This week, I had a most pleasant Zoom meeting. It was an interview with Colin Nourie, the founder and main man at Collective Ten, an industrial design studio located in Cincinnati, Ohio.
After graduating from Ohio State with a degree in industrial design, Mr. Nourie landed a job in Chicago with an industrial design firm doing work primarily outside our industry. In an early indication that the kid had talent, one of his assignments was the design of a bottle for Owens Galderma facial soap, Cetaphil. His design is still being used after 27 years by the brand – a testament to design effectiveness.

Mr. Nourie has designed furniture, products and environments for some of our industry’s best-known global brands – Steelcase, Herman Miller and Geiger, as well “industrial design” products for global brands such as Proctor & Gamble and Abercrombie and Fitch, and even some retail furniture for Staples.
Archideas is a Chicago based multidisciplinary architectural practice with both industrial and interior designers on staff. Landing a job there several years after graduating would be for Mr. Nourie, the launch pad that great careers often need.
“I started working with Steelcase in 1995 or ’96 when Archideas was hired to assist with the development of Pathways,” said Nourie. “As a multidisciplinary practice Steelcase thought we were a good fit to work with them on the research and development of Pathways applications and portfolio, given its scale and complexity.
“So, unlike many architects and industrial designers who design furniture, I didn’t start out designing a one-off object like a chair or a table, hoping to find a company that might produce it. My first experience in furniture design was working for Steelcase on Pathways, a hugely complex system, and I was extremely lucky because unlike those young designers starting from the bottom and working their way up, I was working on huge projects with big teams and big budgets – with engineers who had worked on the space shuttle and people who had been in material science for 30 years. The training I gained and the relationships I made during those years are fantastic.

“For a variety of reasons, I left Archideas and went out on my own in 2002. I moved back to Cincinnati where I had grown up, and started my own firm. I continued to work with Steelcase as a consultant but also did some outside work for others.
“I designed some home office products for Staples and made a few other forays into merchandising retail, which is a different animal altogether.
“After the Pathways launch, I was involved with the entirety of the design and development of Post and Beam, and I worked on what became almost a re-design of Steelcase Elective Elements. It comprises free-standing components equally at home in private offices or open plan. We wanted to address the growing level of collaboration and interpersonal interactions we were seeing among companies trying to increase innovation. People were emerging from cubicles and private workspaces, and we designed Elective Elements to support the move; it has been very successful.”

“Over the years Herman Miller had contacted me a few times to work with them, but I had always been working with Steelcase when they called, so I couldn’t do it. I don’t know how a designer can with work with two companies at the same time that are competitive with one another; I would not do it! But after we’d finished Elective Elements, they called a few years later and said they wanted me to work with the team developing Canvas. This was in January, and they wanted to launch at NeoCon in June so the crunch was on.
“Subsequently, I worked with Geiger on its very first open plan system. Catalyst is a furniture-based system that spans application from private offices to open plan and earned Geiger its first Neocon Gold for casegoods. I think it succeeds really well in bridging the aesthetics and refinement of materials we normally associate with the private office with the reality that more and more professionals were moving into open plan scenarios.

“I was quite surprised when Herman Miller asked me to design a new casework program for Healthcare. I told them I didn’t know anything about healthcare, but they persisted and I designed Mora – a modular storage system that is flexible with a contemporary visual – and based on Herman Miller’s productive capability, well-priced compared to the custom casegoods often specified for the Healthcare environment.
“Not all my experience is with big companies in the office furniture industry like Steelcase and Herman Miller. In the last several years I’ve been working with many smaller companies in North America and Europe.

“It seems like a lot of the projects I’ve worked on recently have been the firsts for the company. Catalyst was the first open plan system at Geiger, and I’m currently working on a fully upholstered outdoor lounge collection that is a first for that company.”
“It’s different from working with a big company. My role seems to take on more aspects of creative direction for the whole company. But it’s not like I come in and dictate a process; it happens organically as work on a project moves along and we’re discussing, for example, aspects of how the new product will fit into their ongoing business. Then, they decide that the conclusions we’ve come to will be the future direction of the company. They say, ‘This is where we’re going in the future,’ and I find that really rewarding.”

the collection comprises a poolside chaise and side table. For Danao Living. Launched 2019
I asked Colin about the size and location of his studio. He said, “I intentionally keep it small. I currently have few associates, and that’s about as big as I want to get. I love designing, and no matter what you intend, as you get bigger you have other things to manage that interfere with the creative part of industrial design.

“We will soon be moving into a new studio space in the historic Over-The-Rhine neighborhood of downtown Cincinnati. We’d be in it already, but for COVID-19 delays with the construction. Our business has been good and other than the difficulty of not being able to travel and pretty constant Zoom meetings, we fortunately haven’t suffered significantly from the slowdown in economic activity.”
