Written by Michela Barone Lumaga, and published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Volume #13
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Phenomena constitute the world as we experience it. Every human-made object is designed. What surrounds us in cities and metropolis is mostly made by collaboration between humans and machines. Karim Rashid works with perception and industries. His peculiar vision produces challenging design that stimulates the human being in a deeper way, breaking the ordinary and obsolete patterns of sensation and recognition. His work goes far behind the simple expression of what comprises the object; he produces an experience. He produces phenomena. The substance of all the phenomena, objects, and spaces developed by Karim Rashid has an evolved and futuristic significance.

This interview was recorded in New York in February 2010.

Michela Barone Lumaga: The task of the designer is to design artificial environment: from objects to spaces. Each design corresponds to the idea that one has of life, of society and of the relations between the individual and society [Ettore Sottsass]

Let’s begin with the beginnings, in your early studies you had peculiar personalities such as Gaetano Pesce and Ettore Sottsass as teachers, how has this influenced you?

Karim Rashid: My professors were German and Dutch, they had antithetical theories and ideologies to those of Gaeteno and Ettore. But my father was a painter and artist, Gaetano and Ettore too. So I was very at ease with the way they were perceiving creation. I learned higher sensitivity, how I could touch somebody’s soul with design or an art piece, they were so poetic.

Neither of them had much tolerance with industry. As creative people, they had a special approach to invention and production: they would be very stubborn as artists in the design. I think, instead, that design is a compromise. The product belongs to industry; it is not so emotional. Both of them told me I would never ever be a designer because I was too sensitive. They made me retaliate – I was always very determined to prove to myself that I could do something poetical and emotional but still produce in mass. They were from an anti-establishment generation. I think that you are not an artist as a designer, and you are not working alone. I believe there is a misconception here: we designers have very much the egocentric idea of being some kind of ‘maestros’ or creators, but the reality is that a lot of what we put out there in the world is governed by industry. We don’t like to admit that, but design means collaboration – a chair is made thanks to the technology support, and beyond that there is the engineering, the marketing, the advertising. So the process is ubiquitous, and way beyond us.

The more you collaborate, the more successful you become. You have to work with the industries and all the people in them, and they are much more experienced because they have done that work for many years. You have to go back and forth in a collaborative interchange between your idea and the producing. It is for me – as a designer – to work with them and to tell them what to do. And the older I get, the more I find myself in the position of a conductor instead of one of the members of the orchestra.

MBL: Karim, what were the key moments that have changed you and moved your thinking forward? Any particular anecdote you would like to tell about your childhood?

KR: I have never been asked this question, but I really like that. In 1965 I’m on a ship, the Queen Elizabeth, with my family coming to Montreal from England. On board there was a competition for 300 children and every one of them had to draw a picture. I decided to draw luggage because I was fascinated by the way we packed our entire belongings into a few cases. I was depicting and designing the objects in that luggage and how they would fit together. My drawings were of luggage, and every other child drew families, boats, trees, sun. For me that was the moment I realized I’m interested in our physical world as an artificial expression.

The next turning point is while we were living in Montreal, in 1967, and there was the Expo. I remember the Buckminster Fuller pavilion. In it they were showing the newest technologies, and presenting innovative products: there was the vacuum cleaner that vacuums by itself. I was fascinated and I said “look mom, that vacuum cleaner can really change your lifestyle: you’ll never have to vacuum again,” and that’s what I want to do in my life: use new technologies and industry to make our lives better.

Another big turning point was when I was in the university and there was a speech by George Nelson: his talk was so poetic about how everything around us and how we shape the world has such an impact on our mental psyche, on our well-being and on our lives.

The next pivotal point was to be for a short time with Ettore Sottsas and Gaetano Pesce. Ettore called me Chagall. I think he saw himself in me, he was a very painterly man and really an artist; he saw that, and he knew that if I was to be so painterly I could never survive in industry. I was so angry. I decided the opposite: to be a designer.

I made the next important decision when I was 29. I was designing X-ray equipment, doing a mammography machine, and I felt I wanted to leave the profession of industrial designer because it all became so technical, that this part was overriding any sense of human relationship, and because I realized that we were not designing, we were just engineering products. So I was fed up and I decided to become an academic: associate professor for three years teaching industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design. Then I got fired because they said I was teaching philosophy not design. I was too philosophic.

For me, RISD was one of the most successful schools of design in America and I was honoured to be working there, but I realized that they were really teaching craft not design, and they were teaching Making rather than Thinking. The reason that Italy has truly shaped the cultural world of design is because of all the theoretical thinking that took place in the last century. I remember when I was at Rodolfo Bonetto’s office there were several young people working there as interns and still going to school, and every time Bonetto left the office they would pull out his books and start reading. For me it was funny; I couldn’t believe how much they had to read, versus drawing, sketching or designing.

MBL: This is a huge difference between Italy and America still…

KR: Yes, a huge difference... I realized later how great that was, to have so much theory inside you when you actually started designing.

At 31 I got fired, and that was a devastating moment. So I came here to NY, found the cheapest apartment ever, full of rats, without a toilet, here in Chelsea on 27th street. The place that is now my office was a horse stable, and the whole area was amazingly different. A night I went out to a party. They were presenting a new Apple PC. And standing just beside me was a very well known industrial designer called Tucker Viemeister: he said to me (he remembered me from Toronto) “Listen Karim: there is an opening at Pratt to teach, they are looking for somebody, they are desperate because it’s September in a few days and they need someone to teach the design studio”.

Next morning, at 7.30, I took the subway, my portfolio under my arm. Met the chairman. He interviewed me, and he really liked me. He said: “You know what? I think you can do the job”. I said: “Well, before you give me the job I need to warn you that I was fired at RISD so if you call them and ask for a recommendation they will probably have nothing good to say about me, all they said was that I’m a trouble maker”. He said: “We like troublemakers!” That was a really major turning point. I probably wouldn’t be here and done the work I’ve done without that. So I got the job, it was part-time, teaching one day a week, and that just let me survive and pay the rent. I was so poor that to earn some money I wanted to write a cookbook called Ghetto Cucina. Then I started to look for projects. After that I spent the last 18 years working like a mad man and soon I’ll turn 50.

The problem with very creative people is that they can’t really retire. When you’re an artist you become very obsessed and you have so much passion and it is the enthusiasm that keeps you alive. I decided to make a very big change. I have a list of ideas I have to accomplish. I usually do these strange things to my life: when it turned 2000, for example, I got rid of all the black clothes in my wardrobe and I am now wearing strictly white. I had a lot of black clothes because of the eighties or the nineties. When we are insecure, we try to fit in. So we fit in with our dress codes, with our mannerisms, with our deliverables and with everything we do. But when you get a better self-esteem, or feel more confident, you decide you don’t have to match anymore.

I’ve reached the point that I just do things because I have to do them. I realized that the less you focus on yourself, the freer you are. If I make an object, I’m just doing it because I feel that I need to contribute. In my work I’m always interested in moving forward and I’m trying to do more universal design. I was taught that design was democratic and a social act that would make the world a better place, not with beauty or aesthetics but more simpler, easier, more casual, more inspiring. Unfortunately, I can easily forget about those criteria because of the way the design profession works, slipping into the mode where it’s about trying to show that you can make a chair more unusual than your neighbour or the next designer, or that you make something for the critics or museum to agree on.

The original theme of the industrial revolution was to make mass products accessible for a large public. With the Slice Y-Peeler, for example, I won an award for products for the physically challenged because it is so easy to grasp, smooth, the handle is soft and the cone is perfect. Now I’d like to make mobile phones with big numbers. Until now, products for the physically challenged have been ugly; I’m really interested in changing this. I’m more and more going back to the roots of what I believe design is really about. Good design is not a plastic chair that looks like Louis XIV. Good design is not a cool object that doesn’t work. The problem with Beauty is always about her condition: depends on media, trends, movements and that’s not enough, and Form is not enough, and Decoration is not enough.

MBL: You claim your design to be democratic. Marti Buber, a 19th century Austrian philosopher, said: “Man has before him a particular way, his way: there is no single way, one has to choose one’s own, and choosing means renunciation”. How did you discover your subjectivity? What did you have to renounce?

KR: My feeling is that when I design something I don’t tend to focus on it, but rather on the broader experience. So when I think about the design, I think about the entire holistic human experience. And maybe that’s also why I never specialized, because for me everything is interrelated. We are walking into a designed world; everything we touch and get in contact with, it is modelled with a purpose. That is how I see the world. So in a way I’m not renouncing anything.

MBL: What is the difference for you between art and design? KR: Art is selfish, design is social.

MBL: Often you speak about the future and technology. How have you gone about doing research? How have you experimented with new ideas?

KR: I was never a hands-on person, so none of my real experimentation came from making models by hand, it was always much more from scientific knowledge, specifically in the last 15 years on internet, but my real research was spending so much time in industry, in factories around the world. In the last 25 years I’ve visited probably 2000\ 3000 factories. Vastly inspiring for me is the way we make things in the world, and seeing the diverse production processes, methods and capabilities. That’s where my research comes: when I think about the product, at the same time I think about production and about experience of the product. I never separate those two; for me, all those things happen simultaneously. All this happens together: the material, the production method, the performance, the function, the sensibility, the aesthetics, and the feelings. I’m not doing it in a pragmatic, consequential kind of way; for me the process is just intuitive.

MBL: “Don’t you wonder sometimes/’Bout sound and vision/Blue, blue, electric blue/That’s the color of my room/Where I will live/Blue, blue” [David Bowie, Sound and Vision] This is a very nice song from David Bowie. Matisse has said: “drawing is of the spirit and colour of the senses, you must draw first, to cultivate the spirit and to be able to lead colour into spiritual paths,” voicing a tradition according to which shape is more important and more dignified than colour, and “shape entertains sensation and colour stimulation” (Kant). What do you think about that?

KR: This is my favourite song of all time. I agree with Kant and Matisse. My feeling about colour is that the human eye can distinguish 10 million colours, so we should exploit that sense. Since we can hear a huge spectrum of sound and we can taste 50,000 different tastes, why not exploit or embrace this? The real sketch is the shape, as Matisse said. After that you have the possibility to make a chair in 50 different colours.

MBL: Do you think shape is more for men, and colour is more for women?

 KR: I hate that, I detest making gender differences. For example let’spick something like the disposable razor: at the beginning of the product story, a woman’s razor had the same blade and the same handle as those for men, but they would make it pink. Now things are changed: they make it more anatomic for women, but for a man it is still a black-and-silver stick and I despise this.

The only time I feel that there is a difference is where there is a real performance difference: so for a joke I designed a razor for woman that had a really long stick so you didn’t have to bend to shave your legs. Only then, can the object be different. In a way colour has been more liberated. Now we can buy a pink camera, or a pink mobile phone. We need personal objects that can be personalized. It’s time we break down all those preconceptions and pre-associations. Roland Barthes says that it is amazing how we have pre-associations of material. We will always see wood as warm and glass as cold. That said, I can make glass warmer and wood cold. I think we have to shift pre-association, move and evolve.

MBL: We see a visionary as a person who is given to audacious, highly speculative, or impractical ideas or schemes; a dreamer. Speaking about archetype and prototype (from ancient Greek protos: first, type: model), can you say how you picture and visualize the ‘post-type’ in the future (I made up this new word which means the future type, the futuristic model, the utopian possible mould); what do you think will be the ‘post-typical’ object of the future?

KR: I realize that we have shaped the world via industry; 90% of our world is made by machines. A very small amount is still made by hand. Architectural shift and shapes depend upon production technology to make architecture. Likewise, the ‘post-type’ you’re talking about will have a lot to do with the shift of technology. For example let’s look at an archetype as the mobile phone. The mobile phone is an extension of the walkie-talkie, which is an extension of the land-line phone etc., but it is obvious that this object is becoming more and more immaterial. I don’t think that to be audacious or visionary is difficult or mystical; instead it is very practical. I can see the evolution and how it is going to change. The mobile phone will become a flexible little screen or will be embedded in our skin, so we will just have the interface on our wrists. What really is going to make it change is not the design, but the technology behind the product.

All the companies I worked for in the last ten years tended to be very nervous because even though some of the technologies are there, they see the consumer as reluctant to change, they believe that the consumer is afraid. The reality is that they are afraid. Now, because of this digital age we’re in, my feeling is that the consumer is ready for anything. The public accepted that they can video-skype around the world for free, and that they can have 5 hours of music in their pocket; so they are now for the first time ready to accept anything in the physical world not just in the digital world.

MBL: So the digital is becoming physical?

KR: Exactly. I try to make the physical world catch up with the digital world. Because the digital world is providing us with far greater experiences than the physical one is now. For me as a designer, I feel like I’m more in tune with the public; it is the manufacturers that are afraid, not the consumers. And this has changed over the years; it used to be the manufacturers that were at the forefront of changing the world and the consumer was a conservative person. Not any more. So my job is to convince manufacturers that people are ready to accept innovation.

This article was published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Volume #13. It was written by Michela Barone Lumaga.