Review

Karim Rashid Brings International Perspective to Midwest

Karim Rashid

Things — we see them, we use them, we touch them, and they touch us. From objects that have been around for millennia — like spoons — to the 21st-century iPod, we interact with thousands of things every day. They constitute our environments, shape our physical experiences, and determine how we feel about the world. We might not think we have a relationship with our toothbrush or our dishes, but we bond with our everyday objects in intimate — if subconscious — ways.

Few designers are perhaps as passionate about these relationships as Karim Rashid. An international designer who has created some 2,000 products for companies like Umbra, Method, Dirt Devil, and Alessi, Rashid has positioned himself as the messiah of good design for the greater masses. In October 2008, design alliance OMAha, an organization dedicated to fostering greater design appreciation and awareness, brought Rashid to the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. “We try to bring people who cross over design disciplines,” says Tom Trenolone, an architect and one of the directors for the alliance. “And he’s one of the more prominent ones.”

Rashid has a global background that enhances his worldview. Born in Cairo, Egypt, to Egyptian and English parents and raised in Canada, he has worked in almost 40 countries and travels 200-plus days a year to meet with clients and give lectures. As peripatetic as Rashid is though, he recently made our country his permanent home by becoming a U.S. citizen. His notion of life, liberty, and particularly the pursuit of happiness, has taken on a new twist, one that embraces democratic design: making broader society better by improving the inanimate products surrounding us.

During his lecture at the Omaha, Nebraska, museum and in a follow-up interview, he did not hold back. Citing cramped airplanes, credit cards, and high heels, he says, “This is a stupid world.” Because of the Industrial Revolution, he argues, more inexpensive goods that beautify the physical landscape should be affordable. “Everything in our lives,” he says, “should offer us some experience, touch our emotions, give us pleasure, increase our aesthetic landscape, and make us excited to be alive.”

Bosco Pi at Vesna Shopping Center, Noviy Arbat str., 19, Moscow, 2006 - 2008, “I created a technorganic seamless fluid ambience for pleasurable and experiential shopping and socializing. Like the shape of the ever-undulating wall, the pattern is like sound waves, data, and information that embrace and envelop the shopper.” (from Karim Rashid, Inc. press release)

It is not about consumers spending more money, he emphasizes. “I have a passion for inexpensive objects. Luxury is immaterial. In the design age, it’s heightened physical experience, heightened immateriality.” For this reason, Rashid thinks that with few exceptions (like Salvador Dali’s Lips couch, the Jaguar 1968 E-type roadster, and Swatch’s original watch from 1984), everything can use improvement. “Every product needs to be thoughtfully designed, and this is happening now. Every banal product is getting a make-over.”

For example, he agreed to design a watch for Alessi only if it would sell for under $75. His Garbo trashcan, which can also be used as a multi-purpose container, retailed through Umbra for $8. Add to this items like the groovy Dirt Devil Kurv hand vac ($50), the curv Oh chair sold by Chiasso ($70), and the entire product line for Method Home’s cleaning products, which Target and other retailers carry for prices starting at around $4. The consumer gets a lot for a little.

Detractors question Rashid’s approach. In 2004, Rob Walker, columnist for The New York Times Magazine,
wrote, “Method products raise the possibility that, stylistically speaking, your dish liquid is not measuring up. Which is, frankly, annoying: must even the most mundane household objects rise up and join the tyranny of Good Design?”

2007; Watches designed for Alessi, Italy, 2006

“Why can’t we love every product?” Rashid says. That is to say, if we have to wash dishes everyday, we might as well get some kind of happy charge out of this mundane task. “Good design reaches our soul, implores us to beautify our environments and ourselves. All objects have semantic language. They speak to us.”

Rashid expresses himself through plastic — like polystyrene, synthetic rubber, and polymer resins — which is fitting. The first definition of plastic is the ability to mold and shape, which is just what Rashid wants to do. He is particularly enthusiastic about materials that change shape in response to temperature changes and give biofeedback. “Smart plastics,” he says, “can have shape memory.” For example, he envisions custom- fitted thermoplastic mouthpieces for athletes. “You submerge the device in boiling water, and then hold it in your mouth for a few minutes while it conforms to exact contours of your teeth and gums as it cools.”

Plastic also has a pliable softness that relays a whole other vocabulary. “Soft is human,” he says. “Certain shapes, lines, colors, textures, functions all touch and communicate to our senses and our daily experiences.” To accomplish this, objects need above all to be human. “Love and desire are part of my interests in sensualizing our physical domestic environments.”

Disk Chair, Ferlea

Humanizing the inanimate aspect is key, because Rashid’s materials tie into something science is only beginning to understand: neuro-plasticity — or how the brain changes in response to the environment. Since Rashid aims to fine tune our surroundings — to change sensory input — it may not be a far leap to say that his designs represent metaphysical non-objects, ones that help blunt depression, take the edge out of anger, and quiet anxiety.

This is precisely why Rashid travels the world. Design democracy has a whole lot more to offer than inexpensive commodities. It is not about consuming, and it is certainly not about owning more stuff. “The physical world can make us happy, give us some sense of relief,” he says. “It’s a symbiosis of design and desire. It’s how we feel, touch, experience the time in which we live.”

See www.designallianceomaha.org for upcoming lectures, and see http://karimrashid.com for more information about Rashid’s work.

Kim Carpenter has written about art and art history for Art Papers, NY Arts Magazine, Bitch, Ceramics Monthly, and Modernism. A staff writer with Sculpture Review, she has also contributed to several artists’ catalogues including Uncreated Light: Steve Joy Paintings 1980 – 2007, published by Prestel Verlag in 2008. Carpenter earned her Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University and has lived in Belgium and Germany.

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