"Michel Dallaire is Montreal's leading industrial designer of consumer products. Son of the noted French modern painter Jean Dallaire, he was educated at Montreal's Institut des Arts Appliqués. He studied interior and industrial design under Julien Hébert (and later worked with him) and graduated in 1963. Awarded a grant from the NIDC, he continued his studies at Stockholm's School of Arts, Crafts and Design (Konstfackskolan) until 1965.
On graduation, he joined the Montreal firm Jacques Guillon & Associates, where he worked on Concept B furniture for Habitat, produced by the manufacturer Paul Arno. In 1967 he became an associate at Bosse, Coutu, Dallaire Associés, where he stayed until forming his own firm, Dallaire Morin Designers Associés, two years later. The company spun off a subsidiary, Dallaire, Morin, DeVito, and Dallaire became its president. Since 1974 he has operated his own firm, Michel Dallaire Design Industriel, in Montreal, and has earned countless prestigious design awards, including two from Geneva's Salon International des Inventions (Jardibac gardening system, 1998, and Angelcare Sound and Breathing Monitor, 1999).
Dallaire has designed electrical kitchen appliances for CGE, the official torch for the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal and, along with André Jarry, modular furniture for Montreal's Olympic Village (1972), of which forty-seven thousand pieces were made. He won the Canada Award for Business Excellence three times: bronze awards for an ASPRI acoustical guitar reverb system in 1989, and for a barbecue tool set in 1988; and gold for bicycle hand-brake levers for Resentel, Montreal in 1986. He was given the Paul-Émile Borduas prize for visual arts in 1991 and made a member of the order of Quebec in 1994.
Dallaire has been a visiting professor in industrial design as the Département Supérieur des Designs Lausanne, Switzerland, since 1988 and is associate professor of industrial design at the Université de Montréal and at the École Nationale Supérieur de Création Industrielle, Montreal. He also teaches graduate courses at the faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary. His 1991 solo exhibition, Beauty in Utilitarian Forms (La Beauté des formes utiles), was featured in the Centre de Design at the Montreal campus of the Université du Québec.