New York, ransmeier.com Unlike many of the designers on this list, Ransmeier primarily produces his beautifully minimalist, ultra-functional work through big-name manufacturers like Herman Miller, Hay, and Mattiazzi.  What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? One of the greatest pleasures for me is making objects that almost anybody anywhere in the world could know how to use — hopefully they might even enjoy using them. I believe there is a universal, human understanding of form and meaning that transcends nationality, American or otherwise. When people speak about “design,” the focus is often on furniture and interior objects, but who decides where “design culture” starts and stops? In my opinion, if we are talking about design, we should also include film sets, sports equipment, sneakers and airplanes, just to name a few. Regarding furniture design, in the U.S. we don’t have the tradition of small family-owned producers of modern goods, and instead the market is dominated by a few large companies. There were a number of years — too many years — where people’s well-being was placed second to profit, and quantity sold trumped quality of life. Entrepreneurship and utility were ingrained in American culture from the beginning, as well as innovation and invention, all of which are still a source of cultural pride in the United States. America helped to pioneer industrial manufacturing on a truly massive scale. Enter the Calvinist frugality that was also embedded into American culture from the outset, and one can begin to hypothesize why the appetite for low cost products is still a dominant force in American consumerism. Thankfully, the dark ages of American design are over. I see big business in America placing a much greater focus on good design and sustainability. I am energized by the collaboration with industry on a large scale, and with designing for a consumer base that may not know or care who designed what they use. If design begins with the desire to change something, then I am inspired by designers who are reinventing objects, businesses and services. Entrepreneurialism is still very American, and the application of inventive passion combined with good principles motivates me. We are seeing more and more young companies producing and distributing their work, and hopefully some of these newer brands will manage to stick around and gather some history. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? I … Continue reading Leon Ransmeier

Brooklyn, karlzahn.com A onetime designer of wooden toys for Areaware and a designer at Lindsey Adelman’s studio, Zahn came into his own this spring with a stunning collection of kinetic, sculptural pieces for Matter.  What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? I think American design is in the middle of rediscovering itself right now. We have a history of ingenuity and a very definite modernist aesthetic, but we haven’t moved much beyond that until now. Thanks to the Internet and the world becoming a seemingly smaller place, global design has been heavily influencing the American design scene and I think we are now making waves in return. It is an exciting time to be involved in the community because we are starting to establish again what that American design aesthetic actually is. There are so many talented designers, chipping away at what that word means and proving that we can hold our own on the global stage. We are setting the foundations of a new, really intriguing formal language that is still rooted in American ingenuity and the prowess that we have inherited. And I think the world is ready for some honest, classic, and ultimately beautiful work. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? This past design week I had an opportunity to show some work which I would consider far more sculptural than design. But the process of making for the sake of experimentation and solely for beauty was so very enlightening and fun. I made it a point not to make anything with a purpose but of course found myself tinkering with some basic products along the way. Now that the experiment has been shown, and based on the reactions that the work has received, I feel more comfortable pushing some of those products further and I am planning on showing another collection of experiments for this coming design week.  What inspires your work in general? I think this past year has helped to push me into a different place than I was expecting creatively. Where I used to be fascinated with connections and the cleanliness of intersecting materials, I am finding that the very point of contact is far more interesting than the whole. That place where two surfaces meet, or where moving lines pass one another, or where the visual weight of one thing begins to affect another: It’s a sort of metaphorical chiaroscuro … Continue reading Karl Zahn

Columbus, Indiana, hale-id.com Nesci learned his trade working in the furniture restoration department at Wright auction house for five years. Now he’s the designer of furniture editions for galleries like Casati and Volume.  What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? Community is the word that I feel encapsulates the current state of American design. So many interconnections: friends, gallerists, fabricators, promoters, writers, curators, collectors, educators and other supporting roles help to make up American design. It’s really all of these people, working together and supporting each other, that have made this period in time such an exciting moment. With social interconnections like Instagram I feel like the design community has a fresh, daily life and we can all support each other and follow individual progressions. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? There is a real excitement happening with design in the Midwest. I am really excited to be included in Rick Valicenti’s CHGO DSGN show at the Chicago Cultural Center that opened in May. This exhibition of the best of Chicago Design will be up through November 6th. It is a fantastic snapshot of what incredible talent is in Chicago right now. Another positive happening has been my recent move to culturally rich Columbus, Indiana. This is a fresh start to another chapter in my life and I am really excited to see what type of work stems from this nurturing environment. Christopher West of Indianapolis has been working with the people of Columbus for over a year on a international Design Biennial proposed for 2016. A group of curators and design leaders will pair the new designers of today against the backdrop of the architectural gems found here in Columbus. To pilot this program I will be installing 100 mirror-polished aluminum tables in the sunken courtyard (which was once a reflecting pool) of Eliel Saarinen’s First Christian Church in Columbus this October 10th. These tables will have a life after the exhibition in Columbus as well; they’ll be shown in Chicago, Miami, and New York with Volume Gallery, Casati and Patrick Parrish, respectively. What inspires your work in general? I’m constantly searching for fabrication processes that I haven’t used before. I feel this is a key element to what I will do next, managing the process of a new design while using a new process is what I enjoy most. I tour new manufacturers … Continue reading Jonathan Nesci

Minneapolis, jonathanmuecke.com Muecke appeared on our 2013 list, but did you hear? The designer was recently chosen to create this year’s high-profile pavilion at Design/Miami. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? I do not know what AMERICAN DESIGN is — BUT this is what is interesting and important about it. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? I will continue to work on projects that have qualities that interest me for one reason or another. What inspires your work in general? Determine the limits of an object or event. Determine the limits more precisely. Repeat, until further precision is impossible. GEORGE BRECHT, EXERCISE (1963)

Seattle, johnhogandesigns.com Glass artist John Hogan makes incredible work in his own right, but his influence on design can also be felt through his recent collaborations with folks like Ladies & Gentlemen Studio (chandelier above) and Erich Ginder. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? American design, like most things American, is a mixture of many international influences and approaches. American designers combine and playfully rearrange traditional approaches, constantly breaking unwritten rules. The results of this mash-up tend to yield objects and products that pay tribute to important movements of the past while blazing trails anew. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? This year I’m focusing on a couple of new collaborations, the branding of my glass fabrication and consulting company, and pushing my own work in new directions. I love to collaborate. It’s a way to guarantee something totally new and exciting for me. Not going to spoil the surprises, but I’m super excited for current developments that will debut at ICFF. In addition to collaborative efforts I have been helping designers to develop and realize their ideas in glass. More and more I’m hearing designers saying they have wanted to work with and implement glass into their lines but don’t know how to go about it. This year I am officially launching “Ballard Assembly,” offering services in development as well as fabrication. Glass can be shaped, colored, and textured in many ways. Helping designers to understand specific approaches towards focusing and developing a vision is the first step. My range of speciality includes both off hand and mold blowing, casting, and cutting and polishing glass. I work with a network of specialists in finishing designs across the spectrum of glass cutting and shaping processes. What inspires your work in general? My work is constantly evolving. I have some exciting new approaches that are coming out in my current works and will continue to develop in the coming year. Recently I’ve been inspired a lot by the culinary world. Chefs like Ferran Adria and Grant Achatz are working creatively on a whole different level. Experimental culinary has the potential to excite all five senses, which for me as an artist is very exciting and intimidating. These chefs work in an organized and well-documented system that indiscriminately and creatively considers anything and eliminates or promotes things without forced foresight. It’s very much a mix … Continue reading John Hogan

New York, ianstell.com Ian Stell fascinated the design world this year with his movable, transformable furniture, which he launched with Matter this spring. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? It seems that the American design community has benefitted from being seen for years as provincial. Although the U.S. has been a significant market for the large European manufacturers, it has with few exceptions been passed over as a source of new ideas for these companies. This comparative isolation has been a gift to emerging American designers in two ways: It has forced us to be scrappily entrepreneurial, and it has also allowed us to develop a distinctive regional voice — a precious rarity amid the homogenizing forces of the global marketplace and culture. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? I will be introducing new work using layered, bisecting anamorphic text, which I’ve been experimenting with for a little while. These will take the form of handwoven carpets, ceramic vessels, and furniture. I’m working on kinetic light fixtures, where form and light will be modulated through simple hands-on manipulation, and I’m working on more variations from the Pantograph series. One will be a vanity, with a shifting, fractured mirror plane and functioning drawers that pivot from a rectangle to a parallelogram in plan. I’m also in discussion with a a developer and cultural patron in Berlin about a large-scale installation on a platform in the Spree river. What inspires your work in general? Inspiration for me is always a moving/morphing target. Lately I’ve found it fruitful to flit back and forth between different departments at the Metropolitan Museum, maybe focusing on the myriad variations on a particular everyday object — perhaps a chest or a bottle. It’s great the way that museum affords brash and at moments almost comical segues: a hallway behind of the temple of Dendur leads to 19th century American furniture galleries (note the drastic shift in climate control), a doorway at the end of the hall of totems from New Guinea spills into Greek and Roman statuary. I love surfing these breaks of aesthetic turbulence.

New York, home-nyc.com After an incredibly prolific year designing the interiors of New York’s hippest restaurants and bars, Evan and Oliver Haslegrave of hOmE are gearing up to put their focus on furniture design. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? American design to us is integrated with location and production — where and how it’s made. It’s most exciting to us when it’s directly informed by the neighborhood of the project/studio and by the process with which it’s made, where the neighborhood and process are part of the design rather than tangential (or unrelated) to it. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? We’re designing several new projects, including: —Sisters, a bar/restaurant in Clinton Hill, opening in October 2014 —1133 Manhattan, an apartment building in Greenpoint we’re having 28 paintings made for, almost all from Brooklyn artists, opening in November 2014 —Dos Caminos, a new restaurant in the W Hotel in Times Square, opening in 2015 —Our first residential project, in downtown Las Vegas, completed in 2015 We’ve also begun projects in Nolita, Cobble Hill, and Williamsburg, all of which are opening next year. What inspires your work in general? Travel is always informative and inspiring. Recently we were inspired by Salvador Dali’s home in Barcelona, the Borgo Santo Pietro hotel in Tuscany, the cathedral in Sienna, the Borghese gallery in Rome, and Grenada in Nicaragua. We’re always looking for new art and architecture, on any scale. Materials, too: Our approach is materials-based, and though it’s always evolving, there are certain materials we will always work with and be inspired by, like reclaimed wood, stone, leather, mirror, and steel. Also sourcing — finding the unexpected, or using the everyday in unexpected ways, has always been integral to our work (especially if it somehow involves travel).

New York, field-experiments.com The trio — Paul Marcus Fuog, Karim Zariffa, and Benjamin Bryant — launched in the spring with a much-talked-about collection of objects made during a three-month residency in Bali. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? We are a transnational collective now based out of New York (Paul is from Melbourne, Karim is from Montreal, and Ben is from America). This gives us a unique perspective on American design and the cultural conditions here that inform the design landscape. America is a very open and energetic place with a strong inventive spirit. There’s a sense that anything is possible. It’s democratic and (generally) unpretentious. All this plays out in the design here — it’s well-crafted, optimistic, and diverse. It’s an exciting time for American design. It’s very vocal right now and influencing the international conversation. There’s a renewed focus on experimental making and thinking through doing – lots of fresh activity, generally. It was the right move to debut our collection here, and we’re so happy to be part of this vibrant and growing community. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? We’ve just launched our new website and online souvenir shop. People can browse and buy our one-off pieces, a small selection of found objects, and our publications. Right now, we’re working on a new project with Kiosk, installing a new piece of work in their brand new store on LaGuardia Place. We’re also discussing a joint field trip for later in the year. We’re also continuing to share our Indonesian project as much as possible. Inspired by the mobile handmade rigs we observed in Bali, used for showcasing and selling a variety of wares, we are designing a mobile souvenir store and plan to tour it far and wide. Most importantly, we’re going to continue to create without an agenda as much as possible. This is our way of thinking, conversing, and learning. We’re working on a range of multiples for a small selection of stores and we’re extending many of the open-ended ideas that we started playing around with in Bali, shifting their context and experimenting with new materials. Towards the end of next year, we’ll be ready and raring to undertake another Field Experiments project. Right now we’re exploring where that might be. We hope to open the next one up to students of design, so that they … Continue reading Field Experiments

New York, eggcollective.com A Brooklyn furniture studio whose founders — Stephanie Beamer, Crystal Ellis, and Hillary Petrie — have backgrounds in architecture, art, and woodworking. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? As American designers, the fact that the greater term “American design” exists means that we’re fortunate to a part of something bigger: a movement and a community that’s changing how things are made and where they’re made. Similar to the idea of slow food, this movement has the power to alter how objects are understood, viewed, and consumed in contemporary society. The community involved in executing and sharing American design is encouraging for the future and evolution of this movement. Each year we are meeting new people who are making incredible work, and also experiencing new venues for exhibition that didn’t exist in years past. It’s great to see that there’s an energy building behind American design that’s creating an environment prepared to support the continual development of new talent and ideas. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? This is going to be an exciting year for Egg. We’re currently renovating a space on the corner of Hudson and Spring where we’ll open our first showroom this winter. The space will showcase our own work alongside a small selection of artists’ works. We also have teamed up with Design Within Reach and just released our first licensed product — the Harvey Mirror, a delicate brass armature that holds a circular mirror. What inspires your work in general? Recently we’ve been going back to our roots (all three of us studied architecture in undergrad) for inspiration. As a trio, we’ve been interested in the simple/sculptural forms found in Ancient Roman Architecture and early Brutalist Architecture — especially the Roman aqueducts, the concrete dome of the Pantheon, and just about anything by Paul Rudolf or Le Corbusier. We believe this interest can be seen in our newest collection of furniture. For our 2014 Collection, we combined five of the most elemental building materials (stone, wood, bronze, leather, and glass) with five of the most basic shapes (circle, oval, triangle, square, and trapezoid). Many of the pieces in the collection are made of thick, solid materials that are combined by stacking or slotting. These fundamental ways of making are offset by the collection’s rich, earthy materials palette, and by the impeccable craftsmanship of the work.

St. Petersburg, Florida, damm-design.com DAMM is a lighting studio founded by husband-and-wife team Robert and Brenda Zurn. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? A defining feature of America is the ability to reinvent yourself. What gives us that ability is looking at our world through the lens of possibility instead of the lens of tradition. America is focused on what the future holds. American design has this same open-hearted spirit that finds fulfillment in exploring what is possible. We’re excited to explore the resurgence in small-scale design and manufacturing that has purposely turned away from cheap homogenous consumerism. We feel like it’s the second coming of the Arts and Crafts movement, but instead of rebelling against the barbarism of the Industrial revolution, this new movement is rebelling against corporatism, which has razed the aesthetics and quality of the objects we live with. What’s even more exciting is the idea that the original Arts and Crafts movement changed the world so profoundly, ushered in Modernism, and laid the foundations for design bastions like the Bauhaus. It’s inspiring to think that this movement is building foundations for a new American design perspective that will have far-reaching implications. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? We’re continuing to work with local artisans, learning more about materials and playing with the boundaries and limitations of materials. We’re adding floor lamps, as well as some more sculptural table lamps which we hope to show in Miami this winter, as well as in New York in the spring. We’re also working on a new line of home goods. What inspires your work in general? Most of the objects that we surround ourselves with are solid and well-made, because they’re from a time when that’s just how things were done. The texture, weight, and visual appeal of the objects in our life influences the way we design. DAMM is highly interested in art, and the conceptual implications of art raised by Dada and all artists who trace their DNA to it. We feel strongly that design is distinct from art and the line between them is an important one, but knowing where it is and why it’s important are matters that we can only understand through exposition that is marked with uncertainty, curiosity, and relentless exploration. As Eileen Gray said, “To create, one must first question everything.”

New York, chiaozza.eternitystew.com Adam Frezza and Terri Chiao have an eponymous art practice (paper plants, rock sculptures) and a design-studio-within-a-studio called CHIAOZZA (shelves, mirrors). What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? Adam: I like to think about history and imagine how native Americans might have lived, or what it may have been like for early settlers building new homes. It helps me fantasize about a kind of ‘wild domestic’ and the severity and ingenuity and importance of objects in our living space. We sense a beautifully mysterious line between the idea of decoration and the notion of living with things. For us, the objects we surround ourselves with are opportunities for endless experimentation, from the can of beans we chose, to the chair we are sitting in, to the vessel we use to pot a new houseplant. I like to use the things I live with. I like to live with them and use them until they fall apart or become something else. Every time we consider throwing something away, we first question its potential at becoming something else. Can that old broken chair that has finally bottomed out become a new home for one of our large houseplants? I love to see my environment shift and change, like a living thing, with small shadows of things that existed before. Design to me is what we make it. It is an endless collaboration with our environment, our needs, our desires, our curious choices in life, and ultimately a collaboration with other designers who have made things that have found their ways into our homes. The same chair will seem different anywhere it’s put, so for me the context and texture of each of our environments is the beauty of design. Terri: We see our work as part of a continuum that includes the ever-evolving expression of the human spirit. We draw from tradition, craft, and imagination alike to make things that we feel connect to this fundamental spirit — and I think sometimes this makes our work seem primitive, childish, and playful, which of course we welcome. Maybe American design has the feeling of being a wide-open field where we’re free to draw inspiration from many different cultures, histories, traditions, crafts, disciplines, mediums, etc without feeling “pinned down” to a preconceived idea of what design is, or what art is. What are your plans and highlights … Continue reading CHIAOZZA

New York, bowernyc.com Product designers Danny Giannella and Tammer Hijazi co-founded Bower in 2013, but launched a much-talked-about furniture collection this spring. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? American design to us is a realm in which designers feel free to experiment and come up with fresh new ideas that may or may not translate into marketable designs. Either way, we see value in that free process and it strengthens the unique language we’re developing. American design values the visual, artistic side of works as much, if not more than, the functionality. It’s traditional materials or processes, but viewed through a contemporary lens, creating seamless hybrids of old and new. American design is simple. We’re into simple form, color, composition and function. Designers and consumers alike are drawn to simplicity and honesty in design. We’ve also noticed regional trends in design within the U.S., which is exciting to see. We like to think that we’re not so globalized and over-saturated with influences from the internet that we lose the character shaped by our tribes and neighborhoods. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? We’re very excited about moving to a bigger shop and studio space this month. It will allow us the space to keep producing our designs as well as experiment and come up with new ones. We’re seeing it as a bigger play space. We’re going to take part in an exhibition during Art Basel in Miami, where we’ll exhibit our Shape Mirrors and some new variations of our Contour Tables which are in the works. We also want to add a psychedelic flavor to our collection for Miami. What inspires your work in general? We’re inspired by the unknown. We’re inspired by ingenuity, inventiveness, and happy accidents. That’s what informs our approach to design. We’d be bored to death if we stopped exploring new uncharted territories and only focused on safe designs that we’d fully figured out. It’s not the wisest business model, but we’re not the wisest business men — we’re wise designers and artists that don’t let business fully drive what we do. It keeps us motivated and interested. Thankfully, this adventurous spirit has lead to some marketable products that are good for business, which motivates us to continue on an unknown path led by our passion and cojones.