SF
Art in Design
S m i t h F u r b e r s h a w
We met in 1979 and worked together as young industrial designers at the same firm.
It soon became clear that we shared similar design values and sensibilities.
We also had complementary personalities and professional capabilities.
The potential of our combined abilities led us to dream of starting our own design firm.
After a few years of imagining and discussing the possibilities, we helped start and run another design office before realizing our ultimate dream by cofounding LUNAR in 1984.
LUNAR quickly established itself as a firm that was highly regarded by clients, employees and the design community. During our thirty years of leadership at LUNAR the firm won over three hundred design awards and its work was featured in over twenty museum exhibitions.
These included the New York Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian Institution's Permanent Research Collection of Information Technology and its National Museum of American History.
In 2014 LUNAR was awarded the prestigious Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum’s
National Design Award for its thirty-year body of work.
In 2015 we sold LUNAR to McKinsey & Company and served as Senior Advisors through April 2018. Three months later we founded SmithFurbershaw LLC and affectionately call it SF
having practiced design our entire careers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
We are proud that the integrated multi-disciplinary approach we established and led at LUNAR helped make its many exceptional clients successful. At SF we are focusing on Art in Design.
Steve Jobs said, “Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation".
We believe that Art is the fundamental soul of design.
We are pursuing two SF initiatives. The first is to create artistically inspired limited-edition furniture pieces that may also lead to licensed production versions. The second is to create an inclusive practice around teaching and coaching Integral Design, where the artistic perspectives of designers and leaders of design, meet the practical needs of customers and business results.
Stay tuned for releases of our work and musings coming soon on this website and other media.
Jeff Smith and Gerard Furbershaw