design manager and furniture designer, born 1957, lives in Munich / Bavaria

 

He did his studies in Munich and Los Angeles. For his dissertation as industrial designer in the early 1980s, Böninger designed the first laptop, a model that can be viewed today in Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne museum. Following his studies, he first worked for Schlagheck und Schultes in Munich, one of the premier addresses for German product design. Thereafter he went to Siemens, where at the end of the 1990s he organized the spin-off of the Siemens design department together with Herbert H. Schultes. This was the beginning of Designaffairs, with over 100 employees one of Europe’s leading design studios, with Böninger as managing director starting in 1997. In addition to his main function as design manager, he also designed furniture under the label “Auerberg Sunday Morning Design”. In the late 1990s he began to experiment with warping aluminium sheets. His initial design, first issued in a small series and quite well-known amongst insiders, is the Soester Hocker ( Soest Stool, 2000 for Mabeg), a featherweight with remarkable capabilities. Weighing in at little more than a kilogram, the stool is able to support up to three hundred pounds. A more recentBöninger piece is the Buga rocking chair, a commission for theNational Garden Show in Munich in 2005. This construction ofrectangular steel tubing and sailcloth evokes double associationswith the classic director’s chair and the cantilevered chair of the1920s, two chair types that stand in different ways for mobility.In other designs as well, such as the tables Sax and Acca ( 1999and 2005, both for ClassiCon), Böninger refers back to theoriginal meaning of the word Möbel ( G e rman for furn i t u re), inLatin mobilis, i.e. mobile. In the meantime, the Munich designerhas left Designaffairs and become senior partner of brain4design,an agency for design management. He is now applying hisexperience in material technology to new designs, such as theoccasional table #24 (for Articolo), once again a very lightweightmarvel of stability, which is sold via the Internet. This is a producthe conceived expressly for mail order: Thanks to its geometricfeatures, which support the packing box precisely at the mostvulnerable corners, #24 requires extremely little packagingmaterial.