Evan is a Creative Director, Designer, Merchant, and Entrepreneur with 16 years of experience in the design-led consumer product and furniture industries. His designs have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Red Dot Award and the Good Design Award. He has also founded companies whose products have sold in the MoMA Store and won Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Award. Evan’s unique talent is his ability to translate a brand vision into a high-level business strategy, encompassing everything from product design to creative direction. Through his practice, he has developed a holistic understanding of what it takes to create and build a brand through product. Most Recently, as VP of Product and Merchandising at Burrow, Evan helped the company execute an aggressive growth strategy, expanding their offering from a single modular sofa system to a full catalog of 30 unique products, cementing their position as a leader in the D2C furniture space. Evan was the creative powerhouse behind the expansion project, activating key team members in merchandising, creative, planning and manufacturing, to accomplish the goal. Evan also designed the Burrow Flagship Store in New York that won an honorable mention from Fast Company for Best Retail Design of 2020. In only two years with Burrow, Evan’s efforts delivered exponential top line growth, improved margins and manufacturing capabilities, and a product development road-map to see the company through 2023. Evan believes design is only great when it’s great for business.

In this talk at the Bend Design Conference, he addresses the questions we ask ourselves as Designers in the New World about our motivations in designing for the future. The autobiographical lecture speaks to the ideas of authorship, innovation, sustainability, and responsibility. He links the driving forces behind mid-century furniture to the optimistic possibilities of additive production.

Clabots has taught Industrial Design at Pratt Institute since 2015. Currently, he teaches an innovative senior capstone design studio entitled Design in Context. This course asks students to look outside of themselves when designing a product and look at the real-world needs of the modern day. To accomplish this, Clabots requires students to read news articles and identify changes in society, the environment, or markets that indicate problems which industrial designers are uniquely suited to solve. This approach is centered around the three specific questions that drive Clabots’ design philosophy: Why, How, and What? Why does this problem need design as a solution, and Why are industrial designers uniquely positioned to solve it, rather than doctors, engineers, or policy makers? How do you reframe the problem to find a new white space for innovation? What is the actual object that can solve the problem?

Clabots' approach also focuses heavily on design theory, pushing students to understand how they are thinking and making decisions. He speaks about design in terms of lateral and linear thinking: lateral thinking being the exploration of different ideas, and linear thinking being the development and refinement of those ideas. Clabots encourages students to think through a number of ideas, compare the best options, and move forward to refine those options. When development stalls, one can employ this strategy to explore different variations on a concept to see if there is a better way.