Order Reprints

GRAND RAPIDS — The greater West Michigan area has a reputation for having great and innovative companies that “want to use design” to succeed, said Patrick Whitney, dean of the Institute of Design and Steelcase Robert C. Pew professor at Illinois Institute of Technology. The region is recognized as a design center for furniture, but there’s a strong desire to spread design thinking outside of that sector, as evidenced by the many executives from West Michigan who’ve been through the ID program in Chicago.

  Order Reprints

GRAND RAPIDS — Many aspects of business are cyclical, and at times, executives find themselves returning to a company’s roots for answers and opportunities.

  Order Reprints

WEST MICHIGAN — Like many manufacturers across the region, Landscape Forms Inc. has tried over the past couple of years to identify how best to apply principles of sustainability within its operations. The Kalamazoo-based maker of landscape furnishings has little room for error.

  Order Reprints

HOLLAND — As soon as office furniture maker Haworth Inc. decided to build a new task chair, managers didn’t send off designers and engineers into their own silos. Instead, they created a war room and filled it with Haworth’s best designers, engineers and marketers and brought in outside materials expertise from trusted suppliers. Together, the team got down to the business of creating a new product.

  Order Reprints

GRAND RAPIDS — Diverse disciplines of design define sustainability in different ways. In the absence of a common definition or a similar framework around the concept, professionals can struggle to collaborate, when, in theory, they would have the most impact on the triple bottom line. But the creative types in West Michigan haven’t thrown up their hands in defeat just yet.

  Order Reprints

KALAMAZOO - Landscape Forms, North American’s largest designer and manufacturer of site furniture, has received another 2010 GOOD DESIGN Award from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies. This award joins a previous one from the same organizations presented earlier this year. The Green GOOD DESIGN Award was presented to Landscape Forms in October, 2010 for the same lighting products in the Metro40 Collection, Hi-Glo and Lo-Glo LED Lighting.

  Order Reprints

GRAND RAPIDS -  Steelcase Inc. announced today that three of its high-performance seating products were honored by the 2010 Spark Awards, an international design competition. node, a mobile, flexible chair that supports the way students learn today, received a Spark! Award - the highest honor in the competition. Collaborative seating products i2i and cobi earned gold and silver awards, respectively.