Musings with Karim Rashid

March 2005

There are two words I notice you use a lot: "banal" and "organic." Why are these so present in your vocabulary and how are they manifest in your designs?
I was told I use the words ‘phenomena’ ‘soft’ and ‘sensual’ too much. Well at least I know I have some favorite syntax occupying my thoughts. I like language and words afford me to express my ideologies and concepts clearer. I am writing a dictionary now of 2000 NEW words including Designocracy, Blobject, technorganics, Pleasurtronics, Orgonomics, etc.

You’ve said your apartment is decorated largely in your own designs with some work by one of your teachers, Ettore Sottsass. Before you became a household name with an almost endless portfolio of designs for you to choose from, how did your home look?
I really only spent a few months with Ettore among many other professors. I remember a project in my sophomore year in university in Ottawa, Canada to design our ‘future design studio’ if one day we would have our own office. I made it very ‘high-tech’ – at that time there was a book published by Susan Slesin that was a bible for us as students called “HIGH-TECH”. I put in a silver rubber floor, chrome metro shelving as desks, and colored glass wall dividers.

Well 25 years later my office looks exactly like that (not consciously). All my apartments in my life had a similar feeling – long and narrow spaces and high ceilings. I would paint them all white, then paint one wall florescent orange or lime, and most of the furniture would be black or a strong color in the white space. Now I do not use black so much. Black can be powerful though it is pessimistic and nocturnal. I like feeling alive in my domestic environment.

Your father regularly rearranged the furniture in your home and you've said it's a habit you picked up from him. How do you edit your collection and decide what goes and what stays? (And where does "what goes" go?)
I go by my personal tenet called ‘addition by subtraction’ (+X-) where I must remove one exact item from my home for every piece I introduce into my home. Therefore if I add a vase, I must take away a vase. This goes for clothing, credit cards, everything. Most of the time my design pieces end up going to shows, museums, are sold or I donate them to housing works or give them away to staff or friends. I have kept this idea of material equilibrium for 5 years now and it is a really rigorous and difficult thing to do – it makes you really consider ‘what you live with’ and question what you buy. I enjoy consumption. I think consumption can be healthy and if considered our modern form of hunting, then each thing you have in your domestic environment ends up having more meaning to you via this editing process.

What do you consider the best piece you've created so far?
I am asked this question often and I always escape it by saying that what I am working on presently is the best. This is because, like all artists we tend to keep moving forward and don’t look back too much and we are critical of our own work. I know many artists including myself who end up hating their work. But strange enough I will see something form 10 or 15 years ago and start to appreciate it again.

I just had a show at Sandra Gering gallery of prototypes from 1988-1998 and it was odd but interesting to see my early work. Right now my favorite project is the limited edition watch for Timex and the limited edition Fessura shoe line I designed.

You made your name creating fast-moving consumer goods. Inexpensive, brightly colored products that appeal to the mass market and are disposable. You've said you're anti-the modernist goal of permanence--"when designers produce so-called classics that will live forever. Because I don't think we're living in a time where anything will live forever anymore." So it seems like the medium for you would be something other than plastic. Why not create from a material whose life has an end date?
First let me say that I never said I create ‘FMCG’ s. The media said that.

I prefer to design inexpensive,accessible, democratic goods – so that everyone can have and afford good design. I hate the idea that only an elite gets to have interesting or beautiful things – sadly most of the elite have bad antiquated tastes anyway. Plastics afford me to do this but I must say for every plastic product that I design that goes to market, I have designed 50 other products in ceramic, glass, metal, and other materials – so I have not really produced a great deal of plastic products – only a few that are very successful.

But also let me speak about plastics for a moment. There are many plastics that are 100% recyclable and some even biodegradable. Seventy percent of medical components and parts in hospitals are plastic – there are 20,000 different polymers and the performances and properties, vary immensely. We have plastic hearts, plastic cars, plastic houses, plastic clothes (polyesters, etc.), credit cards, mobile phones, …– latex prevents the transmission of sexual decease, contact lenses are plastic, and I could go on and on. There are many plastics that cost much more than glass, or marble, or silver. It is a very simple and backward idea that plastics are 'dangerous’ and we want to automatically criticize them without knowing anything about them.

You've described yourself as being "almost hyper-aware of consumers." Saying, "I want to know what people buy and why they buy it and what their values are." So you watch people purchase and discuss purchasing. How has this process influenced your designs?
Yes, being brought up in a consumer society that is quite critical and price conscious, rather than beauty conscious, I realized that people must ‘see’ the immediate value and immediate performance of something, then they see the beauty second. In other words design MUST work.

Critics say your designs are new age versions of old products ramped up with the aid of computer design tools. From The Independent --

Rashid actually wants to turn the clock back. The amoeba-shaped glass-topped tables of the Fifties, the stackable plastic chairs of the Sixties, the glowing pinks and purples of the Seventies, even the digital watches of the Eighties have been given a new, glossy spin with computer-assisted design.

If you look at the landscape today which I called FUTURETRO in the international Design Yearbook, there are reasons why these periods are somewhat revived or of interest- there are certain social and political constructs similar to then, there is a new interest in technology and in space age as there was then, and there are new production tools and methods that afford us new forms that were only experimented with in the past.

But I must say if there is a ‘retro’ feel I prefer it being from 30 years ago than the 16th century or the baroque period or the romantic period. Look at the design world and the copies of the 16th and 17th centuries but done with new material or technologies. At least I was alive in the 60’s! To be honest, if America’s nostalgia was from the 60’s it would be a pretty cool place – can you imagine the entire country with clear plastic chairs, wild clothing, space-age homes, psychedelic wallpaper, and futurist visions? This is not the nostalgia I am talking about – I am talking about Americans living in ‘colonial’ houses and buying fake antiques and living being seduced by imitation of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Secondly, it is not the computer that makes the difference since we control the computer, and it is only an extension of the pen. It is only a tool.

Which do you consider the most flagrant of poorly designed objects and how would you fix it?
Everything from the awful newspaper boxes on city streets to the awkward bathrooms on airplanes to the ubiquitous ugly garden furniture to depressing office spaces to the horrific conference rooms, to the poorly designed public transit, to the automobile (which is strictly style with no content and irresponsibly killing this earth) - I could go on and on.

Design is in its abecedarian stage. It is only now becoming a public subject and only now are businesses and corporations taking design seriously. It is the problem that most of what we have is poorly designed, antiquated, unnecessary, obsolete, or just not relevant to the time in which we live. We will always need objects but everything in our lives should offer us some experience (and hopefully a heightened experience), touch our emotions, give us pleasure, increase our aesthetic landscape, and be objects of rapture.