Gregg Buchbinder
Chair Marker, Emeco
In 1998 Gregg Buchbinder saw the potential in Emeco, a down-at-the heels military supplier in Hanover, Pennsylvania. Buchbinder bought Emeco and over the years has collaborated with the world’s best designers and architects to transform Emeco from a U.S. Navy supplier into one of the top design furniture brands.
Buchbinder’s first collaboration was sparked by a meeting with renowned French designer Philippe Starck, and together Buchbinder and Starck created many Emeco collections. Some of the other architects and designers Buchbinder has collaborated with include Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Ettore Sottsass, Jean Nouvel, Nendo, Jasper Morrison, and Naoto Fukasawa.
Buchbinder entered into a joint venture agreement with Coca-Cola to help the environment. Together they utilized innovative recycling technology to create an authentic and long-lasting product, modeled after the iconic 1006 Navy Chair trade dress design, and made out of waste Coca-Cola plastic beverage bottles. Launched in 2010 the “111 Navy Chair” is named for the 111 Coca-Cola bottles that go into each chair. Each year millions of waste plastic bottles are kept out of the landfill and companies worldwide are inspired to design with environmental protection in mind.
Under Buchbinder’s leadership, Emeco remains focused on making chairs in America, using sustainably sourced reclaimed, recycled, and repurposed materials, and always making products that are made to last.
Bryan Lee
Founder/Design Principal, Colloqate Design
Bryan is an Architect, educator, writer, and Design Justice activist. He is the founder/Design Principal of Colloqate Design a nonprofit multidisciplinary design practice, in New Orleans, Louisiana, dedicated to expanding community access to design and creating spaces of racial, social, and cultural equity. He is a Design Critic at Harvard GSD and has led two award-winning youth community design programs. Bryan is a founding co-organizer of the DAP (Design As Protest) Collective and Dark Matter University. He was most recently honored as one of the 2018 Fast Company Most Creative People in Business, a USC Annenberg MacArthur Civic Media Fellow, and the youngest design firm to win the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices award in 2019.
Alessio Grancini
Prototype Engineer, Magic Leap
With a hybrid background between design and technology, Alessio Grancini is a Prototype Engineer at Magic Leap. He studied Architecture at Sci-Arc, and is interested in AR and VR meeting human interaction, in the context of Augmented Reality cloud . He taught Unity workshops internationally, exhibited work in art galleries, and published multiple articles about AR/VR on platforms such as DesignBoom, Archdaily and Forbes.