Product Design Alum Travis Hyatt Receives SIT Furniture Design Award
Hyatt designed an early iteration of the Sway Rocking Stool while a student.
Travis Hyatt (’22 BFA Product Design) has won a prestigious SIT Furniture Design Award for his Sway Rocking Stool. The award recognizes, celebrates, and promotes international furniture designers, interior designers, brands, manufacturers, emerging talents, and visionaries enhancing daily life with innovation. While he was a student, Hyatt minored in sustainability, increasingly one of the College’s most popular minors.
Hyatt describes Sway, which can be straddled or sat on, as an “honest to function representation of a traditional rocking horse. Constraints were created by breaking the form down into the three necessary parts: reins, rockers, and saddle. Parts are factored by the simple requirements of ergonomics, structure, and recreation. These limitations steered the design from a literal ‘horse’ into a functional stool while maintaining its purpose as a hobby horse.”
The winning version of the stool, which had its origins when Hyatt was still a student at the College, is made of black walnut hardwood with brass dowels.
The SIT Furniture Design Award is a sibling of the LIT Lighting Design Award (LIT), International Design Awards (IDA), and European Product Design Awards ( ePDA), all of which focus on product aesthetic, concepts, and enhancement, and have emerged as some of the most well-known design awards today.
For this year’s awards, members of a select professional jury committee of creative leaders in industrial design evaluated each work based on its merit. Winners receive the SIT trophy and a digital brochure featuring their entry. They also are invited to the biannual winner reception and receive extensive publicity promoting their designs to a global audience.
See other recipients of this year’s SIT Furniture Design Awards.
