Scott Klinker Publishes Fine Design Studio Guide Book, Launching at Cranbrook Art Museum This September
Photo by Annette Behrens.
Cranbrook Academy of Art is proud to celebrate alumnus and former Artist-in-Residence Scott Klinker (MFA Design 1996), who has published Fine Design: A Studio Guide to Remixing Design, Art, Craft, and Industry, a new book that draws on more than twenty years of studio teaching and practice to define a contemporary framework for designers working across art, craft, and industry. Published by Set Margins (Eindhoven) with a foreword by Cranbrook Art Museum Director Andrew Blauvelt (MFA Design 1988), the book was featured in ArchDaily and available now.
A book launch and signing at Cranbrook Art Museum is planned for Wednesday, September 23, during Detroit Month of Design in September 2026. This event is free and open to the public. Register on the museum’s website.
Fine Design begins from an observation that is central to Klinker’s career: design, once bound to the logic of mass manufacturing, is returning to the intimacy of making. Designers now operate with unprecedented access to the tools of production, distribution, and digital media. The result is a renewed engagement with materials, processes, audiences, and scale — and a dissolving of the opposition between industrial design and craft. In its place, Klinker proposes a hybrid landscape in which digital and handmade practices inform one another, and in which the designer’s own voice, authorship, and material intelligence take center stage.
The book offers a guide to navigating this terrain. Drawing on his two decades of teaching Cranbrook’s 3D Design/Industrial Design program, where he led the department from 2001 until his departure in 2025, Klinker pairs reflective essays with workbook-style exercises that help readers build their own creative tools. Rather than prescribing a single method, the book invites designers to explore new scales of production, rethink authorship, and approach making with both rigor and flexibility. It is richly illustrated with inventive student and alumni work from the Cranbrook 3D Design/Industrial Design program and addressed to emerging designers, educators, and transdisciplinary makers alike.
As one recent review noted, Fine Design “does not present a manifesto so much as a taxonomy, a way of naming what many studios have been doing quietly for years: working at the intersection of art, craft, and design without apologizing for the hybridity.”
Klinker studied under Michael McCoy at Cranbrook before returning to lead the 3D Design department, during which time he forged industry partnerships with Herman Miller, Alessi, Steelcase, Landscape Forms, and Burton Snowboards, among many others, and built a program that helped launch hundreds of careers. His own studio was named one of “Ten Studios Leading Detroit’s Design Scene” by Dezeen in 2024. Fine Design is the culmination of those twenty years of thinking and teaching, now offered as a resource for the next generation of studio practitioners.
Learn more:
Fine Design: A Studio Guide to Remixing Design, Art, Craft, and Industry – Arch Daily
