Scott Bennett

Former Indy 500 Auto Engineer Discusses Design After Dark

On Friday, February 5, 2016 Design Council of the Denver Art Museum presents the 12th annual Design After Dark, one of Denver’s most highly anticipated parties for its ever-changing theme and innovative, design-inspired atmosphere. The heart of Design After Dark has been reinvented to give form to its unique 2016 theme: AMASS. Inspired by the concept of gathering and collecting, sixteen Colorado-based artists and designers have been invited to create an imaginative, one-of-a-kind artwork for a one-night-only exhibition and silent auction.

I recently sat down with past and present participant Scott Bennett, a former Indy 500 auto engineer and the founder of Housefish, a Denver-based furniture design and manufacturing studio. Scott spoke with me about his object for Design After Dark | AMASS and his inspiration. Here are the highlights from that conversation.

Darrin Alfred: Can you tell us about your Design After Dark | AMASS object?

Scott Bennett: I kind of subverted the theme of amass. Rather than thinking about building something up, I wanted to take the opposite approach and remove the mass. The most important part of my career in designing racecars was getting weight out. A reduction in mass gives you greater acceleration, and greater acceleration means you go faster. This principle applies to all sorts of different objects. On airplanes, reducing mass improves your cargo carrying ability and range; on road cars, it improves performance and fuel efficiency; and in buildings or other objects, it reduces the amount of material used.

Traditionally, making an object as light as possible requires the designer to use their best judgment at an initial guess, analyze the design to make sure it’s strong enough, and make changes as they go. It's a slow process.

In recent years, a lot of progress has been made with genetic algorithms that automate this process. The designer starts with a basic outline, defines the forces and constraints involved, and then the computer starts gradually removing material, analyzes the results, and then tries something different and compares it to the previous version. The process repeats thousands of times until it converges on an ideal shape. It's very similar to the way natural selection uses genetic mutation to shape living things into an ideal form to suit a given set of conditions. The resulting computer-derived shapes tend to look a lot like natural forms like bones or trees.

The chair I'm designing for Design After Dark uses this process to remove the unnecessary mass from a wooden chair. The resulting shapes will be carved by computer-controlled equipment, then painstakingly joined together using our signature digital joinery. The finished chair will be about 70-80% lighter than its rectilinear solid wood equivalent, with no loss of structural integrity.

– Scott Bennett

DA: Lastly, do you live with your own work?

SB: I feel like most designers live in a state of constant dissatisfaction with the world, so every time I see something I've made I only see its flaws. We mostly keep the prototypes (which are usually full of flaws). The original Key prototypes that started the company are in our living room, and I just built our daughter a storage bed that will probably end up in the product line in some form. She hasn't noticed that the drawer alignment is about 1/32" off, but I do...

Since its debut in 2005, Design After Dark has showcased Colorado’s creative talent. Funds raised at this annual mid-winter party support a wide range of acquisitions, exhibitions, and design-related programming for the Denver Art Museum’s department of architecture, design, and graphics. We invite you to join us on Friday, February 5!