Students Redesign IKEA Chairs for ICFF

The students were charged with repurposing mass-market raw wood IKEA chairs.

Nicholas Tamarin -- Interior Design, 5/6/2008

Though it might sound like a dance floor chant, IKEA was virtually unknown to denizens of the disco era. Nonetheless, the two will come together at least once as the Swedish mega-retailer finds its chairs reinvented by New York's School of Visual Arts at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), May 17-20.

Students from SVA's MFA design department were each given a raw wood chair from IKEA and were asked to restyle the mass-market product using cultural touchstones such as as disco, suburbia, and machismo as themes. The projects were created under the guidance of MTV designer and SVA's chair of 3D design Kevin O' Callaghan, and will be part of the school's multimedia display at New York's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center during ICFF.

"To address the challenges confronting graphic designers in the face of ever-changing visual media and rapidly evolving business environments, our students focus on entrepreneurship in the broadest sense: developing a viable concept, and then working through the process of prototype fabrication, production, and marketing of individual intellectual properties," says Lita Talarico, co-chair of SVA's MFA design department.

SVA was one of four schools chosen by the ICFF to participate this year at the Javits Center, along with the California College of the Arts, Savannah College of Art and Design, and Yale University.