Harrington Design Challenge

I was very fortunate as I always knew I wanted to be in the furniture - design business. After graduating high school, I was eager to attend Harrington School of Design located in Downtown Chicago. There never was a second thought of where my career should be. Since attending school, our store has always made an effort to hire graduates from Harrington. It has always worked well for our business and the graduate.
Late last year, Jerod of Mortise and Tenon, Los Angeles and Mig and Tig, Chicago thought is would be fun to create a challenge for students at a design school. The challenge was based on our experience and the realistic expectations of what one faces when designing furniture. And to make it sweeter and more competitive we added scholarship money to the picture. The students had to design an audio video cabinet and sofa. Sounds simple, right? It was in-depth and students’ final presentation required CAD working drawings that were detailed in how their piece would be built.
We selected Harrington as we had relationships there and this is where I went to study design. The teacher who made this happen at the school was Peter Klick. Peter is an amazing teacher and it is a privilege to know him. This is a person who really wants his students to have a great experience and let their creativity and design skills shine. Peter created the semester challenge with a week by week schedule and the students were to email their updates to Mig and Tig and Mortise and Tenon. We posted on our store websites the weekly updates. At the end of the semester we selected the three winners and honorable Mentions.
The entire experience for the students and ourselves was a wonderful event. It provided us an interesting weekly content for our sites and fresh insight from design students. Additionally, a benefit to students as to what manufacturers would expect when designing product in the furniture business world.
We now are working with the president of Harrington, Eric Parks, and will be opening up the challenge to more students this year. This semester’s challenge will be the “seating and eating” challenge. Students will be required to design seating and a table for an eating area. We will keep you posted on our blog and bring to you some of the interesting developments on our challenge on our posts.
If you have created a community challenge, let us know…we would love to know about it and share it with the industry!

www.yourfurniturelink.com
www.mortisetenon.com
www.migandtig.com