Designing for a Good CauseEach year, Design  Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS calls on  major designers to create dining installations  for fund- raisers. For years, SOM has  participated in the event by conceiving not only  tables but total dining environments. DIFFA is  an opportunity for the firm to explore  unconventional design and fabrications  processes—an annual laboratory for innovation.

 

Exploring Cutting-Edge Processes In 2005, The  Design used a new acrylic polymer material to  create a seamless, organically- curved space.  The follow year’s angular design studied how  an interior environment could be distorted  through a “genetic” process and still satisfy  functional and acoustic

requirements. In 2007,  design created luminous partitions out of laser- cut metal screens with lyrical patterns derived  from traditional Middle Eastern geometries