Designer picnic was the first collaboration of The Mighty Bearcats for a street design show in the meatpacking district in Chicago. The "Guerrilla Show" as it is called, is an offsite event held during Neocon, Chicago's biggest design event of the year. The show consists of several independent designers displaying their work in the back of (mostly rented) trucks pulled up side by side along the loading docks of the meatpacking district as if they were booths at a trade fair.
We began our conceptual process by analyzing the event itself. We looked at the event as a literal and figurative tailgate party for another event that was Neocon. We started to talk about how different the common lowbrow tailgate crowd that you might find at a football game would be when juxtaposed by the design crowd with their well-planned outfits and designer glass-frames. But after all, if there were one event that the designers would tailgate all year it would surely be Neocon.
We began to take individuals symbols commonly associated with tailgate parties and other outdoor gatherings and used them as conceptual fuel to design a set of new objects which would be more in keeping with our designerly audience. One of these objects was the ubiquitous picnic table. Everyone has seen that grey, warped, birdshit covered public picnic table chained to a tree in every nameless park in the country. We took this image and refaced it.
Our designer picnic table is roughly ten feet long with a laminated, frosted, beveled glass top. It has a white framework created from three literal picnic table profiles. It has twelve, individual seats, upholstered in pink and brown hounds-tooth which move freely from each other and can be pulled away. The table comes equipped with white paint pens which allow visitors to “carve” their own personal communiqué onto the surface. By the end of one such event, the top is completely covered in the scribblings of several anonymous collaborators and can be wiped clean for the next event.