Product Design senior creates furniture line for Chicago firm
MIAD’s product design major was a good fit for Samantha Shappell’s longtime love of interior design and furniture.
For the MIAD Senior Exhibition, Samantha designed a four-piece furniture line for Third Coast Interiors, a Chicago-based interior architecture and design firm. The firm recently was formed from a merger of a Chicago interior design studio with an architecture firm owned by an architect from Mexico. The furniture line celebrates the company’s rebranding and the intersectionality of Mexican and Scandinavian cultures and its location in Chicago.
This Senior Exhibition project was the first time Samantha had built furniture. She designed and built:
- a lounge chair featuring custom upholstery.
- a side table, featuring a concrete tabletop embedded with black and white mirror pieces.
- a coffee table featuring a concrete top and woven cord shelf.
- a concrete terracotta planter.
Samantha received a MIAD Alumni Thesis Scholarship Award for her project. “A lot of the materials were really expensive to source. The scholarship helped offset the cost of material exploration, which is very important in furniture design,” Samantha said.
Samantha was hired full-time by Third Coast Interiors and plans to continue to develop the furniture line further for the company.
Samantha’s project is currently on view in the virtual MIAD Senior Exhibition at seniorexhibition.miad.edu. The MIAD Senior Exhibition is generously sponsored by BMO Harris Bank.
News
Penfield Poster 2024 winners announced
Continuing a long-standing collaboration between advertising agency Cramer-Krasselt and the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD), juniors in Illustration IV designed posters for the Annual Croquet Ball fundraiser at the Penfield Children’s Center.
Milwaukee Ballet sponsor features work by Illustration senior
Working through the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design’s (MIAD) Lubar Innovation Center, Illustration senior Kayla VanProoyen was hired to produce an ad highlighting the Milwaukee Ballet’s presenting sponsor, the Herzfeld Foundation.
Löwe: Senior Exhibition 2024
“Löwe,” Zach Scharrer’s ’24 (Product Design) senior exhibition project at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD), is a bespoke adaptive formalwear line designed in collaboration with employees at Independence First.
Forgotten Nation: Senior Exhibition 2024
“Forgotten Nation,” Tanesha Spencer’s ’24 (Communication Design) senior exhibition project at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD), is a guerilla marketing campaign intended to bring awareness to the 5,712 missing and murdered Indigenous women in the United States.
MIAD celebrates one-year anniversary of offsite gallery
The Gallery at The Ave, the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design’s (MIAD) first offsite gallery, celebrated its one-year anniversary at the opening reception of its newest show, “Culture Starters: Emerging from Quarantine.”