The IED network, an international School of Design informed by a rich Italian cultural heritage since 1966, educates in multiple creative fields such as Design, Fashion, Communications and Business Management, Arts and Restoration, and Visual Arts, and spans over Italy, Spain, and Brazil. This past month the organization made an impression on the U.S. design network, as two renowned Alumni attended the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), held at the Jacob K. Javitz Center in New York City. The design fair took place from May 21-23, 2023, and each student represented their own booth in the WantedDesign section.
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In 2022, WantedDesign launched the Schools Showcase to provide blossoming creators with the chance to present their best work to audiences and receive valuable feedback from professionals.
Maintaining the inventive and eco-friendly teaching methods of IED, each award-winning Alumni showcased projects with a focus on biomaterial application.
Ines Balbas brought forth a lighting collection called Sêlo developed as the final project of her Undergraduate Course in Madrid, while another featured Alumni, Matteo Congiu presented a curated selection of cork-based products as a part of the Launchpad section, a jury-selected group of emerging designers.
Moreover a selection of IED students have been featured in the WantedDesign Online exhibition, and their work employs innovative solutions, featuring natural resources such as eggshells, artichoke leaves, kombucha and beeswax. Among these students, one has even secured a Conscious Design Award for Sustainable Solution, with the project “Color Kartel” by Flavia Carneade.
Balbas’ award-winning light fixtures were first conceptualized when she set out on a pursuit to answer the question: “How can we transform waste into desirable products?” She uses food waste to create practical, everyday objects — giving a brand new life to what would be seen as trash by most. Eggshells are used as the fixture’s base material; they are ground to a powder and then mixed with a natural, biodegradable binder to hold their shape. The result is one-of-a-kind lighting made with the environment in mind: Sêlo.
Congiu garnered attention when he began creating cork-based products, such as large-scale furniture pieces, including a bedframe, BISU. As sustainability and ingenuity are two top priorities for Congiu when designing, he decided to work with cork since it is a recyclable and biodegradable material and it even improves the quality of sleep due to its antistatic qualities.
“[The] IED Projects exhibited here at New York WantedDesign well reflect the identity of our school which finds its roots in asking questions before trying to find solutions. [We] teach students how to concretely do things by projecting with the aim to make products and objects with not only an aesthetic purpose,” says IED Group’s Dean Riccardo Balbo. As some of IED’s most revered Alumni include Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino and Maria Grazia Chiuri of Dior, together with worldwide renowned creative designers such as Gabriele Chiave and Jaime Hayon, it is evident that IED has not only ushered in a new mindset when it comes to the realm of design, but the institution continues to develop the industry in a positive way by welcoming a new generation of innovators year after year.
To learn more about the Instituto Europeo di Design, visit ied.edu.
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