Brent Cordner Brent began his education studying pre-med while playing college hockey in the U.S. After two years, he did an about-face and transferred to the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto where he completed his degree in 1999. He worked as a teacher's assistant on two occasions and lectured in an introductory course about modern architecture. The Felt chair for Keilhauer is his first piece of design-work on the market. It won a Best of NeoCon award for Innovative Product in June 2002. Brent was born and raised in Montreal. He now lives and works in Toronto. He is an avid cook and he competes in the martial arts.

Jonathan Crinion For over thirty years Jonathan's work has followed a common theme of innovation and material reduction. His resolved forms reflect this frugality often combining many functions into one simple part. For Jonathan environmental consciousness is not new. He began in earnest when he designed a solar hot water heating system some thirty years ago. While trained as an Industrial Designer Jonathan does not fit the mould. Although not formally trained as an engineer or architect, he began to show a proclivity for engineering and architecture at a young age. His father was an architect and Jonathan grew up surrounded by architectural debates, designs and projects on the go. It was only natural that he would not hesitate to combine his skills into designing and building structures; a skill that did him well while working with Lord Norman Foster in London, UK and eventually lead to projects in Italy such as Compas furniture system for Tecno of Milan. At fifty-one years of age his designs are showing that they have a sense of quiet timelessness that comes from the complex but restrained forms that he generates. You won't find Jonathan participating in the rabid consumerism game that has grabbed so many designers to compete in the consumer goods commodities markets. In fact his philosophy lies in complete opposition to the many designers who want to change the world by designing yet even more needless products. Jonathan will tell you that 'the future of design lies in finding non material solutions.’ His latest work begins to resolve the disparity between the corporate fight for limited global resources and designers creating the problem. In addition to the many patents already in his name, in 2001 Jonathan received a number of patents for both his innovative wind turbine concept, and his 6 meter Open Table, now sold globally by Knoll, a product that has revolutionized the office work environment. Virtually every major furniture manufacture is producing its own version of this massive workstation designed over 18 years ago. Like most of his work, he was 18 years ahead of his time and it took his unrelenting perseverance to get the product to market. The Open Table follows his philosophy by massively reducing the number and complexity of the parts required to produce 8 work stations while creating a new way of working akin to sitting around a conference table. Jonathan has designed three wind turbines now, all specifically with an eye towards taking people off the 'out of site out of mind' nuclear powered grid system. His turbines are designed for single-family dwellings and cottages and a smaller version for yachts. Recently and together with his partner, architect, urban planner and filmmaker, Stephanie Mills, they formed a new company called Mackerel Sky. They are currently designing a number of modern homes. In addition a factory-made kit cottage is in the works: A self sufficient building made from modular sections, it is an exploration into designing a completely autonomous building, the inspiration for which is drawn from Jonathan’s love of ocean racing yachts. We are not talking about production yachts but rather one-off carbon fiber racing machines. 'What I love about these yachts is that they are designed to sail around the world non stop and be totally self sufficient, while at the same time they push materials and technology to the limits. There is a lot we can learn from these awesome, and absolutely minimal machines.’ Jonathan is a member of the Chartered Society of Designers in London UK and was appointed to the Royal Academy of the Arts. He has won virtually every award there is to win in the design field.

Tom Deacon Tom graduated from the University of Toronto in Architecture in 1982 with honours and the RAIC medal. After working briefly in the profession, he chose to pursue furniture and product design as a more clear and direct expression of his ideas. In 1984 he founded AREA Design Inc. to design, manufacture and market seating and tables for the contract industry. In 1990 he established an independent design studio and is currently designing products for leading manufacturers in Canada and the United States. His work has been published and exhibited widely and has received numerous design awards. Deacon's first project as a freelance designer was the Deacon chair for Keilhauer. Since that auspicious beginning, Deacon and Keilhauer have developed a close and fruitful relationship resulting in a number of successful products.

EOOS EOOS are Martin Bergmann, Gernot Bohmann, and Harald Grundl, who studied design together at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna from 1988 until 1994. In 1990 they started their first collaboration and in 1995 they founded EOOS. They live in Vienna and work in the fields of product, furniture, and architectural design. EOOS is named after one of the four sun horses of the Greek mythology and stands for their programmatic approach to the field of design. Design for them means the articulation of dreams and fears of the human species. It gets the power of the collective unconsciousness of human beings and supplies cultural service for the society. Terms such as ritual, culture, and poetry are at the centre of their work. They sympathise with mistakes, paradoxes and the immediate thought - in other words, travelling light. However, the shorter route is not straight ahead, but off the straight and in a wide bend. Professionally speaking, design must venture forward into zones of the incomprehensible.

Patty Johnson Patty Johnson Design is a Toronto-based design studio whose clients include Keilhauer, Fluid Living, Speke|Klein, Pure Design, Nienkamper and others. Patty Johnson has been cited for synthesising craft and mass production in her furniture design. Johnson’s work has been included in ID Magazine’s Annual Design Review Awards and her table, Turn, is part of the Design Exchange’s permanent collection. Johnson has pioneered efforts in design development in Canada and abroad. She has organized a series of projects representing the work of Canadian designers, including the Pure Canadian Exhibit at the Totem Gallery in New York City in May 2003 and the Current Furniture Practise in Canada conference (co-presented with Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre) in February 2004. She has also worked on a long term consulting project in Guyana, South America to develop viable methods and products with the country's furniture industry. Johnson is a founding member of Furnace and the Furniture Collective and she teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

Andrew Jones Andrew is an architect-designer based in Toronto. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Toronto, and a Master of Arts degree in Furniture Design from the Royal College of Art in London. He teaches furniture design in the new Graduate Program in Architecture at the University of Toronto. Andrew Jones' work has been featured in several newspaper and magazine articles: The Globe and Mail cited Jones as one of "8 young Canadians who will carry us into the next century." Andrew is now doing interior architecture and furniture design projects in Toronto and London. He is particularly interested in projects that combine architecture with production design and custom design in furnishings and fixtures.

Mark Kapka Mark studied industrial design at San Jose State University. He worked as a designer at Metro Furniture corporation for nine years where he designed a wide array of furniture in addition to showrooms and exhibits. Since 1997 he has been working independently and collaboratively for various manufacturers. Recent projects have included seating for Keilhauer, training room furniture for Howe, and home office furniture for OFFI & Company. He lives and works in San Francisco.

Ed Keilhauer Ed entered the realm of furniture design through his knowledge of the craft of upholstery. Having apprenticed in saddlemaking and upholstery in Europe in the late 1940’s, he immigrated to Canada in 1951. After working for a number of large local residential furniture manufacturers, he started his own company, Fine Art Upholstering in 1955. For the next 25 years Ed worked closely with product and interior designers developing custom products for commercial interiors. His company also did much of the upholstery work for the emerging commercial furniture manufacturers of the early 1960’s. In 1981, with the start of Keilhauer, he began to create products of his own design. His early products formed the backbone of the company in its formative years and his knowledge of the craft of upholstery can be seen in many of the products designed by others for the company over the years. His skill and knowledge of furniture continues to influence the development of Keilhauer products today.

Helen Kerr Helen Kerr grew up in Montreal and studied Environmental Science at the University of Waterloo and Industrial Design at Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD). She is principal of Kerr and Company Inc. with a practice that encompasses all aspects of the industrial design process; from research and product philosophy through to production detailing, fully engineered part drawings and prototyping. Her experience is quite varied, ranging from contract furniture and housewares to more technical mass production objects. What is common to all of Kerr and Company's work is the underlying problem solving employed coupled with a strong aesthetic sensibility and a real sensitivity to user needs. Helen is an instructor at OCAD, a member of the Toronto Design Forum, and she currently sits on the Board of Directors of Virtu, an organization promoting Canadian Design. Since 1988, Helen and her team at Kerr and Company Inc. have been creating and developing furniture and consumer products for both the contract and retail market. They design smart, sexy, playful products that work. They understand that to meet a user's needs, they have to look beyond the functional and production realities of manufacturing to include the intangible, the meaning of objects and systems. How things fit into an environment, a process, a life is as important as how they look, feel and behave.

Scot Laughton Scot Laughton was born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1962. He studied industrial design at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. In his final year, he designed the Strala light, which Time magazine named one of 1987’s top ten designs. In the same year, he and two other OCA graduates founded Portico, a studio and manufacturing facility for their own limited-production furniture and lighting designs. Recognized for its high quality furniture, Portico achieved a synthesis between production and craft that became a model for others seeking to establish designer/maker studios. Laughton opened his own practice in 1992 and has designed furniture and products for the residential and commercial markets. His clients include Keilhauer, Pure Design, Du Verre, Umbra and Nienkämper. Among his most recent designs are the Laughton Series Lounge collection for Keilhauer, which won the Silver award in the Seating category at NeoCon Canada 2002, and furniture for Lolah’s debut collection at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York City, which received the ICFF 2002 Editors Award for Best Furniture. Laughton’s work has been selected for ID Magazine’s Annual Design Review and has appeared in many other publications, including Metropolis, Azure, Intramuros, FRAME and Ottagono. Exhibitions in Canada, Britain, Scotland and Japan have featured his designs. The Royal Ontario Museum and the Design Exchange in Toronto have recently acquired his work for their permanent collections. He is a founding member of Furnace, a collective committed to producing thoughtful, functionally appropriate, minimalist designs through collaborative effort. In the fall of 2002, Furnace launched its first collection in London, England. Laughton has taught at York University and Sheridan College and currently teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. He has conducted workshops at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York City and other venues throughout North America. Recently, he was named Designer of the Year (2003) by the Interior Design Show, Toronto.

Tom McHugh Tom McHugh, AIA, is an award-winning Architect, Interior and Furniture Designer with over thirty years of experience on a variety of project types, sizes, and complexities; with concentration on hospitality and corporate interiors. He is a pioneer in alternative officing concepts in the US and England, and was one of the first designers to implement "hotelling" offices in America. Mr. McHugh has given featured presentations on this subject at numerous industry events. He has worked for prestigious architectural firms in the US and London, including S.O.M., Maxwell Frey and Jane Drew, and Poalo Soleri. He is currently Design Director for Interiors at a 250-person national multi-disciplinary architectural firm in Madison, Wisconsin. Mr. McHugh is a member of the National AIA Design Awards Task Force, the National AIA Interiors Steering Committee, and was the 1998 National Chair of the Interiors PIA. His design work has been exhibited at galleries in the US and Canada, including the Cooper Hewitt and the National Building Museum. His contract furniture work is experimental, elegant, dramatic, friendly, poetic, minimalistic; softened with curvilinear lines and anthropomorphic references. His approach is intuitive and sensory; with concern for the way the user will experience the object; and how the object adds value to the space. The inside/outside sensuous flow of the upholstery on the front of the Tisbury Lounge Series was inspired by the undulating skin which connected the ears to the head of his dog "Tisbury" from Martha's Vineyard. He is currently sniffing around his new puppy, "Mobie," for new morphological furniture ideas.

Gord Peteran Gord has been designing and making furniture for the past twenty years. He is a faculty member of the Industrial Design program at the Ontario College of Art and Design while also teaching the graduating class within the Furniture program at Sheridan College. While having lectured, exhibited, taught and published internationally, Peteran's practice is based in Toronto. In 1999 he was a guest faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design and in the summer of 2000, he was in Maine and Colorado.

Christen Sorensen After working in the Danish furniture industry for twelve (12) years, Christen Sorensen became profoundly aware of its shortcomings. This awareness prompted him to apply for admission to the "Kunsthandwærkerskolen" (Copenhagen's School for Arts and Crafts) to study design. On the Faculty were some of Denmark's most famous architects and designers. Hans J. Wegner, Borge Mogensen, Bender Madsen, Jorn Utzon (Architect of the Sydney Opera House), Ejner Larsen and others. After completing his studies at Design School, Sorensen opened a furniture design and production studio in Copenhagen. He participated in numerous competitions and exhibitions. One of these being the Triennale in Milan/1955. His chairs were also exhibited throughout Scandinavia. Amongst his contemporaries/friends were Werner Panton, FinnJuhl, Bender Madsen, Greta Jalk, Nanna and Jorgen Ditzel and Poul Kjærholm with whom he developed some very avant-garde chairs, even by today's standards. Sorensen arrived in Montreal in 1956 where he was involved in many design projects: airport interiors, 3 pavilions for Expo' 67, commercial interiors, and furniture. At one point, he even tried his hand at teaching, but this was not for him! In the 1980's Christen Sorensen began to work with Keilhauer. He feels that his association with them has been a happy, productive and fortunate one.

Kathleen Wicks Kathleen has been an independent interior design consultant for over 20 years with industry and project experience ranging from hospitality and corporate public spaces to condominiums and health clubs and residential. Her education began by attending Niagara College of Applied Arts and Technology for interior design, and Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto for Architectural Technology. At Ontario College of Art in 1988, she studied furniture design in Italy as well as wood working through the same college. At various times over the years Kathleen has shared the insight of her extensive experience by serving as a board member for the Niagara College Interior design program curriculum, an instructor at Georgian College in Barrie, Ontario, as well as judge/jury member for industry or educational competitions and has participated in various committees for her professional organization ARIDO.