DESIGN AWARENESS : 2005 EVENT : SPEAKER : Michael McCoy

2005 EVENT : SPEAKER : Michael McCoy

"The Cranbrook Connection: Eames, Saarinen, Knoll, Bertoia and Beyond."

Michael McCoy, designer for Knoll and director of the furniture design program at Cranbrook for 24 years looks inside the culture at Cranbrook that produced many of the American mid-Century modern furniture classics of Eames, Saarinen, Knoll and Bertoia and now includes HumanScale designer Niels Diffrient, architect Daniel Libeskind, Herman Miller designer Eric Chan of ECCO and Knoll designer Hani Rashid of Asymptote among others.

About Michael McCoy:

Michael McCoy is a principal in McCoy & McCoy Inc. in Colorado and Fahnstrom/McCoy Design Consultants in Chicago and Co-Director of Post-Professional Education at RMCAD in Denver.

He was Co-chair of the Design Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art for 23 years, Distinguished Visiting Professor at The Royal College of Art in London from 1994-1996 and on the faculty of IIT¹s Institute of Design in Chicago from 1996-2003.

His interior, furniture and industrial design work includes the best-selling Bulldog Chair for Knoll, The Philips Electronic Office System, the office of the President of Formica Corporation, computer monitors for NEC in Japan, Details desk accessories for Steelcase and seating for Artifort in Europe. His work has received over 200 awards including the IDSA Gold Medal, the ID Magazine Best of Category, the IBD Award and The Interiors Magazine Best Office Design and has been exhibited at many museums around the world, including the National Design Museum in New York, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the British Design Museum.

His strategies for interpreting technology and information through design form have been widely published and he lectures internationally on the subject. He is the author of numerous papers on design and is Co-author of Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse published by Rizzoli.

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In recognition of his influence on design education he, with his wife Katherine, has received the American Center for Design Education Award, the Industrial Designers Society of America Education Award, and an honorary Doctorate from the Kansas City Art Institute. In 1994 they received the prestigious Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design given to 6 architects and designers annually.

He and Katherine are directors of High Ground Design Workshops which offers advanced design workshops to professionals at their mountain studio in Buena Vista, Colorado. www.highgrounddesign.com