Designer Ken Baker gives a eye-witness report from NeoCon, held last month in Chicago, and while noticing the effects of recession is invigorated by the event

I was thrilled when FX magazine asked me to review this year’s NeoCon. Chicago is my hometown and was my workplace for almost 20 years. I’m also am a seasoned veteran of the event, making the yearly pilgrimage to this furniture mecca since 1979, missing just one year.

NeoCon is and has always been the summer market for the introduction of furniture and furnishings for the contract furniture industry. All the manufacturers in North America and many from abroad gather in steamy and rainy Chicago every June to display their wares in the hugeMerchandise Mart building.While many of these manufacturers have a permanent showroom in ‘TheMart’, many do not, and every year more than 1,000 companies from around the world convene in Chicago, the ‘Windy City’, to rent a temporary exhibition space on the premises and showcase their wares.

NeoCon is first and foremost about design. Each year it prompts showrooms to get their yearly facelift, and a host of seminars and programmes and keynotes are developed to attract the world’s corporate commercial interior design industry for three days in mid-June.

In turn, the city of Chicago pulls out all the stops to accommodate the show’s huge audience: the hotels are full, the restaurants impossible to get a reservation for (unless you are resourceful enough to plan ahead or ask to be a guest of one of the exhibiting companies), and the shops are teaming with designers from all over the world.

And then there’s the Merchandise Mart itself. The art deco-styled building, formerly owned by the Kennedy family, was once reputed to be the largest building volumetrically in the world with miles of corridors on its 20 floors of leasable showroom space. The Mart is always well turned out, running a slick programme with extraordinarily helpful staff whose priority is getting the thousands of attendees through registration, the queues for the lifts, and back into a shuttle bus or taxi when they’re ready to leave at the end of the day. No small task!

During my 30 years of show attendance, I have seen it go from a week-long show to four and then three days. NeoCon has always provided an opportunity for me, as a designer, to preview the latest and best products in a central location under one roof (although in recent years some manufacturers have moved out of the Mart to the surrounding neighbourhoods). It is a fantastic opportunity for clients to make decisions on furniture and furnishing selections for their projects, to catch up with the furniture manufacturers’ sales representatives, and to see and be seen by fellow designers and competitors in the industry.

NeoCon is a great showcase and it helps designers, facility managers, corporate procurement directors and the furniture manufacturers themselves to stay current with what is the latest and greatest in the corporate contract interior design world.

NeoCon 2010 was no exception. Everything I have just described took place – but with one noticeable difference… a dramatic reduction in delegates. The economic climate has hit the industry hard, not only in North America but Asia and Europe too. And the easily negotiable halls and corridors of the Mart were a telling sign, alongside some very prominent vacant showroom spaces and the seemingly airy exhibition floors. With registration a breeze and non-existent queues for the lifts, the journey around the show this year was very comfortable but an obvious indicator that the recession had definitely bitten.

The other notable effect of the poor economy was that there seemed to be a lot less of the ‘new’, and a lot more of ‘refreshing’ existing product lines. It is evident that the major North American furniture manufacturers have cut back drastically on their R&D budgets, resulting in a lot of focus on showcasing and promoting existing products that have been ‘enhanced’ for reintroduction at this year’s show.

While it was great to be back at the Mart, I was quite disappointed with the lack of new or groundbreaking design – a real shame, as vision and creativity can be more evident when times are tough and I had hoped this might have been the case this year. The branding of these manufacturers was highly present but new content was distinctly missing.

Many of the manufacturers I visited had a new twist on their existing products, with one or two small introductions. There were some exceptions; companies like Halcon, Humanscale, Datesweiser, J&J Invision and Knoll had some very attractive and interesting products. But I think these were the exception by and large. The show was about ‘me too’ products and remastered mid-century classics. Very little jumped off the page and there was certainly no innovation.

I don't believe this is the manufacturers' fault alone. It is hard with little or no R&D budget to survive a sluggish economy, but the industry should accept responsibility for the lack of real design innovation.

At a time when project work is a nadir, there should be a focus on design solutions and products that will make a difference and change the paradigm that still exists before the recession. Aside from spending time mining new project work, cutting costs and slashing professional fees, we need to be looking to the future and the next great idea.

The slow times we've endured for the past two years should be an impetus of inspiration, a time to recreate, question and get creative. Why aren’t we focusing more on sustainable issues, the next big agenda?

Having moved from the USA to the UK three years ago I have been privy to and witnessed some interesting global client trends and spotted some noticeable differences in cultural specification.

In Europe manufacturers have, for many years, been developing a ‘less is more’ approach to their furniture offerings and clients have completely bought into that mantra. It is in total contrast to North American clientele, who continue to use furniture with a heavier, more robust, ‘more is better’ composition.

Interestingly, I saw a subtle European influence filtering through some of the product offerings this year at NeoCon. Manufacturers such as Knoll, and its new Antenna range, are bold examples of how the old American paradigms are starting to change. So the news isn’t all so bad, there are green shoots out there, but there’s not enough and it’s not happening fast enough.

In spending an afternoon with Thomas Bene (of Bene) it dawned on us at Gensler that the reason for this year’s lacklustre product showing could possibly be more to do with the client and design community than the manufacturer, and we concluded that we designers need to be more demanding, as demand sparks innovation and spurs creativity.

NeoCon is a great platform to benchmark the state of the American interior design industry, but I could not say it was generally representative of the global industry as a whole. It is, however, another forum for the design, manufacturing and end-user communities to come together and a great opportunity to recharge the design batteries.

Even though attendance this year seemed down, I was pleased to see that NeoCon was impeccably organised as usual and is still a much-venerated market. I was able to catch up with colleagues and decision makers from around the world as well as speak with a number of UK and European representatives, who while not exhibiting felt it important to attend from a networking perspective.

At the end of the day, the three major worldwide shows – Orgatec in Cologne, Salone in Milan and Neocon – are all market events that bring the design community people together.

Shows such as NeoCon are much more than just cocktail parties or a big social. They facilitate the design community to share experiences and showcase progression in design around the world, which has to have a positive influence on our own client solutions. They show us the art of the possible.

I for one walked away from this year’s NeoCon not thinking about the current lack groundbreaking product introductions, but inspired about the kind of innovative products my firm Gensler could develop to meet the challenges of an economy that demands that we are one step ahead all the time.

This article was first published in FX Magazine.