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Hyper Designer
Karim Rashid is truly a citizen of the world. Born in
Cairo of English and Egyptian parents, he was
raised in Canada, studied postgraduate design in
Naples, Italy, and today runs his own practice in
New York City.
He has won multiple awards for his designs of
everything from packaging to restaurant design,
and counts Prada, Issey Miyake, Sony, Yahoo!,
Cappellini and Umbra amongst his global clients.
He has more than 70 objects in permanent
collections, and his designs have been exhibited in
museums from Philadelphia and Holland to
London to Tokyo.
The vast scope of Rashid’s work reflects his
insatiable appetite for the new. If he’s not
designing ashtrays and drinking glasses, he’s
trying his hand at designer suits and cosmetics
bottles. You name it, he’s probably given some
thought as to how to make it more aesthetically
pleasing, more functional and faster to produce.
We asked Design Indaba alumnus and product
designer extraordinaire, Naoto Fukusawa, to pose
a few questions to Karim.
For you, what exactly is design?
I act as design editor or cultural editor of our
physical world. Ironically, themore product
produced the more design is necessary, as the
saturation of objects predicate a need to be
improved, bettered, with higher quality and new
ideas. I am interested in developing products that
are accessible to everyone and I believe design is
democratic. I design for everyone. Good design, as
far as I am concerned, is a combination of these six
points: relevant intelligent ideas, functional,
expressive (it’s semiological appropriateness and
aesthetic originality), it’s appropriate use of
technology and materials, the product’s impact on
the environment (it’s full cycle) and the product’s
quality (including maintenance and durability).
Good design can also shift and change human
behaviour and create new social conditions. Design
is really communication to a better more utopian
sense of our physical landscape and well being.
Design and ideas can be disseminated through
syntax, lectures, books, films, not just by designing
a ‘thing’. Design is every part of life. Design is
creative, political, and social.
Which designer/design do you respect, and
why?
I do not separate designers from other creators
in the world. Here is a list of people that I have
learned from , that I respect, that shaped some
of my philosophies:
Luigi Colani, Ettore Sottsass, Joe Colombo,
Philip Starck, George Nelson, Charles Eames,
Isamo Noguchi, Ross Lovegrove, Bruno Munari,
Carlo Mollino, Victor Papanek, Frederick
Keisler, Shiro Kuramata, Buck Minster Fuller,
Toyo Ito, Eero Saarinen, Alessandro Mendini,
Laslo Moholy Nagy, Naum Gabo.
Contemporary artists such as Dutchman, Gober,
Charles Ray, Koons, Peter Hailey, AndyWarhol,
Noriko Mori, Dan Graham, Robert Irwin,
Mayijima, Pipilotti Rist, Chapman Brothers,
Donald Judd, James Turrell; and philosophers
like Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord,
Jean Bachlard, and Jacques Derrida, Tufen
Orel; fashion designers like YSL, Bikkenberg,
Hussein Chalayan, JPG, Halston, and the list
goes on and on...
What do you think with regard to the
relationship between the things you design
and the people who use them?
The world is becoming very visually and
sensorially savvy. The energy and times are
hypertrophic, hypertextual and technorganic.
Consumers are perpetually interested in being
stimulated, in being excited about their physical
environment. It is the residue of the digital age.
If the virtual world is so flexible, personalised,
complex and aesthetic, why not the physical
world?
What do you use as a point of departure for
your design ideas?
Every place inspires me - I love and get inspired
usually by the unfamiliar so even the lost local
places of industrial parks, airports, hotels in
small towns, alleyways in big cites, taxis in
London, a gym in Hong Kong, a bathroomin
Paris, a prop plane in Sweden, a cinema in
Milan, a Renault in Sweden, anything that is
new to my senses, unusual, odd, inspires me.
Beauty is in everything.
Generally I am travelling, designing and
co-ordinating projects fromthe road. I love
being on planes where I can really focus on
projects. I can fill a sketch pad on a single
European flight (about 100 pages). I write
proposals, answer press questions, strategise,
develop ideas and directions, and dream about
what I really want to do - not what I think I
must do. I travel about 180 days a year. I have
crazy days in the office. I must sleep 7.5 hours
exactly or I have trouble performing. I wake up
at 8:00 am and brew the strongest fresh cup of
espresso, answer all my emails (usually
European or Japanese at that time), then go to
the office (I live above my office - a hyperconvenient
and enjoyable condition - allows me
to work very late), review issues with my office
manager, answer more emails, write articles,
proposals, etc. then go down the list of projects
- meet with each one of my staff (I probably
review/work on the design of 20 projects in a
day with my staff - I have about 40 projects
going so I manage to get to each project every
other day), have two or three client meetings,
have salad nicoisealmost everyday and soy
shake (in 10 minutes break), drink four strong
coffees and one late afternoon decaf - the Do
cup of tea - and I keep going until about 8pm -
then either go to the gym, go out for dinner, or
go to an opening. I try not to work past 22:00
because I work seven days a week. I
perpetually multitask.
When I meet with a client or potential project (I
also create many projects myself just because I
have so many ideas I want to realise - in fact,
30% of my office is conceptual non-client-forthe-
love-of-design projects). I immediately have
several ideas (If I like and believe in the project.
If I don't I turn it down) which I sketch right
after the meeting in a hotel, cafe or office.
Then I keep sketching over and over. Then I
put together several of my senior staff and
explain the project, the concepts, and they start
to develop the concepts digitally with 3-D
modelling programs. Then I review it - or keep
thinking about the project, I research the
possibility of the behavioural issues, new
materials, new technologies, etc. and I share
this information with my staff. In turn, I have
people in the office researching the same
pragmatic issues, and getting virtual, solid, or
real models produced. Each project actually has
a very different process, sometimes vertical,
sometimes linear, sometimes hypertextual. I
used to do the drafting, the rendering, the
engineering, the sketching, the entire process -
but these days I do not have the time.
A great point of entry for me is the digital age -
that has afforded us tools that speed up the
process, create better precision, better quality,
more variance. (The profession is much less
hands on, and more in the third order of
prosthetics. CNC, Raid prototyping, solid
modelling, new production methods, smart
materials, parametric programs, etc. has really
completely shifted the profession).
Each project inspires the next, each typology
has a commonality to the next typology, each
morphology has its relationship. I reallymake
an effort at staying broad. I do not agree with
specialisation.
This is just my impression, but I think that
there is a strong link between your designs
and fashion. Despite fashion trends being
short-lived, there exists a certain
attractiveness or passion in changes in
fashion.What do you think with regard to the
attractiveness of design and time?
Fashion has perpetually spun its wheels in
circles, recycling. Design is based on new
technologies, new behaviours, new materials,
and newproduction methods. Design is
infiltrating fashion, because fashion needs to
catch up with our product landscape. For
example in cosmetics, I designed over the last
several years many projects that are changing
the 'perfume bottle' landscape. I see now
everyone catching up. I introduced polymers,
plastics, and new 'mobile' behaviours that had
very little to do with the bottle as an aesthetic
sculpture of glass, and everything to do with
the way we live and our integration with
design and technology.
Remember that many fashion designers are
trained as architects - Romeo Gigli,
Gianfranco Ferre, etc - also there has always
been a blend of designing and fashion. It is
just that designers always looked down on
fashion as something superfluous. I always
believed that fashion is a critical cultural
motivator and shaper and design is
instrumental to it. I think it surfaced in the
sixties when Luigi Colani did clothes, and in
the seventies with Memphis doing jewellery,
although even the Bauhaus and the Russian
constructivists created clothing and fashion
with design and architecture.
Design will be like fashion in the sense that
we are getting impatient with things in our
lives and that we want to exist in a world that
is about new perpetual experiences, not
things. I see a perfectly
cycular
world
developing where we will hyper-consume and
shape our individual worlds – and everything
will be disposable and 100% recyclable so that
we perpetually change our environments, our
spaces, our objects, our needs, our
experiences – a polygamous object landscape.
The image of you as always wearing white is quite
strong.Why is it that you wear white so often?
Please also tell us what you think about the colour
of designs.
I wear white, silver, and pink starting the
Millennium. I gave away all my black wardrobe.
Black represents negativity, Armageddon, jealousy,
greed. I describe my style as contemporary,
infostethic, and addition by subtraction – style can
be learned but the truth is that you are born with an
aesthetic eye and sensibility so to really know
proportion and balance - that is innate. So style is
not just what you wear – it is how you live, how you
think, how you exist, to be. White represents purity,
clarity, positivity, autonomy, and a tabula rasa–
where you are free to think, be, and act.
What kind of things would you like to design in
the future?
There is so much to do. I want to design cars,
planes, clothes, houses, robots, and shape the future
but I think that the future is that we will own
nothing - this is really nature - we lease cars, we
lease houses, and soon we will learn to lease
everything - experience it for a short while, and go
on to the next. We will create a hyperconsumptive,
forever dynamic, ever-vast changing human
condition, where everything will be cyclic,
sustainable, biodegradable, and seamless. This is
Utopia, this is freedom, and this is nirvana. All the
goods in the world will only exist if they give us a
new or necessary experience.
I want to host a design TV show, I want to create
music, I want to design a small museum, I want to
live in perpetual inspiration, I want to be part of the
entire world, working in every country, touching the
souls of everyone. I want be smarter, faster,
stronger. I want to implant a microchip in my eye
that allows me to see everything.
I would like to live in 2030 (this is not a dream). By
this point we should have the cure for cancer and
HIV, planes that travel at Mach5 or 6, a global
paradigm (one global culture), clothes that you
spray on your body from an aerosol can, total
robotic global production (no manual labour
assembly lines), no high tech products – everything
will be immaterial for communication,
entertainment, and information, multilingual
language voice chip, implants, anti-ageing... and
Smartoos‘intelligent tattoos a tattoo that has my ID
numbers, passport, social security, bank account,
e-money, etc. so I never need a wallet, money or
credit cards, great virtual sex, creating by waving my hands
like a conductor, no paper, no pens, no chairs, just a virtual
plane in space that is highly customised, complete
reconfigurability, and personalisation of goods, we will all
design our own objects and spaces - can’t wait!
We live in a borderless world now – all creative disciplines
are blurring, merging, hybridising – in my studio I am
designing buildings, interiors, fashion, objects, products,
furniture, art, installations, music, film–aWarholian model
– I hope to continue this and – although this sounds
arrogant – this is all Industrial Design and all the creative
professions will be under the industrial umbrella because
this profession is based on industry and technology, all
architecture is changing to become an industrial product,
fashion is changing to become industrial products, etc.
I think that you are a charismatic designer. Why do you
think that you have gained this image? I think that you are
a designer who exerts an influence socially. What is your
social mission as a designer?
I want everyone to live in a contemporary world. Forget the
past – live and experience now. I spread the gospel of
design perpetually because I believe that design is a way of
living, a way of thinking, and a way of being. I have a great
deal to say.
Yes, I am charismatic and I believe that designers have
taken a back seat for too long considering we shape this
world. I am doing new things in the world, there are so
many opportunities to change the world, then I change the
public knowledge of this profession and future generations
of designers will have so much more respect and ease in
this profession. I think that it is great because this profession
needs stars so that it can become a popular subject and be
more instrumental in affecting culture. America has not had
a design star since Charles Eames (40 years ago) and
thanks to Philippe Starck and a few others we now get an
opportunity to have a voice in the world. Design is like
music or actors but much more complex, more involved,
and we deserve recognition. My scope of work is
broadening - I will host a television show on design; I am
releasing CD compilations this spring, and creating my own
music for fall 2003 release. I am designing clothes,
buildings, publishing books, etc. I want to write a book on
the “Supreme Lifexistence + Style” How to be smart,
creative, organised, healthy, young, and rich. (I am not all
these things yet).
Why do you think people like your designs?
They represent and imbue all the energy, spirit, and content
that I try to bring to them. I have many unsuccessful
projects too. I am quite critical about my work and I admit
many times that some objects, ideas and spaces are not
perfect. But I am always very thrilled when I receive
recognition froma consumer that they love my work. I was
lecturing in Nova Scotia a few years ago when a 12-yearold
came up to me with a limited edition chrome Garbo can
and asked me to sign it, and recently I was speaking in
Washington and a 10-year-old with her mother came up to
me and she pulled the ‘King’ piece of the chess set out of
her pocket and asked me to sign it, and her mother told me
that she loves my work and thinks I am the best
designer in the world. I was extremely moved
and flattered because these children are the
next wave of people who will grow up with
design as part of their everyday life and are
already embracing design at a young age. Ten
years ago, a 12-year-old would be interested in
Britney Spears - not design, so it is reassuring to
know that design is finally making an impact as
a public subject and effectual with popular
culture. Children always react so positively to
my work – because they exist in the moment –
that is how I exist – the past is pointless – the
future is fugacious.
How do you join together design and
regionality or cultural difference?
Digital technology is the instrument for the new
Tower of Babel phenomena. The world started
as one dialect, one religion, one culture, and
then it built the tower of Babel to reach Utopia
(heaven – nirvana – god). But god would not
allow the folk to reach him or the heavens so he
gave everyone a diverse tongue, a diverse
culture, diverse beliefs so they could not
communicate. This is the beginning of the
world as we know it - but we are returning to
that global constellate - Utopia - and our one
language is binary notation - zeros and ones.
We will one day not have cultural differences,
only creates global pockets of perpetual new
ideas from individual thinking. All humans are
creative and we will all participate in shaping
our global paraditic universe.
I believe that there is nomore local - that local
implies a way of thinking, a myopic way of
seeing human behaviour in a narrow context,
but the world is shrinking and global is the only
way to perceive culture and to think freely,
unobstructed by political, social, historical, and
nepotistic issues. Local thinking is the nemesis
of free spirit and real creative thought in our
new globalisation. A new international style
seems to have established itself recently.We are
all reading the same books, watching the same
movies, looking at the same magazines, listing
to the same music, we're even drinking the
same soda. Inevitably our creative
manifestations are starting to be the same. The
concept of creative simultaneous discovery is
based on shared information and so in turn, the ideas are becoming
similar. We are shaping a similar construct, a similar notion of physical
space and time. At the same time since there is no single dogma, no
single school of thought, no formulae, no doctrine, unlike 50 years ago.
Modernism is dead. Rules are dead. Humans can exist and
domesticate in with a new freer spirit. The results are everything,
everyone, every sensibility, every idea simultaneously in real-time
anywhere and everywhere. I love the autonomy of an eclectic
landscape, where all human creative thought and ideas are expressed
regardless of their origins or of their history.We live in a time of NO
RULES! and NO BORDERS, and of real freedom of expression. I like
this contradiction, wherewe are influenced by everything, all
information simultaneously, where things appear the same globally,
but at the same time things are split into micro tribes, into thousands of
diverse sensibilities, of diverse tastes, views, beliefs, values, and
feelings. This contradiction (the global village versus an eclectic chaos)
is our new contemporary aesthetic world that is a plethora of
expressions, signs, logos, where there is no good and bad, a
Nietzschian idea beyond good and evil in design.
Please tell us about three of your own designs that you like most or
that you perceive to be most representative of your work.
Design is in a new enlightenment where it will touch, effect, affect,
and be every part of our everyday lives. Design is making people live
today, not yesterday, making us be phenomena-logically part of this
modicum – design is bringing pleasure, betterment, energy, love, and
meaning to our physical world. There is no turning back – finally
design is here to stay as a qualifier of a better more aesthete life,
poetic, smart, functional, democratic and hopefully seamless. I am not
sure if I have succeeded yet with this criteria in my work. I like mostly
the OH chair because it is five years old and selling more than ever –
which means there is an appreciation for the fact that it is democratic
(inexpensive), very comfortable, and engineered and moulded in a
very innovative way. I would say the same for the Butterfly chair of
Magis (engineered like an automobile) in the highest quality ABS
plastic. I would also say the new Copco kettles (new technology), the
swing chair of Frighetto, the bloob stools, and the Kush for new
materials and molding techniques. Fromamore romantic and poetic
idea I like Superblob, Orgy, and Krysallis. I generally tend to like the
projects that are not in the market, yet. Artists are always most
interested in the work they are doing at the moment.
Could you please give a message to South African designers?
I approach environmental sustainability from “material reduction” and
deproductisation. I believe that I bring to companies smart efficient
minimal sensual proposals that can reduce their SKUs (numbers of
styles/variations in their lines). One product today should replace three
at least - it’s about editing.
A designer will be a cultural purveyor and developing products that
people want to elevate experiences, developing proposals that actually
really change our lives and bring a heightened - more enjoyable -
experience to life.
There are several strategies not just to deproductisebut to develop
successful products:
- Design objects that meet all the criteria not just one. Beauty,
performance, meaning, cost, seamless production, no hand labour,
ease of assembly, smart material, recyclable, spatial, etc.
- Show companies that quality creates higher margins and greater
brand loyalty.
- Subtract SKUs that are complex, confusing, noncommunicative,
labour-intensive, made from too many parts, high maintenance,
culturally irrelevant, etc.
- Design flexible, extensive, relaxed, module, interchangeable,
reconfigurable, multifunctional products.
- Remove collateral, streamline distribution, manufacture on
demand, drop-ship, local manufacturing, global positioning, etc.
- Promote, educate, disseminate a direct simple philosophy - design
experiences versus objects. Form follows subject.
I want to reach Utopias, one global culture, one religion, the religion of
love, harmony and beauty and high-energy.
Karim Rashid is presently designing LCD televisions, soap bottles,
shampoo bottles, cosmetics for Miyake, Prada, Davidoff, packaging,
furniture for Cappellini, Felice Rossi, Driade, Edra, Frighetto, Pure
Design, Zerodisegno, Ferrachi Casa, Nienkamper, Magis, De Sede,
and others, glassware for Mglass, Nambe, Covo, Egizia, Salviati,
Decorum, Arnolfo di Cambio, products for Guzzini, Umbra, and
Mikasa, lighting for Foscarini, Fabbian, Artemide, and Nemo, interiors
of restaurant in NYC, Moscow, Mexico and Las Vegas, Architecture in
London and Athens, Hotel interiors in Los Angeles and San Francisco,
his own shop, retail shops in Dallas and Denver, clothing collection,
jewelry for Golay in Switzerland, Greek water bottle, watches,
kettles, thermos, carpets for Dreschle Teppich and L’Art du Temps,
toys for Bozart, a hot tub, bath tubs, street furniture in Tokyo, a new
book, TV show, a bicycle for Biomega, luggage for Leeds, Wallpaper
for Marburger in Germany and Wolf Gordon, dishware for Wovo, and
he just completed editing the 2003 International Design Yearbook. He
is also doing some art installations and painting shows in Graz, NYC
and Paris and some objects for charities globally. He just launched
music CD compilations with Neverstop records, and a retrospective
in Seoul, Korea, and the list goes on...
Catch this and more at next year’s Design Indaba... first-hand
from the maestro.
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