RAMA CHORPASH born 1969 Stanford California, USA

For over a decade and a half, Rama Chorpash’s creative-practice has focused on intersections between people and everyday things. Designs have traversed an array of project types, from an innovative office furniture system with a blue-chip company such as Herman Miller to a celebratory roller-skate disco with avaf and the Public Art Fund in Central Park. While his spectrum of work is wide, embedded in each initiative is an exploration of social use and the interactions they cause. As an generalist industrial designer, developing benchmark products challenges him to express not only what role he plays in creating the useful and sublime, but in articulating complex frameworks of practice.

He is interested to expand the notion of product to include intentional and unexpected by-products. Principal to advancing human-centered design are concerns of aesthetics, ergonomics, narrative, and cultural relevance. Shadowing this product development are ostensibly contradictory issues such as manufacturing and sustainability, materialism and equity, consumerism and need, globalism and localism. Embracing complexity, his products progressively help form our contemporary condition and inform that which he brings to academia.

While engaged in his creative-practice, he is an Associate Professor and the Director of Product Design at Parsons The New School for Design, School of Constructed Environments. As an academic leader, educator, and scholar, Rama’s design discourse extends to activities such as organizing symposia, judging design reviews, and acting as moderator or panelist in events such as impersonating Tobias Wong at the Core77/Art Directors Club discussion on Design Wit and the Creative Act, conversing with Donald Albrecht in the Dialogues with Design Legends series at the NY 92nd Street Y, or presenting at Get It Louder in Shanghai China. The New School is an ideal platform to cultivate critical inquiry into industrial design, exploring what it is, what it could be, and how it might tangibly posit positive change in an uncertain world.

Rama has had a studio in São Paulo Brazil focusing on Latin American product development. He has been a Senior Project Manager/Designer with ECCO Design New York, as well as helped establish the Swatch Lab New York, where he designed for many collections and participated in the design of the Centennial Olympic Pavilion.

Rama’s design has been exhibited coast to coast from the Museum of Modern Art to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and internationally from Portugal’s Bienal da Prata to Switzerland’s Design Miami/Basel Art Fair. He has been featured in The New York Times Style Magazine as well as his work in books and other publications such as: 1,000 Product Designs, Metropolis Magazine, I.D. The International Design Magazine’s Annual Design Review, IDEA/Business Week Good Design Awards, International Design Yearbook, The San Francisco Chronicle, Surface Magazine, Art and Auction, Philips de Pury and Company, Vogue Brazil, New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The Oprah Magazine, Architectural Record, Mediabistro, Co.Design | Fast Company, and Discovery Tech TV ‘Invent This'.