{"id":218740,"date":"2023-12-07T09:22:00","date_gmt":"2023-12-07T14:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interiordesign.net\/?post_type=id_news&p=218740"},"modified":"2023-12-19T15:08:27","modified_gmt":"2023-12-19T20:08:27","slug":"suzanne-tick-2023-interior-design-hall-of-fame-inductee","status":"publish","type":"id_news","link":"https:\/\/interiordesign.net\/designwire\/suzanne-tick-2023-interior-design-hall-of-fame-inductee\/","title":{"rendered":"Suzanne Tick: 2023 Interior Design Hall of Fame Inductee"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\"Matter,
Matter, 2008, a weaving of plastic, tissue paper, wire, cardboard tubes, and sheath-core vinyl. Photography courtesy of Suzanne Tick Inc.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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December 7, 2023<\/p>\n\n\n

Words: <\/span>Jen Renzi<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Suzanne Tick: 2023 Interior Design Hall of Fame Inductee<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Material innovator Suzanne Tick<\/a> has the future on speed dial. She embraced sustainability before most of us knew what the word meant, developed a CEU on the post-gender society before it even happened, experimented with 3D knitting before it was a thing, and imbued the woven surfaces that surround commercial interiors with characteristics of transparency, digitalism, and illumination before we realized we needed them. Then there\u2019s the fact that her New York\u2013based textile brand, Luum, launched its Fabric of Space collection, with patterns based on star trails and the expanding universe, the very day the James Webb Space Telescope images of same were publicly released. \u201cEveryone thought we were in cahoots with NASA!\u201d she jokes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No, Tick is not conspiring with the government\u2019s space-research arm, but she has<\/em> collaborated with a galaxy of big-name brands during her four-decade career: Tarkett, Tandus Centiva, and 3form are just a few for which she\u2019s conceived upholstery and drapery fabrics, high-performance carpeting and broadloom, and cement-tile and LVT flooring. She has enjoyed a longstanding partnership with Skyline Design<\/a>, for which she conceives etched panels that bring textile softness to hard glass, and maintains an active fine-art practice realizing tapestries, custom textiles, and experimental handweavings for such clients as the Gates Foundation and BlackRock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Suzanne Tick on Her Futuristic Approach to Design<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Earlier in her professional life, Tick served as in-house design lead for Knoll Textiles<\/a>, Unika Vaev, and Brickel Associates, but she prefers the outsider perspective and risk-taking opportunities inherent to being an independent entrepreneur, her first taste of which was in 1995, when she colaunched Tuva Looms. \u201cI need the autonomy\u201d\u2014a freedom she enjoys at the helm of her eponymous studio and the decade-old Luum, which recently pioneered the contract industry\u2019s first multipurpose fabrics made entirely of postconsumer-recycled biodegradable polyester, plus other designs made from discarded garment waste.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having ownership over product and process is Tick\u2019s recipe for innovation\u2014and her career driver from day one. In the early \u201980\u2019s, after earning textile-design degrees from the University of Iowa and the Fashion Institute of Technology, she talked her way into a job working for modernist fabric master Boris Kroll\u2014\u201cnot because of my portfolio, mind you, but rather my outgoing personality and loquaciousness.\u201d Tick was quickly disillusioned with the siloed production process she encountered, where design was divorced from the technical side. After months of laboring over her first pattern, she arrived one morning to discover it gone from her desk. \u201cI thought, Wait, I don\u2019t get to see what happens to the design next? I can\u2019t live like that!<\/em> I wanted to see the entire process so I could create the best fabrics.\u201d Kroll ultimately moved her from the studio team to his assistant, a role that exposed her to what transpired at the mill and beyond. \u201cI learned everything\u2014from how to buy the fiber to how the patterns worked.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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\"The
The weaver, textile designer, and founder\/CEO of Suzanne Tick Inc. and Luum. Photography by Martin Crook. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Get Ready for 2024: See what\u2019s next for <\/em>Interior Design\u2018s Hall of Fame event with a peek at what we\u2019re planning for the 40th annual gala. Discover Hall of Fame details<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For Tick, Sustainability is Top of Mind<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Her approach has always been holistic and sustainable, ranging from development of raw material and structures to revamping of manufacturing methods. At Luum<\/a>, for instance, \u201cThe majority of what we do is to develop new fibers and invent constructions. That\u2019s why our fabrics feel different.\u201d Her handweavings also utilize novel materials\u2014salvaged objects like dry-cleaning hangers. For a financial company commission, she\u2019s currently warp-and-wefting two centuries\u2019 worth of shredded ledgers; for a paint brand, she\u2019s weaving cut-up sample discards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tick, a self-described \u201cfourth-generation recycler,\u201d comes about her salvage mindset honestly. Business at her dad\u2019s scrap-metal yard was the main dinner table topic growing up. At the same time, her family was \u201cvery cultured and creative\u201d\u2014her mother was a graphic and set designer\u2014and tapped into Eastern philosophy. \u201cMy dad had all the books: the Bhagavad Gita, a library of Ram Dass.\u201d Also stacked on those shelves were her mom\u2019s interiors magazines. Tick owes a lot to those glossies, which helped her home in on a vocational track when, late in her college tenure as a printmaker experimenting with etching fiber textures onto copper, she set about figuring out what the heck to do after graduation. \u201cFlipping through them, I saw ads by Jack Lenor Larsen, Brunschwig et Fils, Scalamandr\u00e9. I thought I could work for a company that makes fabrics like those\u2014<\/em>and that I had to move to New York to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meditation Meets Design Innovation<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\"Suzanne
Tick at the loom in the New York town house that serves as her residence, studio, and meditation center. Photography by Martin Crook. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Manhattan proved an energizing yet scary place at the time. \u201cI arrived at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Designers we were creating custom orders for would just stop calling us back.\u201d To handle the stress, she tried Zen meditation, but it never stuck. She gave the pursuit of higher consciousness another try seven years ago, after a period of discontent despite her many achievements, which at this point included a TEDxNavesink talk and work exhibited at international museums. A last-minute opportunity to attend an introductory Vedic workshop coincided with a weeklong staycation, her first in 30-odd years. She found the mantra-based practice transformative, and since 2020 has been teaching it to others. It\u2019s become a cornerstone of her studio culture that she credits with unlocking higher levels of collective creativity. \u201cIf I could get more firms to realize how incredible this practice is for design teams! Your awareness becomes open, everything becomes much clearer, you just see what needs to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of de-stressing her nervous system, she continues, has involved \u201cfiguring out what I can do to be of help.\u201d She\u2019s doubled down on her commitment to giving back via free weaving workshops and serving on the board of The Light Inside, which teaches meditation to prison inmates and corrections officers. Tick pays it forward to Mother Earth, too. Back in the \u201990\u2019s, she was the brains behind Resolution, the first-ever solution-dyed panel fabric (and the first Knoll Textile product to sell 1 million yards); today, her studio recycles all textile waste it produces (almost a ton annually) and has been instrumental in shifting our perception of circularity via envelope-pushing product designs attuned to nature yet equally informed by technology, craft, and human ingenuity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Watch the Hall of Fame Documentary Featuring Suzanne Tick<\/h3>\n\n\n\n