Bringing Good Design To The Masses

Source : The Business Times, December 21, 2007

Uber-designer Karim Rashid talks to PARVATHI NAYAR about his interest in visual language and what draws him to a project

HE Is one of today's hottest designers, almost a household name in the US with signature products that meld form and function with a love for colour and sleek shapes. In person, with his imposing height and attention-grabbing white-and-pink sartorial statement, Egyptian-born, New York-based Karim Rashid certainly fits the role of uber-designer.

Sartorial statement: The colourful Sceye glasses and the funky Alessi watch are both designed by its wearer, Karim Rashid, who is attired in his signature white-and-pink colours

It helps, of course, that every accessory he's wearing has been personally designed by him: colourful Sceye glasses, funky Alessi watch, comfortable Fessura shoes and eye-catching rings. Having long abandoned mantras as predictable as 'creative people wear black', Karim has worn only white - and pink - for several years now. 'It makes shopping for clothes very easy; if I walk into a store and don't see white, I leave.'

Karim is credited with bringing good design to the masses, his commercial success somewhat unusually matched by equivalent critical acclaim. In other words, if he has over 2,000 objects put into production, equally, his objects are featured in the permanent collections of museums like New York's Museum of Modern Art.

The 47-year-old designer was in town for a series of events connected with the Singapore Design Festival that included a design lecture on Blurring Boundaries, unveiling two limited edition prints inspired by the MINI Cabrio Sidewalk, and the ongoing exhibition titled Plastik Blobular Worlds.

'I've been doing quite a bit of art over the past 15 years; in art you can be completely free,' says Karim. He enjoys the space this allows him to inhabit, space that lies somewhere between the worlds of design - that by definition has to be useful - and art, which defines itself as having no usefulness at all.

As promised by its title, Karim's exhibition showcases colourful, two- and three-dimensional blobs, which, says the designer-artist, evolved out of years of experimentation with the latest tools of computer technology.

However, his interest in visual language grew out of a childhood love for drawing. 'As a child I would hide under the bed and draw,' he says, explaining how he was not at all tuned into the 'real' world populated by adults. Very soon the precocious child realised that with the act of drawing, 'I could change my physical environment, alter what I saw around me'. And so he was hooked.

Growing up, he thought he might be an architect but happily found his true calling in industrial design, and graduated with a degree in it from Canada. Karim went on to graduate in design studies in Italy, then spent a year at the Rodolfo Bonetto studio in Milan.

In 1993 he opened his design studio in New York where he is still largely based. There is an inevitability to this choice of geography: as young children, Karim and his brother were so fascinated with New York, they promised each other that one day it would be the city in which they'd live. When he actually started living the dream, however, there were a few nightmare years.

'The first five years were painful. For eight months I cold-called about 100 companies for design work - picking companies that I felt needed good design rather than companies that already practised it.' Finally he got work with the Santa Fe-based company Nambe, which had been founded in 1951 but was still relatively unknown in the US. Karim's first collection for the company sold for about US$30 million, and along the way, established his American credentials.

Since then, he has worked on product and interior design, fashion and architecture, with such names as Sony, Prada and Issey Miyake, to create iconic objects and democratic designs like the Oh Chair and Garbo trash can. Among the many awards he has received is the prestigious Daimler-Chrysler award for design excellence. He has also taught design at prestigious schools like the Pratt Institute.

Today Karim gets 'five design proposals a week from over 24 countries', but the projects he gets involved in have nothing to do with the remuneration offered. 'The reason I became successful was because I didn't worry about the money; all I'd ask myself was, 'Is there something new that I can do with this project?' Today I'd pick a project based on three criteria: it must allow opportunities for innovation and be in an area that needs improvement; also, I need to believe in the agenda of the company.'

For example, when he got into redesigning the vacuum cleaner for Dirt Devil, what captured him was the idea of a paradigm shift. His Dirt Devil KONE, with its sleek, sculptural form, was born out of a desire to 'break the archetype of the vacuum as something you hide away. I wanted to create an object so beautiful and simple you'd leave it on display in your home, so you could just pick it up when you needed to use it.'

Future plans include the realisation of a long cherished ambition - to create his own line of casual clothes for men and women. Any advance previews? 'There will be jeans but not in blue,' he says cryptically.

But it's not just colours and fabrics that he wants to play with. Karim has no room for nostalgia, and wants to rethink the basic elements of clothing, such as jacket lapels or the placement of pockets, to see if these things still have reference to - and relevance with - the way we live today. 'I want to make clothes that are more symbiotic with the world in which we live - like sporting gear today, for example, that is so well designed.'

Karim is someone who wants to leave his visual mark on the contemporary world. It's a desire reflected in the titles of the books he has authored, such as I Want to Change the World, Evolution and Design Your Self: Rethinking the Way You Live, Love, Work, and Play. Karim reads a lot - philosophers like Paul Virilio, business books like Our Brave New World - but he hasn't looked at a design magazine in over two years. 'I need to be inspired by other things now,' he says.

Inspiration - that much-hyped word - should not come from looking at other people's designs but from a personal response to the world we live in.

Plastik Blobular Worlds, at Gallery Hotel, Robertson Quay, Until Jan 31. The works are for sale: digital paintings at $8,500; each of the 250 sculptural blobs at $250 and the entire installation at $45,000. Free admission.