Distinguished Design

The prompt sounds humble enough: Submit a design for a chair. Something aesthetically pleasing and practical for mass production. For the best entry, the Bienenstock Furniture Library will award a $5,000 scholarship.

Valente Zambrano, a third-year industrial design student at UH’s Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design, sized up the assignment and decided his design would impart a sense of peace. He drew on an unlikely inspiration — puffins, with their rounded beaks and bodies — as he sketched, sculpted, refined and eventually prototyped a plush, cushy armchair he named Lunda. It went on to take first prize in this year’s Bienenstock Furniture and Interior Design Competition.

“The junior year chair was the project I had been looking forward to since I entered the industrial design program,” Zambrano says. “I put everything I had into it. Working on it within the studio walls, day and night, to finish on time was one of the most exhausting — and fun — experiences I’ve ever had.”

Zambrano’s win was the second in as many years for Hines College students in the annual Bienenstock competition. In 2023, Ilse Mariana Anzures Puga won for a swirling wooden design that evoked a traditional Samoan fire dance. Additionally, Hines students Anna Bibikova and Michael L. Dillon won the competition in 2021 and 2018, respectively. The competition draws entries from accredited college design programs from around the country.

Hines College, which dates back to the 1945 founding of the UH College of Architecture, was recently ranked the No. 3 best value among U.S. architecture schools by College Factual. Its students are likewise stacking accolades. In design competitions, Hines’ brightest are proving themselves among some of the best young talent anywhere. They’re bringing the school’s integrated disciplines of architecture, interior architecture, environmental design and industrial design to bear on the world design stage with impressive results.

Consider also the 2023 Global Footwear Awards. There, Toluwalase Adedipe, a recent industrial design graduate, entered his senior design project and won in the student sports performance category with a basketball shoe he called Flyte.

In the color scheme, his green-on-black-on-white prototypes read a bit like a Boston Celtics alternative look. But for his structure and pattern, Adedipe gathered inspiration from the natural world. He aimed to mimic butterflies for lightness and geckos’ feet for traction. He researched dragonfly wings, looking at the changes in density and rigidity. He figured that a point guard slashing to the hoop isn’t so fundamentally different from a zipping insect.

“The challenge was creating a unique and functional design, particularly in footwear with predefined expectations,” Adedipe told the Houston Defender after his award. “A breakthrough came when a professor suggested imagining a shoe designed by nature, pushing me to think beyond conventional boundaries. This advice helped me create a unique, eye-catching design that merges aesthetics with functionality.”

Adedipe spent five months in the design process as he delved into the natural and industrial worlds. The prototypes incorporate 3D-printed thermoplastic polyurethane, silicone in the sole and warp-knit fabric uppers that Adedipe learned to sew in order to create.

Flyte also garnered an award at the 2024 FIT Sport Design Awards, one of three that Hines students nabbed in that competition.

Recent industrial design graduate Maha Alsagheer also won a FIT Sport Design Award, in the sport equipment design / mountaineering, climbing, hiking category, for a prosthetic foot called Klime built specifically for rock climbing. The prototype slots an aluminum “ankle” into a black carbon fiber “foot.” The springy blade slides into easily replaceable school-bus yellow silicone rubber soles meant to give the user a natural grip on rocky surfaces.

To make the prosthetic, Alsagheer collaborated with people who had lower-limb amputations. She told the college’s Dimension magazine that she hoped to develop the prototype further to make it practical and affordable for anyone who needs one. Winning the design award, she said, “pushes me to keep getting better and making things that improve people’s everyday lives.”

In the same category, Mary Leath, a second-year student, won an award for her Tarsus Chalk Bag, a magnetic-topped bag fashioned to allow rock climbers to chalk their hands without unnecessary futzing.

“I worked with my best friend over several months to develop the Tarsus Chalk Bag,” she said in a previous interview. “Through that process, we went through many failures and prototypes to get to the final design, which she still uses today.”

Leath made a removable, water-resistant chalk sock out of ski pants and nestled it into a vinyl cup capped with a magnetic lid that easily opens and automatically recloses, a decided improvement over the usual drawstring bags that climbers and boulderers rely on. Around the entire rig she wrapped a zippered nylon fabric shell that fits almost like an apron.

Like a sumptuous easy chair or a pair of lightweight kicks inspired by dragonflies, the bag elevates an ordinary object into a thing of functional elegance.