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.

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.

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The Crafting Diversity Initiative

Berea College Student Craft

September 26, 2019

From the Berea College Student Craft department:

In 2018, we at Student Craft began discussion with an informal working group including Glenn Adamson: Curator, writer and historian working at the intersection of craft and contemporary art; Jon Prown: Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Chipstone Foundation, an organization devoted to advancing the field of Decorative Arts and Material Culture Studies; Meghan Doherty: then Director of Berea College’s Doris Ulmann Galleries, Curator of the College Art Collections, and Associate Professor of Art History.

Early in those discussions, the group identified the need to link the work of the Craft program more closely with Berea College’s Great Commitments.

The team suggested designing new products with students that manifest those Commitments.

By early 2019 the group had identified industrial designer Stephen Burks, Principal of Stephen Burks Man Made, as a potential partner.

Stephen’s workshop-based practice extends craft traditions through a pluralistic vision of design that is inclusive of many cultural perspectives.

His hands-on experience partnering with non-profits as a product development consultant was well-aligned with the goals of Student Craft to introduce a collection of products that were representative of Berea’s diverse student body.

Early in the partnership, however, it became clear that a longer term vision was needed. The resulting strategic Crafting Diversity initiative conceived by Stephen Burks Man Made in collaboration with director of Student Craft Aaron Beale engaged the creative potential of Berea’s diverse student body by positioning their participation as “design collaborators” instead of “laborers”.

Beginning during the 2019-2020 academic year, students at all stages of the design development process participated in workshops led by Burks within each of Student Craft’s departments - broomcraft, ceramics, weaving, and woodcraft.

This participatory process of discovery, (typical of Stephen Burks Man Made’s practice) informed Crafting Diversity’s first range of objects: the Community Basket, the Pixel Blanket, the Pixel Placemat & Runners, and Broom Thing, which in turn showed the way forward for students to leave their impressions as designers on the products they continue make.

Since implementing the revolutionary Crafting Diversity initiative, Student Craft is no longer strictly a labor program with production quotas and sales figures to meet, but now a design culture program where students learn craft skills through the production of their own designs.

“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” - Stephen Burks.

Recognizing the larger need for broader distribution of these ideas, as well as the students work , Stephen Burks Man Made leveraged his relationship with MillerKnoll to highlight the Crafting Diversity initiative through a Design Within Reach exclusive distribution deal (the full proceeds of which go back to Student Craft).

This ongoing relationship encompasses both the products developed under Stephen’s leadership in addition to four student-designed products being added to the collection in 2023, naming 14 Berea College students as designers of record for their contributions.

Design Assistant Vara Yang

Photography Justin Skeens

Crafting Diversity Products Available at DWR

StephenBurksManMade

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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."

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?

BD Barcelona 50th Features Grasso

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

April 16, 2023

Dedon Launches Kida Dining Chair

Milan Furniture Fair

April 17, 2023

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

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.

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.

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”.

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.

Taking a Moment to Lounge at Milan Design Week

The New York Times by Lauren Messman

April 15, 2024

You can always see where you would like to sit at the annual festival of furnishings and household objects.