Photography courtesy Elizabeth Lamark, RIT ETC

Last week we were invited to participate in the jury for the Rochester Institute of Technology's inaugural Metaproject, a student competition and an industry partnership which places student output into a global venue.

Metaproject is a new initiative at RIT. In keeping with the Design is One philosophy espoused by the Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Metaproject aims to encourage students to produce design that is "semantically correct, syntactically correct, and pragmatically understandable, but also visually powerful, intellectually elegant and timeless".

Congratulations to Dan Fritz, the competition winner of this year's Metaproject01 presentation. His chair will be unveiled this May at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York.

Second place was awarded to Colleen MacKenzie.

Runners up were; Andy Clark, Dan Kestler, Tim Kuo and Francesca Pezze.

A $1,000 scholarship is awarded to the winning student. The winning project, along with 5 runners up will be displayed at the 2011 ICFF in New York City during design week

In the fall of 2010 twenty Industrial Design Seniors from the School of Design in CIAS were given the task of creating seating prototypes that celebrate the richness of Wilsonart International's laminate surfacing materials. Each student was required to select and research a specific object typology and a specific cultural / situational context and respond with an inventive proposal that merged their chosen typology with a utilitarian service in context. The students were required to surface the objects in Wilsonart laminate, making use of its time-tested qualities, giving their objects the qualities of a modern heirloom. The palate was limited to the use of the classic black, white and red laminate colors in order to focus attention to design efficacy.

Wilsonart further required the objects to have the following qualities: - The product must be well crafted and bear substantial weight. - The product must be recognizable as a seating device. The product must function as a seating device. - The product must incorporate an image of the Wilsonart laminate sample chip.

Jurors who selected the winner and finalists at the Center for Student Innovation at R.I.T. were:

The course was taught by Associate Professor Josh Owen and assisted by graduate student Jae Ho Seo.