Pratt Institute

Star­wood Hotels & Resorts World­wide, Inc. and Pratt Insti­tute cre­ated an exclu­sive stu­dent design com­pe­ti­tion in Spring 2009.

As a leader in hotel design and inno­va­tion, Star­wood Hotels & Resorts deliv­ers upscale guest expe­ri­ences supe­rior to any other. Star­wood is one of the largest hotel and leisure com­pa­nies with over 1000 prop­er­ties across the globe. This con­test intro­duced stu­dents to the hos­pi­tal­ity and meet­ings indus­try and chal­lenged them to develop a prod­uct that had the poten­tial to be man­u­fac­tured and dis­trib­uted to hotels and Starwood’s largest brand, Sher­a­ton Hotels & Resorts.

 Con­test Details

The objec­tive of the con­test was to re-imagine a chair to be used in banquet/meeting spaces at Star­wood hotels. Star­wood chal­lenged stu­dents to think beyond the cur­rent con­fines of a stan­dard meet­ing room chair and develop designs that speak to meet­ing atten­dees who want more func­tion­al­ity and con­trol over their meet­ing space. Stu­dents were encour­aged to think cre­atively, but all sub­mis­sions needed to be based on mate­ri­als and tech­nol­ogy avail­able in the mar­ket today. Oper­a­tional insight from the hotels and meet­ing plan­ners was pro­vided as the designer shaped the Meet­ing Room Chair.

Suc­cess­ful entries demon­strated the fol­low­ing criteria:

• Com­fort­able (Can you sit all day in this chair?)

• Func­tional (Is it easy to move chairs from one space to another? Are there any spe­cial fea­tures that will allow the meet­ing attendee to be more pro­duc­tive? How can the chair allow the user to con­trol their per­sonal environment?)

• Inno­v­a­tive (What fea­tures make this chair dif­fer­ent from other meet­ing chairs? How will this chair rev­o­lu­tion­ize the meet­ing industry? )

• Adheres to Oper­a­tional Lim­i­ta­tions (Is this chair stack­able? Is the chair crafted from durable materials?)

The con­test was judged by hos­pi­tal­ity design and brand man­age­ment lead­ers and the win­ning designer, Ash­ley Thorfinn­son, received one mil­lion Star­points® to be redeemed for free nights at Star­wood hotels and resorts.