Stories

Since 1986, Surtex® has hosted an annual International Design Competition called Designext®, honouring outstanding art and design students for their exceptional surface design work.  Each year four winners are chosen from colleges and universities from all over the world and are invited to exhibit their work to over 6,000 attendees at the Jacob K. Javits Centre in New York where their work is exposed to thousands of worldwide industry professionals.

For their 28th annual competition, Tori was one of four international winners invited to exhibit her designs in New York and have her portfolio judged by design professionals who would ultimately pick a Grand Prize winner from herself, Karina Rasmussen, Jenny Boucher and Samantha Mast.

Having had her portfolio critiqued by all four judges, including Dorothy Cosonas, Creative Director of Knoll Textiles and Knoll Luxe, Tori was announced as the Grand Prize winner for Designext® 2014.

The judges said they found Tori’s talent and vision to be beyond her three years of study and added that her work was “prolific”. 

Penny Sikalis, Surtex Vice President, described Tori’s entry as “exceptional” and commented that Tori “did an outstanding job demonstrating her passion for surface design”. 

Grand Prize Winner

Tori's innovative surface pattern designs for interior room division and home textile designs were based around the theme of Street Influences. Inspired by the world’s eyes being focused on Japan in 2020 for the Tokyo Games and by graffiti street art, Tori created her designs around a combination of Japanese motifs and art processes using graffiti spray paints, airbrushing techniques and laser-cut stencils to represent the ‘Street’ theme.

Working within the ‘LIVE’ category, Tori’s 6 original surface designs featured beautiful and elegant printed-surface solutions, on interesting substrates, for dividing contemporary livings spaces of the future.  Her ‘room dividers for shared living’ concept was inspired by forecasts in population growth for 2020 and a sense that as the population increases living space will shrink and there will be a growing need to share and divide living areas into multifunctional spaces in beautiful and creative ways.