Hasta La Ideas

Monday morning at the Metropolis pavilion marked the beginning of the full day conference on Design Entrepreneurs entitled “Innovate.” Susan Szenasy, Metropolis Editor and Chief, and Bruce Brigham, President of the American Society of Interior Designers, took on the hosting duties.

The first speaker was James Ludwig, the head of global design at Steelcase, the pioneering green furniture manufacturer and majority owner of IDEO. Speaking rapidfire, the clearly enthusiastic Ludwig explained how his planned three year stint at Steelcase grew into a ten year residency. Accompanied by beautifully designed slides that would make a typesetter proud, Ludwig began by talking about “the language of design,” but rapidly morphed into a discussion of usage and production. He drew an illuminating continuum of architectural scale versus user scale showing how large and lasting products needed to be timeless, but small user-scale products could afford to be both timely and personal. From there he discussed Steelcase’s design philosophy (smart, desirable, and viable). As a sign of the times, he listed sustainability under the “desirable” category rather than the more obvious smart or viable, but perhaps that befits a company that received the first LEED Certification for a manufacturing plant. After that framework he broke headlong into several illuminating case studies very rich in both process and slides.

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