New York, apparatusstudio.com
Edgy lighting and an appealingly chunky new furniture series made New York’s Apparatus the talk of ICFF in 2015.

What is American design to you, and what excites you about it?
I think of American design as a place where we can access a collective design history and a tradition of craft without being burdened by its weight — where innovation and experimentation meet knowledge and craft, with a healthy dose of scrappiness. I think the enterprise is what makes it the most exciting.

What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year?
We’re working on new collections of lighting that use LED technology for the first time. We’ve been holding out for the right time — we’re so invested in the warm glow of dim incandescent light, and it feels like the technology is starting to be able to address that. We’ll also be moving our entire studio to a new space on 30th Street in Manhattan, combining our showroom, design, and production spaces onto one floor. The space was a school at the turn of the century, and we’ll be occupying the entire 4th floor, which was once the school gymnasium and adjoining classrooms. We’re very excited about the expansion and what it will mean for the daily operations of our studio.

What inspires your work in general?
As a studio, we’re most interested in what happens when you try to express perfect mathematical ideas in materials that fight that perfection. There’s a tragic quality in the space between the pure idea and its imperfect manifestation that I think lends our work a certain sense of humanness and accessibility.