2023 Design Excellence Award Preview: Stephen Burks
Stephen Burks pictured with The Ancestors Prototype, a new work from his Shelter In Place Project. Photo by Caroline Tompkins
Polymath designer Stephen Burks (b. 1969) will be the next recipient of the Collab Design Excellence Award. Trained in industrial design at the Illinois Institute of Technology and architecture at Columbia University, he is now widely known and respected as a designer of products that unite artisanal traditions from around the world with the sphere of industrial manufacturing.
Burks is also a fierce advocate for the importance of craft and design education, bringing together the worlds of practice and pedagogy in inventive ways. He has served as a Critic in the Masters of Design Engineering program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, an Expert-In-Residence at the Harvard Innovation Lab, a visiting professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, and leader of a multi-year collaboration with Berea Craft College. His previous honors include a 2015 National Design Award and a 2019 Harvard Loeb Fellowship.
With his stated ambition of “returning the hand to industry,” Burks aims for a respectful pluralism in his work, combining multiple cultural perspectives in a globetrotting exploration of form, material, and making. From designs for luxury brands to consulting for nonprofits like Aid to Artisans and the Nature Conservancy, Burks’s practice covers a broad social range and plumbs the possibilities of what “design” can be—and who can participate in it.
Collab and Burks previously partnered in 2016 with a series of programs for the annual DesignPhiladelphia festival. The designer mounted a small display of recent work at a local showroom, gave a well-attended public lecture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and ran a workshop for students at the Charter High School for Architecture and Design. Out of these collaborations, the museum acquired several works for its permanent collection, including Burks’s “Traveler” indoor armchair (the first commissioned design by any American designer from Paris-based furniture maker Roche Bobois), a stool made by German firm Dedon in a partnership with master weavers in the Philippines, and a novel silicone and mosaic glass tile bowl produced Mandela Mosaics in Cape Town, South Africa as part of the Cappellini Love collection.
In 2023, these acquisitions will be complemented by a larger assemblage of work in the Design Excellence Award’s accompanying exhibition at the PMA. Showcasing the breadth of Burks’s creativity and his expansive vision for the design profession, the objects on view will range from mass-produced designs to unique craft works. New speculative works will further probe makers’ roles and responsibilities in a post-pandemic world. In many of these recent experiments, Burks draws explicitly on African American history and culture, arguing for an understanding of design and craft as sustaining forces of community—not just means to formal or commercial ends.
