Design 50 2024: Introduction
Design 50 2024: Fashion/Beauty
Design 50 2024: Graphic Design
Design 50 2024: Planning/Community
Design 50 2024: Home/Interior
Design 50 2024: Architecture
Here are those who shape Chicago’s Industrial Design and Innovation.
Cody Norman and Tom Burtonwood
Happy Returns
At the intersection of art and technology, Happy Returns Studio is the brainchild of Cody Norman and Tom Burtonwood, artists, designers and educators at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. With over four decades of combined experience, they collaborate with clients on artistic and commercial projects, using their expertise in industrial robotics and recycled plastics. Their work spans multiple mediums, integrating cutting-edge technologies like industrial robotics and 3D printing to bridge the gap between handcrafted and industrially produced objects. Among their collaborations are projects with Marz Community Brewing, Norman Teague Design Studios, and artist and activist Jenny Kendler. Committed to sustainability, their project Redemptive Plastics, co-founded with alt_ Chicago, blends art, faith and community action, transforming discarded plastics into functional art and promoting sustainable practices and recycling within the community. The studio, named for the British birthday greeting “Many Happy Returns,” reflects the shared interests of its co-directors and embodies their focus on robotics, recycling and recreation. (Vasia Rigou)
Wava Carpenter
Anava Projects
“I generally have multiple projects going on at once,” says Wava Carpenter. “Currently, I’m wrapping up editing a book for dieDAS—Design Akademie Saaleck—with my longtime partner at Anava Projects, Berlin-based Anna Carnick. I’m also perennially involved with Design Miami to one degree or another. These days, I’m helping the team in preparing for the inaugural Design Miami.LA, which is followed by the Basel show. Additionally, I’m working on developing a new venture, the Design Miami Curatorial Lab, dedicated to curating public art, pop-up installations, and private collections for developers, brands and municipalities.” Carpenter has been busy curating design-focused cultural and commercial exhibitions, writing scholarly and popular texts, and producing lectures and events—all to uplift the global design community. She also collaborated with the Walker Art Center to develop a collectible design concept shop, Idea House 3, and curated a selection of objects created by Midwest-based designers, artists and makers. “As someone who has worked in the international design world for two-plus decades before moving to Chicago in 2022, I saw the Walker project as the perfect opportunity to shine a light on the region’s extraordinary talent. The Midwest as a creative hub still doesn’t get the attention it deserves.” The best part? “Like most working parents, time is a scarce resource,” she tells me. Yet she shows no signs of slowing down. (Vasia Rigou)
Sung Jang
SungJang
An associate professor and chair of Industrial Design at UIC, Sung Jang also co-founded Article, LLC., an industrial design studio, and has his own eponymous design studio, SungJang. He has worked with the brands Louis Vuitton, Guzzini and Roche Bobois. Sung says that navigating between design and art has been trickier than expected. “While art practice is an inward-focused activity where ‘I’ or ‘my experience’ is the primary factor of the narrative, design deals with external things like problems others face either as individuals or in a system, which takes a lot of effort to understand,” he says. “I work on a very wide range of projects—one day I am a painter, the next day I am working to solve logistic bottlenecks in instant noodle packaging. The amount of new things I am faced with at this stage of my career is sometimes daunting, but at least it’s never boring.” Sung says he has made a shift to a “naturalist position” which “aligns with the kind of poise and philosophy of traditional Korean artists and craftsmen.” (Mary Wisniewski)
