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.
furniture, products, lighting
In the wake of several global crises, designers have responded by redefining our relationship to our homes, including interrogating the modernist trope of better living through design.
Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place explores ideas concerning domesticity—namely asking how we can design our interiors to enable joyful living while empowering creativity.
It is the first solo exhibition in over a decade to survey Burks‘s workshop-based design practice, presenting several key projects from the last ten years.
These industrial design and craft-centered projects will be seen in conversation with Shelter in Place, a new speculative project that will explore the visionary possibilities of design.
As an African American designer, Burks has forged a unique path by embracing the challenge to advocate for hand production as a strategy for innovation within industrial production.
Shelter in Place will also demonstrate Burks‘s holistic approach across the disciplines of art, architecture, and design that underscores principals of synthesizing craft, community, and industry.
Shelter In Place, High Museum of Art, September 16–March 5, 2023