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Design Your Self
Rethinking the Way You Live, Love, Work, and Play
By Karim Rashid HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2006 Karim Rashid
All right reserved. ISBN: 0060839023
Chapter One
My desire is to see people living in our time, participating in our contemporary world, and delivered from nostalgia and antiquated notions. My hope is that we become conscious and sensorially attuned with this world, in this moment. If it is human nature to live in the past, we have to change it. To look back is to impede our forward momentum. There is nothing to be afraid of; we should embrace technology, allow progress to run its course, and believe how much better our lives can be. That is what I have set out to do. I want to change the world.
Design Theory (Why me?)
In the last twenty years, I have designed everything from snow shovels to teacups, watches to couches, mailboxes to martini glasses. When I first started designing, I had the idea that I wanted a product in every shop. I'm still working on that one, but I am proud to say I have designs not only at Bloomingdale's and museum shops but also at Costco and Target, which means that they are touching the lives of the broadest possible spectrum of people. In my life, in my work, and in my travels, I like to cross boundaries. I try to see the world from the inside out.
I watch people use and live with products, with eachother, and the space that surrounds them. I am fascinated with the interaction of people and things and the idea that I could make that interface more efficient, pleasurable, and seamless.
Design has a way of shaping people's lives, their behavior, sensibility, and psyche. As a designer, I have a special vantage point. I not only think about every aspect of our daily lives but I see several different ways we could do any one thing. I observe and analyze behavior, design, and the interface of the two. I am a shaper of everyday commodities and, as such, I hope to impart some of my findings and lead you to rethink where and how you live, even what and whom you live with. Sometimes it amounts to a good dose of common sense and, often, it is merely a question of changing your perspective. Always, it has to do with dedication. Perhaps because I have a multicultural background and grew up traveling, I never feel quite comfortable. This is simultaneously what stimulates me--gives me the impetus to design and change things--and what keeps me from conforming to any place, culture, or medium. I like feeling alien--like someone from another planet just observing and engaging in the human condition.
Objectivity
Designers have to be completely open minded, unbiased by race, aesthetics, religion, or any other kind of perspective. They must accept all they see and derive forms from abstraction. The reason artists are good at commenting on society is that they see the world as others don't. It is said that artists see the present while everyone else sees the past. Designers are able to see things that don't (yet) exist. That is my gift and one I don't take for granted. Very often a client will tell me that they are having trouble "seeing" a project that hasn't been built, that they need something to compare to. In order to create something new, I have to make every effort to detach myself from references. This is something we should all work on. We need to try to be objective, to see everything as it is now, and to really live in a contemporary world.
As humans, we try to find keyholes for any incoming information. In order to understand, we make comparisons to what we already know, and this is an effective formula at some level. It is not, however, what we refer to as "thinking outside the box," which is what interests us as designers. What I design are things we already need (not things I predict needing in the future), and therein lies the challenge. If all my life I've been sitting down at a table with four legs and a chair with four legs with a plate surrounded by a fork on the left and a knife on the right, I will have a hard time inventing a new utensil. If I stick to what I know, I won't get past changing the number of prongs on a fork or making the edge of the knife more or less serrated. But if I step outside of history, habit, tradition, and what I already know, I might come up with an innovative solution.
Industrial design is somewhat limited in that we have to work within certain mandates--until couches can hover over the floor, we need to create something that can stand and balance. Until then, we are challenged to make it work. The same will be true of designing your self--you can't exactly start from scratch, and you will have some obstacles to work around, but the key is to find the fearlessness to push those boundaries. By changing a shape radically or using an unexpected color, we might find we live a happier, freer life. This goes from how we dress in the morning to the colors we surround ourselves with and the comfort of the car we get into every day. Many people admire the variety of colors in a field of flowers or the plumage of an exotic bird but would never dare to bring those colors into their home or wardrobe. Why?
If we didn't have fear, we would be a different society, certainly a different-looking one. My concern is that such fears are so prevalent that we don't even know we have them. Ask yourself why you have to have the couch where it is, the carpet arranged just so, with the coffee table in front of it, and a vase on the mantelpiece? Maybe it's a successful arrangement, tried and true for generations, but it's still worth considering. What if you moved the table to the side and left a flowing empty space in the center of the room?
Continues...
Excerpted from Design Your Self by Karim Rashid Copyright © 2006 by Karim Rashid. Excerpted by permission.
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