Design's local talent

Kenn Gray wants to own the biggest and best interior design firm in Boston. Gia Sung just wants to have fun, designing funky gift and home products that her friends can actually afford to buy. Dinesh Tharmaratnam dreams of being a star -- a designer with as much buzz as Michael Graves or Phillippe Starck.

This is the Boston design world's new generation.

They are a few years out of school, in their late 20s or early 30s, and just starting to make a name and a mark. They work for others, at large architecture and design firms and at small industrial design start-ups. They work for themselves, out of their homes or their workshops, following an inner rhythm they hope others will appreciate.

They help design everything from homes, work spaces, and universities to the coffee mug you pick up at Starbucks or the plastic wine rack at Crate and Barrel.

Their sensibilities are modern, tending toward clean lines, form following function, and a general disdain for anything frou-frou.

They are part of an American trend toward a European awareness of design and its economic and aes-

thetic virtues. These young designers are in a profession that's on the upswing, and they know it. "I think a lot of people in my generation get excited about design and fun and color," says Rachel Moffett, 25, who studied industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and designs gift and home products at Swing Ltd., an industrial design firm in Concord.

Dawn Barrett, dean of the RISD Architecture and Design division, says applications to her division have increased about 20 percent in the past five years. Students are more aware of design as a profession, she says. These days, mainstream stores like Target recruit famous designers to create products. Television ads for cars trumpet superior design. Newsweek recently devoted an entire issue to design and how accessible it has become.

"Our students are pretty sophisticated," says Barrett. "There's been a lot of marketing to young people. They have had consumer products put in front of them where design is part of the added value."

Rachel Pike, a professor of interior design at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, says the building blocks of design are form, rhythm, and balance. On the grandest scale, design is architectural: designing a building. On the smallest, it's industrial: designing products.

In the middle of the spectrum is interior design, the art and science of planning an interior space, starting with where the electrical outlets and interior walls might go and ending with the color of the couches and the rugs.

"As a designer, you might do some interior decorating, but you also have to understand the building code and be able to work with engineers to produce technical design," says Pike.

The computer is the tool of choice for designers, though the drawing pencil and the T-square are not obsolete. Pike says there are some disadvantages, such as a shying from curvilinear drawings because they're hard to do on the computer. But, she says, the advantages are greater, especially the ability to quickly change a design if a client changes his mind.

As an intern at the Brookline design firm Vessel, Andreu Osika helped design a free-form children's night light. "I think design exists to elevate common everyday experiences," says Osika, 29, who has a master's degree in industrial design from RISD. "Even really simple things like household items need to provide a positive experience."

At 25, Patrick Planeta was recently named an associate interior designer at CBT Architects Inc. in Boston. As the youngest associate at the firm, he works mostly on condominium projects and commercial spaces and hopes to bring a freshness to what he calls "Boston's staid culture."

"I like very modern, clean and simple, nothing overdone or over-decorated," he says.

Gray, 30, opened his own interior design company two years ago, focusing mostly on high-end residential work. Though not trained as an interior designer -- he studied fashion design at the Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles -- he's already well-known on the Boston scene. He owned an art gallery, Media Gallery, and used to be director of exhibitions at the Judi Rotenberg Gallery on Newbury Street. He works out of his Jamaica Plain home, but is planning to open a South Boston office this spring.

"My goal is to build this business to the biggest and best in Boston," he says.

Tharmaratnam, 31, a 1997 Wentworth graduate, worked as an interior designer at The Stubbins Associates in Cambridge until early March, when he was laid off because the work had slowed down. Within days, he was hired as an interior design consultant at Bargmann Hendrie + Archetype Inc., an architecture and interior design firm in Boston. "When this happens, it makes you hyperfocused," he says. "It gives you a lot of different experiences and you learn to market yourself better."

And Tharmaratnam hasn't given up on his grand dreams. "Eventually, I want to be a name brand," he says. For now, he envisions working on big industrial or residential projects, such as the biomedical complex he worked on at Stubbins or the condo complex he's now working on.

Sung, 29, says her employer, Swing, has so many young employees its nickname is the "University of Swing." Co-owners Everett Bramhall and Mark Hazel say part of their job is to turn people with big ideas and little experience into competent designers who can operate within the parameters of a real-world company.

"Coming to work and being creative every day is not easy," says Bramhall, who is a 1985 RISD graduate. "They have a hard job."

Sung wants her designs to reach as broad an audience as possible. "In school, many of the designs are so exclusive," she says. "Our goal is to bring really good design to a massive amount of people."