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The annual Salone Internazionale del Mobile (International Furniture Fair) in Milan, Italy is one of the most important design trade events in the world. Each year, hundreds of thousands of design professionals and enthusiasts flock to the city — known worldwide as a hotbed of contemporary design — to get a sneak preview of the latest offerings from 1,000-plus leading furniture makers. For many attendees, though, the real excitement of the fair lies just outside the highly commercial spotlight of the main event, in off-site exhibitions that draw attention to the more experimental work of design students and other international up-and-comers.

RISD’s Department of Furniture Design has been selected as one of a handful of entities to present work in That’s Design!, an exhibition that runs concurrently with the 2008 Salone (April 16-21) and showcases the talent currently percolating in the most important design schools worldwide. RISD is in good company, joining a roster that includes Milan’s renowned Domus Academy and institutions in Hong Kong, Sweden, Germany, New Zealand and other countries. In 2007, the inaugural year of That’s Design!, more than 80,000 visitors came to glimpse the future in the form of furnishings, graphics, products, communications and services devised by some of today’s sharpest young design minds.

For RISD’s entry in the 2008 event, Assistant Professor Lothar Windels BID ’96 asked students in a Furniture Design studio to consider the subject of time — “or rather, the lack of time,” he explains. In the face of information and activity overload, how can designers respond with solutions that “question our current lifestyle or help to slow things down?” In addition to coming up with clever solutions to this conceptual challenge, each student was required to produce drawings, models and a well-crafted prototype suitable for exhibition. Students also paid close attention to the feasibility of manufacturing their products beyond the prototype stage.

As the designers created their pieces through an intensive process of proposals, critiques and revisions, Windels and Department Head John Dunnigan MFA ’80 ID selected 12 designs by 12 students to be presented in Milan. For the final component of their assignment, students will travel to Italy in April to install the exhibition and discuss their work with the many press representatives who attend Salone and its accompanying events. The value of this type of exposure is “extraordinary,” Dunnigan says. “The opportunity to exhibit their work in an international context is a significant educational experience,” as well as “great preparation for the professional world of furniture design.”

The design solutions that make up the RISD exhibition On Time are witty and thoughtful. Made for a mix of practical and contemplative functions, they offer the promise of relief from the relentless pace of life — at least for as long as the viewer takes to consider them. For instance, Quiet, a clock-driven music box by Nora Rabins MFA ’09 FD, plays a series of notes every five minutes in a random cycle that “momentarily de-contextualizes time,” she explains. Clepsydra by Phillip Mann MFA ’09 FD turns a quick glass of water into a 40-minute exercise in patience, as the user waits for water to drip slowly through a funnel. And for his Hydroscopic Calendar, George Dubinsky ’08 FD found a way to mark time by measuring the natural expansion and contraction of wood that occurs with change in the seasons. Like many of the projects featured in On Time, the elegant device encourages the user to rediscover the easily forgotten pleasures of subtlety and slowness.

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