StephenBurksManMade

About

Stephen Burks Man Made is a hands-on collaborative design studio deeply invested in the transformative power of craft techniques that challenge the limits of new technologies within industrial production.

We believe in a pluralistic vision of design that is inclusive of all cultural perspectives and backgrounds.

We bring the hand to industry through a community-driven, workshop-based practice.

Our projects include furniture, lighting, interiors, exhibitions, and product design.

We are Stephen Burks (Principal), Malika Leiper (Cultural Director), Vara Yang (Design Consultant), and Fridolin Jeger (Design Assistant).

Our solo exhibition Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place, formerly at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (September 16, 2022 - March 5, 2023) is part acclaimed mid-career survey and part commissioned speculative project presenting the last decade of professional practice alongside new expressions of radical domesticity through handcrafted industrial design.

Most recently, Stephen Burks: Spirit Houses opened at Volume Gallery in Chicago and Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place (November 19. 2023 - April 16, 2024) opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where Stephen became the first African American to receive the Collab Design Excellence Award.

Follow us on Instagram @stephenburksmanmade and contact us at info@stephenburksmanmade.com.

Stephen Burks

Chicago native, Stephen Burks is an industrial designer, product development consultant, and educator whose innovative approach to design synthesizes craft, community, and industry. Independently and through association with various non-profits, he has collaborated with artisans and craftspeople in over ten countries on six continents. His socially engaged practice seeks to broaden the limits of design consciousness by challenging who benefits from and participates in contemporary design.

Stephen and his studio, Stephen Burks Man Made, have been commissioned by many of the world’s leading design-driven brands to develop collections that engage hand production as a strategy for innovation to express a more pluralistic vision of design including BD Barcelona, Cappellini, Dedon, MASS Design Group, Missoni, & Roche Bobois.

He has had solo exhibitions and led curatorial projects at the Studio Museum in Harlem (Stephen Burks Man Made, 2011), the Museum of Art & Design (Stephen Burks, Are You a Hybrid, 2011), and the High Museum of Art (Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place, 2022).

He has been visiting faculty and a strategic consultant to academic institutions around the globe and taught architecture and design at Berea College, Columbia University GSAPP, ECAL, the University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture & Design, and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Stephen is the only African-American to win the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Product Design and the only industrial designer to be awarded the prestigious Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Malika Leiper

Originally from Cambodia, Malika Leiper is interested in the culture of design across various disciplines with a particular focus on emergent contexts in Southeast Asia.

After completing her master’s in urban planning at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, she consulted with restaurants, non-profits, local governments, and museums on research and strategies to build creative cultural capacity, often through public programming and community engagement.

She approaches design as a collaborative process of translating knowledge and insights from different worlds into one common language through technical, moral and utopian applications.

Most recently, Malika has contributed to Disegno Journal #34 as a Het Nieuwe Instituut inaugural emerging writing fellow with her first published short story, When The Words Don't Exist.

Vara Yang

Vara Yang joined Stephen Burks Man Made as an industrial designer in New York in 2017.

Before working at Stephen Burks Man Made, she worked with several startups helping them bring their products and services to the market, including smart home devices, smartwatches, smart jewelry, and 3D printers.

Now an independent consultant based in Rotterdam, she continues to work with the studio on projects at various scales from furniture design to packaging to exhibitions.

Vara received her bachelor’s in design engineering from National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan and her master’s in Industrial Design from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Variations Journal

Calligaris & P:S

April 14, 2013

Burks's Variations deconstruct both seating and structure, turning the concepts of warp and weft into sculptural explorations.

The Crafting Diversity Initiative

Berea College Student Craft

September 26, 2019

Today, Student Craft is no longer just a factory of student labor, as it had been for nearly 100 years, but is transforming into an academic program producing open-ended products.

Senegalese Coil Basket Weaving

Private Client

July 1, 2015

In 2015, Stephen Burks Man Made consulted and was commissioned by a South African private client to create a collection of coil woven sweetgrass basket lamps in a small village outside of the second city of Thies.

Welcome to Contemporaries

Disegno Journal

February 15, 2021

With the romanticism of a wiser woman looking back on a fleeting youth, Joan Didion once described New York City as the “shining and perishable dream itself”.

How Stephen Burks “Future-Proofs” Craft

Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place Book Review in Untapped Journal by Francesca Perry

February 13, 2023

The book Shelter in Place considers the possibilities, and the precedents, of the designer’s inclusive approach to creating objects for the home.

Curbed 21 Questions

By Diana Budds for New York Magazine

November 7, 2023

Stephen Burks Wants to Finish a 20-Year-Old Conversation With Fran Lebowitz.

Home as Project

Stephen Burks for Goodee

September 1, 2019

"I found myself back in school in the midst of a year-long fellowship, where I met Malika."

When The Words Don't Exist

By Malika Leiper for Disegno #34 x Het Nieuwe Instituut Design Drafts #1

September 21, 2022

How to begin writing about design if the word does not even exist?

The Making of the Community Basket

By Stephen Burks for the Oak issue of Material Intelligence online, edited by Glenn Adamson.

June 2, 2022

Yes, the mighty oak tree, the stuff of legends, is also the traditional
basket maker’s wood of choice in Appalachia, as elsewhere
in the eastern United States.

On New Cosmologies: Stephen Burks Approaches the Sacred

Najha Zigbi-Johnson for Volume Gallery

September 8, 2023

Within this spiritual and cultural context, I engage and understand the most recent work of industrial designer Stephen Burks, who has created a collection of modern altars entitled Spirit Houses.

Business of Home Podcast

By Dennis Scully & Fred Nicolaus for Business of Home

January 23, 2023

Stephen Burks wants to open the doors of the design industry.

Dedon Launches Kida Dining Chair

Milan Furniture Fair

April 17, 2023

New Kida dining chair to be presented during 2023 Milan furniture fair

BD Barcelona 50th Features Grasso

Perez Projects Presents BD Barcelona: A New Perspective, 50 Years of Design

April 16, 2023
Powerhouse Arts Ceramics Design Fellowship
August 1, 2023

Over the course of six months, Stephen Burks Man Made experimented with clay at various scales.

Grasso, Bolon Edition

BD Barcelona x Bolon

April 18, 2018

An alternative vision of beauty; a study on the imperfections of the skin.

Magniberg Portraits

Photography Caroline Tompkins

November 1, 2022

How to get really nice bedding for free.

The Sacred and Profound

By Vasia Rigou for The Chicago Reader

September 19, 2023

The Volume Gallery exhibition connects past, present, and future through reverent design.

A Casa Di Burks

Living Corriere Della Sera No. 4
Creative Survival Tactics: At Home with Malika Leiper & Stephen Burks by Olivia Fincato

April 6, 2023

"We transformed a former bakery into a modernist gallery."

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