About Us
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 Inc. 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. 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 panelists in events such as impersonating Tobias Wong at the Core77/New York Art Directors Club discussion on ‘Design Wit and the Creative Act’, conversing with Donald Albrecht in the ‘Dialogues with Design Legends’ series at the 92nd Street Y NY, or presenting at ‘Get It Louder’ in Shanghai China. The New School is an ideal platform to cultivate critical inquiry into industrial design, exp