May 26, 2011

Announcing the Winners of the 2011 Umbra/Pratt Design Competition

The 7th Annual Umbra | Pratt Design Competition recently took place in New York City at the Manhattan Center during the Pratt Show, where Umbra unveiled this year’s winning designs and introduced the Pratt student designers. This year’s esteemed judges included Surface Magazine’s editor-in-chief Dan Rubinstein; Harry Allen, founder and president of Harry Allen Design and a Pratt Alumnus; Apartment Therapy co-founder and CEO, Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, and Debera Johnson, Pratt’s academic director of sustainability. Umbra’s director of design Matt Carr once again led the competition, which was coordinated by Pratt faculty members Noah King and Scott Lundberg under the direction of the new Chair of Pratt’s Industrial Design department, Steve Diskin.

The students whose winning designs are determined by the Umbra design team to be eligible for production and meet Umbra’s criteria of quality and affordability, will be given the opportunity to work with Umbra’s team to create a prototype. If a design is manufactured, it will appear in Umbra’s catalog and earn royalties for the student designer and Pratt Institute. Talk Bulletin Board by Carolina Kim, the 1st Prize Winner in 2008, the CONCEAL Shelf and WISHBONE Soap Dish –both winners of the 1st Umbra | Pratt Design Competition –are all among Umbra’s top-selling products. In keeping with Umbra’s commitment to Pratt, all packaging, catalog and online images for products designed by winners of the Umbra | Pratt Design Competition will include the fact that a percentage of the profits of the design benefits Pratt Institute’s Industrial Design program.

“The annual competition sponsored by Umbra provides an invaluable educational experience for Pratt’s industrial design students to develop their skills as designers, to work with a distinguished client, and to see the possibility of their designs going into production,” said Concetta Stewart, dean of Pratt’s School of Art and Design. “We appreciate that Umbra has afforded our students this great opportunity for seven years. We look forward to continuing this partnership in the future,” she added.

ABOUT UMBRA

Umbra is the worldwide leader in innovative, modern, casual and affordable design for the home. The company’s products are available at over 35,000 retailers in more than 118 countries. Umbra’s award winning design team—30 men and women from all over the world—creates products for every room. Design remains the heart and soul of the company, whose global operations now house over 750 people. Begun in 1979, when boyhood friends Paul Rowan and Les Mandelbaum joined forces to create exciting, everyday products that would alter the overall aesthetic of a home, Umbra today has offices in the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, China and Europe and an award-winning Concept Store, which opened in Toronto in 2007. Marking over 30 years of groundbreaking ideas, unparalleled success and eye for creativity, co-founders Mandelbaum and Rowan were recently inducted into the Marketing Hall of Legends in Toronto. “Not only have their brands and teams weathered the recession, but they have been able to evolve through the years to build campaigns that now define our industry,” said Jim Warrington and Stéfan Danis, Co-Chairs, Marketing Hall of Legends.

ABOUT PRATT INSTITUTE

Globally recognized for its distinguished academic reputation, Pratt Institute is one of the most prestigious independent specialized colleges in the United States. Founded in 1887, Pratt offers undergraduate and graduate degree programs to 4,700 students from around the world in architecture, art and design, information and library science, and liberal arts and sciences. Pratt’s programs are consistently ranked among the best in the country, and its faculty and alumni include the most renowned artists, designers, and scholars in their fields. Its interdisciplinary curriculum promotes collaborative and creative strategies for design thinking and provides students with unparalleled training facilities. Pratt’s inspirational campus in the beautiful Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn and in Manhattan on West 14th Street places it in one of the world’s multicultural epicenters for arts, culture, design, and business and provides its students an exceptional learning and working environment that extends beyond its campus.