Talent Pool

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Cormier's Le Havre installation

Ponce de Leon and Tehrani's Helios House

2007 Masters of Design

• All About Yves
• Image: Design That Makes a Difference
• The Seven Axioms of Yves
• Paola the Populist
• Paola's Picks: A Few of MoMA's Recent Arrivals
• Reinventing the Reel
• Starck Raving
• Image: Starck-itectural Details
• Streamlining HP
• Image: Hot Buttons
• Image: The Evolution of a Printer
• Image: Blackbird--Will it Fly?
• Talent Pool
• Elements of Design: Light
• Elements of Design: Sound
• Elements of Design: Matter
• The Green Standard?
• Point Spread
• Slideshow: 2007 Masters of Design
• Slideshow: 2007 Designer Approved
• Slideshow: 2007 Widgets We Love
• Video: Yves Behar on Furniture Design
• Video: Designing for Your Best Friend
• Video: R/GA Interactive Advertising

Jason Schulte
San Francisco

He has won plenty of awards for graphic design, but Jason Schulte prefers to think of his seven-member team at Office as "creative problem solvers, idea generators, and storytellers." While some clients come calling for help with graphics, Schulte almost always takes a step back to look at the larger brand. His peers may be surprised that such a tiny firm is working for big guns like Coca-Cola, Target, and Adidas (Office did marketing for the Tour360 II golf shoe), but he says Office's size keeps ideas from getting watered down. "When people see the work, they need to be amazed or have a smile on their face. I would almost rather have them hate it and react instead of feeling nothing."
Clients: Adidas Golf, Coca-Cola, Target

Claude Cormier
Montreal

Claude Cormier is a landscape architect who is as likely to work with fuchsia fiberglass tree trunks and silk flowers as with live greenery. For the 2006 Art Biennale in Le Havre, France, he hung multicolored plastic balls like alien grapes in a vine-covered gazebo. "It's artificial but not fake," he says. "It's actually more true than an imported tree that tries to look natural." Other projects include a design studio for Nissan, a convention center in Montreal, and a courtyard for the Four Seasons hotel in Toronto. There's nothing wrong with being green, Cormier says, but that doesn't mean people should give up on pink, orange, and blue.
Clients: Cirque du Soleil, City of Toronto, Nissan

Sheila Kennedy & Frano Violich
Boston

"An existing material has many hidden uses," says architect Sheila Kennedy, "and the role of an architect or designer is to see into that material and to misuse it, if you will, for many other purposes." That kind of thinking led Kennedy and partner Frano Violich to launch a materials-research division. MATx has developed textiles that release light and harvest energy from the sun. Their paradigm-breaking product is the Portable Light, a flexible mat with integrated thin-film photovoltaic panels and LEDs with no breakable glass parts. Prototypes are being tested in Mexico. Kennedy and Violich are now building a ferry terminal in Manhattan that will have a high-performance, energy-harvesting textile roof.
Clients: DuPont, Harvard University, Herman Miller

Jonathan Harris
Brooklyn, New York

On wefeelfine.org, a universe of colored dots explodes across the screen. Clicking on a dot reveals a sentiment that Jonathan Harris has pulled from the Net zeitgeist. "I make projects that use the Internet as a means of studying and understanding the human world," Harris says. "Those projects end up being one part computer science, one part anthropology, and one part visual art." In 2006, Yahoo hired Harris to create a digital time capsule to be sealed until 2020. With a project on the way for MoMA in 2008 (a study of online dating), he will soon be sharing his way of seeing the online world with many more of us.
Clients: Seed magazine, Sputnik Observatory, Yahoo

Laura Guido-Clark
Berkeley, California

Laura Guido-Clark designs the skins of consumer goods--the finishing materials, colors, and textures--but her interest in product development goes much deeper. "If I don't understand the heart of a product, I could never express it," she says. Generally she consults with her clients from the very beginning of the development process. Whether it's bedding for Design Within Reach or an across-the-board change of finish options for Steelcase, she aims to elicit a visceral response from consumers: "You should just know you want it."
Clients: Hewlett-Packard, Mattel, Oral-B, Samsung, Steelcase

Manuel Saez
New York

Humanscale Design Studio hired Manuel Saez in 2001 to manage the freelancers who designed the company's office furniture, but he promptly built an award-winning in-house design team. Humanscale's latest product is the Switch Mouse, an ergonomic mouse with a tilted base to allow for a neutral arm position and adjustable palm support. The prototype Daybed workstation was introduced at this year's International Contemporary Furniture Fair. In May, the studio announced that it would offer design services to outside companies; office products company Fellowes has signed on.
Client: Humanscale