On the occasion of design Week 09,we present Karim Rashid – one of the most prolific designers of his generation. Over 3000 designs in production and over 300 awards speaks about his ins and working in over 35 countries attest to Karim’s legend of design. Karim’s diversity affords him the ability to cross-pollinate ideas, materials, behaviors, aesthetics from one typology to the next, crossing boundaries and broadening consumer horizons.
Where do you live?
I am a citizen of the Global World, but I reside in New York City.
Your last trip…. and next one will be?
I travel about 220 days out of the year. I am on a trip right now! I am on my way to Milan for the 2009 Salone. I will be showing nearly 50 new pieces this year.
What is inspiring you at the moment?
Inspiration is accumulative.
Describe your personal style?
It is hard for a designer to see ‘their‘ own style and define their place in the world themselves. I have always referred to my work as sensual minimalism, but also technorganic and infostethic. I try to always have some level, even a nuance, of originality or innovation in my work whether it is a new material, a new human behavior, new form, new production method, new market, new message (be it wit, humor, emotion, meaning, social or political agenda), new experiences, or completely new concepts.
Where do you work on your projects?
I sketch profusely. I draw a 20-30 pages a day. I love drawing on planes where I can really focus on projects. I can fill a sketchpad on a single European flight (about 100 pages). I write proposals, answer press questions, strategize, and develop ideas, directions, and dream about what I really want to do – not what I think I must do.
I travel about 220 days a year. I have crazy days in the office. 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. I perpetually multitask. The projects cross over so much. One minute in the office we’re working on another wastebasket or garbage can and suddenly you realize that some concept I’m doing with that garbage can is perfect for the hallways of a hotel in Spain. It happens a lot. I’m juggling 45 projects simultaneously.
How would you describe an evolution in your work, from your first projects to the present day?
I decided when I opened my own office in 1993 after working 10 years in other offices that I would be a pluralist – I would design from the micro to macro (as Tarfurri termed ‘the city to the spoon‘). Therefore I have kept touching, investing and working in all aspects of the built environment from eyeglasses to televisions to furniture to shoes and the list goes on.
There is nothing more satisfying than one minute in my office I am working on chocolate for Solen then I turn around and work on a new hotel in Berlin.
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Your favourite product designed by you, why?
I am so proud of the OH chair and Garbo can for Umbra. They have sold millions in the US and proved to me that Americans want design but at an affordable price. In fact the Garbo was just inducted into the permanent collection of the MoMA. Paul Rowan of Umbra asked me to study waste baskets and I remember drawing about 50 ideas.
At that time the ubiquitous plastic wastebasket on the market was a rectangular black can with absolutely no character and there was little alternative. I thought that banal objects need life, they need presence, but they also need to make awful tasks more pleasant. I immediately thought about a more sensual object, an object that is wider at the top than the bottom to peak semantically about a mouth for garbage, and then raised handles in order to make it function better.
The scoop top prevented you from touching the garbage when picking it up, and the rounded inside double wall bottom prevented coffee and other liquids from getting caught in the interior. I used recycle polypropylene in various colors to give a lightness, a ephemerally to the object – to make it sensual to float it, to de-stress a chore, to add color, simplicity and sensualness to ones space.
Who would you like to design something for?
There is so much to do and I would like to design for everyone I want to design cars, planes, condominiums, houses, architecture, robots, and shape the future. I want to create beautiful, forever dynamic, ever-vast changing human experiences, where everything will be cyclic, sustainable, biodegradable, and seamless.
Where do you see yourself in ten years time?
I see the future of our aesthetic world crossing all the aesthetic disciplines so that design, art, architecture, fashion, food, music, fuse together to increase our experiences and bring greater pleasure to our material and immaterial lives.
Our motivations should focus around our conscious collective memory and a desire to fill it with ideas that are seamless between art and life. As art takes its ideas from everyday life and I hope that everyday life will take its ideas from art.
I will say that in comparison to product design Interior design has a difficult role between convincing the world that it is critical that our human psyche, our well being, our evanescent experiences, our memories, and that our lives are shaped by the spaces we occupy. There is no real quantifiable translation between a better space and a better ‘experience’, a better space and a healthier life, a better space and business, that a better building can create great revenue and a more financially successful result.
There are few cases, but very few. Design is also the shaping of these spaces, of our physical environments, not just ‘decorating’ and applying finishes to an existing architectural structure.
The key is the human element, the human scale, and the human condition. Design touches us on every level, and it can continue to define and shape our dimensional interior environments and create new progressive human behaviors and new languages.
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