Furniture Bank, CCAD students join forces
The true winners of a recent industrial-design competition at the Columbus College of Art & Design might be needy central Ohio families.
Working in four teams, about 40 CCAD students had three weeks to come up with improvements to the templated chairs and tables built by the Furniture Bank of Central Ohio, a nonprofit organization that annually donates furniture to several thousand underprivileged families.
Last week, the teams — all working with the particle board that the Furniture Bank uses — presented their finished products to Steve Votaw, president of the nonprofit. The distinct looks ranged from sleek mid-century to starkly contemporary.
The furniture of Team CNCKT (“Connect”), featuring a “Lego-inspired” interlocking system to allow for easy assembly, earned the top score from Votaw and three other judges — two Furniture Bank volunteers who oversee the furniture assembly and a representative from an area marketing company.
But Votaw emphasized his satisfaction with the efforts of all the teams.
“I just want to thank you for the creativity and the passion that you put into this,” he told the entire group after the judging. “You came up with some really amazing designs. It’s very, very impressive.”
The next step, Votaw said, is to study the ideas to see what the Furniture Bank staff can glean from the work, whether that involve tweaking an existing design, learning a more efficient or cost-effective way to build furniture, or adopting one of the new designs outright.
“You’ve given us a lot to think about,” he assured the students.
This year marked the third collaborative project between CCAD students and the Furniture Bank, but the previous two were more conceptual — with students examining the customer and donor experience one year and analyzing potential future markets the next.
This project was more ambitious.
Tapping the talents and creativity of CCAD students, Votaw said, makes perfect sense for the Furniture Bank.
“It has been a wonderful partnership,” he said. “They (CCAD officials) were looking for some potential real-world opportunities for students, a place where they could make a pretty substantial difference. And, for us, being a nonprofit means that, a lot of times, we can’t access that kind of creativity.”
The 2018 effort began with Votaw sharing with the students examples of the end table, the dining-room table and a chair that the Furniture Bank currently builds. Most of the group’s furniture is donated, but volunteers also build about 5,000 pieces a year.
After they inspected the models, students began brainstorming.
“We started with bluesky ideas that maybe were a little bit crazy,” said Harrison Gwin, a senior from Dalton, Ohio.
Then they honed the design, he said, mindful of the need for easy assembly and the limited space in recipients’ homes.
Several teams found ways to add storage features to their pieces, something the Furniture Bank items lack.
“We kind of used our own experience, living in studio apartments,” Gwin said.
The teams entered their designs into computers, and the Industrial Design Department’s “ShopBot” machine cut the furniture pieces out of 5-by-8-foot sheets of particle board.
Greg Thurn, the department chairman, said student grades would be partly based on how efficiently they used the material — the less waste, the better.
On assembly day, students — sprawled on the floor of the design studio — fastened bolts with cordless drills and inspected the pieces. When they finished, they sat in their chairs tentatively, testing the work.
There were no obvious disasters.
“Doing this made me realize I think I want to do something to help people,” said sophomore Katie Price, a Columbus resident who had been considering toy design as a profession.
“This kind of work is really interesting — it’s a lot more rewarding.”