Last winter Bruce Tharp and Stephanie Munson, the husband-and-wife design team known as Materious, entered their latest creation, the Cubby, in Design Within Reach’s second annual Modern + Design + Function: Chicago Furniture Now competition. A combination coat hook and storage nook, the deceptively simple design–a slightly upturned hollow cylinder–beat out 183 other entries to win Best in Show. The award got the attention of design-porn blogs like Inhabitat and Stylehive, and over the spring the couple was inundated with e-mails from people as far away as Japan asking where they could buy one. Not too bad for something Munson says started out as a “napkin sketch over a burrito,” and which they’d never even planned on selling.
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Both Munson, 33, and Tharp, 38, studied engineering as undergraduates, and both had the same experience–it wasn’t quite what they were looking for. “You’re cranking out ‘What’s the gear ratio? What’s the bending ratio?’ on this stuff,” Tharp says. “But it’s really disconnected from the human who may actually be working with it.” Munson took a class on industrial design at the University of Michigan and loved it, “but it was my senior year,” she says. “I thought, I’ll just get a job and maybe it’ll go away.” After graduating she moved to Detroit and worked for Ford for two and a half years, calculating the placement of interior features in various vehicles. She left to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, where she earned a master’s in industrial design, then landed the job at UIC four years ago.
For his dissertation Tharp studied the Amish in Indiana–not the most mainstream group of consumers to observe, but that’s exactly what sparked his interest. He says the question for the Amish wasn’t how to eliminate consumption, but how to consume in a way that made sense. “In the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy a Coke bottle becomes this social object,” he says. “We see that over and over again when modernity intrudes into pristine cultures–they love this stuff. It’s not that it’s bad.” Working with a buggy maker, Tharp saw firsthand how technology was incorporated in acceptable ways–using solar panels to power government-mandated flashing lights, for instance, and switching from wooden to fiberglass wheels, which last longer and require less maintenance. “Their culture is full of compromises they have to make,” he says. “But as long as they can find a distinction between their way and our way, they’re OK with some changes.”
“We’ve got mounds of projects,” Tharp says. “Inevitably we won’t do all of them.” Of those that do come to fruition, they say, probably only a few will ever be available commercially. (The Cubby is available at Orange Skin in River North, where it sells for $90; there’s a possibility it will be mass-produced.) It’s the pleasure the couple gets from the process of design that makes their work worthwhile. “That’s what’s really great about our positions,” Tharp says. “We don’t have to make a living.”
