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.
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