Suzanne Tick: 2023 Interior Design Hall of Fame Inductee

Material innovator Suzanne Tick 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’s the fact that her New York–based 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. “Everyone thought we were in cahoots with NASA!” she jokes.

No, Tick is not conspiring with the government’s space-research arm, but she has 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’s 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, 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.

Suzanne Tick on Her Futuristic Approach to Design

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For Tick, Sustainability is Top of Mind

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

Tick, a self-described “fourth-generation recycler,” comes about her salvage mindset honestly. Business at her dad’s scrap-metal yard was the main dinner table topic growing up. At the same time, her family was “very cultured and creative”—her mother was a graphic and set designer—and tapped into Eastern philosophy. “My dad had all the books: the Bhagavad Gita, a library of Ram Dass.” Also stacked on those shelves were her mom’s 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. “Flipping through them, I saw ads by Jack Lenor Larsen, Brunschwig et Fils, Scalamandré. I thought I could work for a company that makes fabrics like those—and that I had to move to New York to do it.”

Meditation Meets Design Innovation

Manhattan proved an energizing yet scary place at the time. “I arrived at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Designers we were creating custom orders for would just stop calling us back.” 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’s become a cornerstone of her studio culture that she credits with unlocking higher levels of collective creativity. “If 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.”

Part of de-stressing her nervous system, she continues, has involved “figuring out what I can do to be of help.” She’s 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 ’90’s, 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.

Watch the Hall of Fame Documentary Featuring Suzanne Tick

Explore Textiles Design by Suzanne Tick

Installations by Suzanne Tick on Display