven runners-up, was produced by Herman Miller and then displayed at a showcase at RIT and at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair during Design Week in New York. “ICFF was the first time we got to see our finished designs,” says Bennett.  “It was almost surreal—a unique opportunity to share a design with the world.”

Alex was one of the few students in the class who addressed digitally mediated relationships in a truly novel and brave way. His approach was novel because it added the computer as a third party in a triangular conversation between two individuals in the workplace. His approach was brave because he took on the biggest challenge from a company famous for chairs.

Josh Owen, Metaproject Founder and Professor and Chair of Industrial Design at RIT

“Courses like Metaproject are both valuable and important for students of design because they provide a depth of experience that cannot be replicated in their early careers in the field,” says Owen. “To be treated as independent designers while being guided by faculty mentorship in tandem with leaders in the industry is kind of a guided tour through an experience that many designers never receive.”

As for Bennett, who’s off to intern with Microsoft for the summer, participation in Metaproject was the fufillment of an aspiration he held since his freshman year at RIT. More importanly, Metaproject allowed Bennett and his fellow students to learn an approach to design held sacred by both Herman Miller and RIT’s Vignelli Center for Design Studies. “Metaproject is not really focused on one specific industry like furniture or cars or footwear,” say Bennett. “It’s more finding what enables you to solve really interesting problems.  That’s what Herman Miller’s brief was—an interesting problem to solve, and my solution just happened to be a chair.”