Allsteel Sends Video Winners to Salone Internazionale del Mobile
Austin Karr and Jay Neill produced a tongue-in-cheek portrayal of a smitten designer whose affair with the Allsteel Acuity chair is cut short when he discovers it's cheating on him--with another Acuity.
Nicholas Tamarin -- Interior Design, 4/28/2009 12:00:00 AM
Allsteel's Acuity chair
Any office worker lucky enough to land a comfortable office chair knows of the intimate relationship that develops between posterior and seat. Office-furniture manufacturer Allsteel mined just this bond for its recent Never Sit Still, a YouTube competition that tasked designers with channeling their inner filmmaker to create humorous videos expressing their love for the company's Acuity chair.
In addition to bragging rights as laugh-inducing directors, participants in the competition, held from July to December 2008, were vying for a grand-prize, all-expense-paid trip to the annual Salone Internazionale del Mobile furniture fair in Milan, which just wrapped up after running from April 22 to 27.
Austin Karr and Jay Neill, principles of Denver-based interior design firm Box Studios snagged the top award with their tongue-in-cheek production portrays a smitten designer whose affair with the office chair is cut short when he discovers it's cheating on him—with another Acuity.
"This competition was so much fun," Karr says. "We filmed about three hours of video, and we were laughing hysterically the entire time."
Allsteel also chose three regional winners, all of whom earned an Acuity chair for their yukkers. Perhaps the most creative of the group was the Dallas office of architecture firm RTKL, the Mid-Central region honors, who submitted an Acuity-starring spoof of the hit comedy The Office.
"We were very impressed by the humor, originality and high production quality of the video submissions," says Greg Dunlop, Allsteel's national manager for architecture and design. "The A+D community's excitement about Acuity—and, the contest itself—was manifest in the caliber of the entries."
The competition, which netted dozens of submissions, was the result of a first-time partnership between Allsteel and Milan-based industrial designer Bruce Fifield, of Design Continuum Italia, who hosted Karr, Neill, and their guests at a special Acuity event at Salone on April 23.
VIEW ALL GALLERIES
