Rama Chorpash
In his practice as a working designer, professor, and director of Parsons’ MFA Industrial Design program, Rama Chorpash works at the intersection of people and things. This rich and expansive space has included a wide variety of creative projects including designing office furniture to public spaces and exhibitions, to objects that enhance daily life.
Chorpash’s list of collaborators is equally broad, encompassing global firms such as Herman Miller, Swatch Watch, Hewlett Packard, and Colgate as well as local family-run businesses tucked into Brooklyn.
Chorpash employs a collaborative approach to design systems, encouraging his students to become active participants in exploring design’s capacity to amplify social impact and equity. His uncommonly thoughtful approach to design embraces the complex and uncertain relationships between people and objects, especially the byproducts, often mistaken or unintentional, of these relationships. Oftentimes, his explorations aim to intertwine environmental and business sustainability. And always, he engages with production processes in as broad a manner as possible, paying particular attention to material sourcing and supply chain, labor, and cultural appropriateness. “A product is not just the end user’s experience, but also its full relationship to the world,” says Chorpash.
Chorpash’s approach uniquely enabled him to establish a master’s level making curriculum at Parsons’ School of Constructed Environments that meshes architecture, interior design, lighting design and product design disciplines. His “design through dialogue” approach engages students’ aesthetic and problem-solving sensibilities.
For his teaching, Chorpash draws on his extensive experience working for local firms such as ECCO Design and time spent in São Paulo, Brazil, where he maintained a studio and worked with the advertising agency DM9/DDB Brazil, designer Carlos Miele, and others. His work creating environments — he collaborated on the design the 1996 Centennial Olympic Pavilion in Atlanta and later a rollerskating disco for New York’s Central Park.
Chorpash’s work has been published in the New York Times Style Magazine, Surface, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue Brazil, I.D., and Metropolis, and has exhibited his work nationally, from the Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and internationally from Portugal's Bienal da Prata to Art Basel in Switzerland. He has received accolades from ID Annual Design Review and the Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) for his designs.
