What do neoprene and video telephones have in common? Interface. That concept links the various projects of Stephen Peart and his Campbell, California, design firm. Vent Design brought you O'Neill's Animal wet suit and Apple's Adjustable Keyboard, among other innovations.
"People touching and feeling technology" is what Peart says turns him on. The Animal bendable wet suit represented the "packaging" of a human: an interface with the ocean. The easy-on-the-hands keyboard for Apple started as a series of experiments, but when people picked it up they all wanted one.
Along with work on interface designs for Sun's tight-lipped startup, FirstPerson Inc. – "a kind of porthole into virtual reality" – Peart is exploring video telephony. Many of his projects at Vent are set up just to test ideas. "I'm a kind of Luddite," Peart says, "even though I love technology and I could finger chips all day long, I try to keep my distance because I have to remain a user, not a technophile." Too many things, he thinks, are designed by technophiles for technophiles.
His latest creations include the "Surf" series of office accessories for The Knoll Group, a furniture maker known for hiring the best designers. In his mouse pads, wrist rests, and foot- and backrests, Peart has taken functional biomorphic shapes – resembling puddles that might have collected under a wet-suited surfer like Peart – and rendered them in various kinds of rubber. They soften the edges of furniture and equipment.
The backrest is unlike anything you've ever seen: a pad of inch-thick rubber that varies its shape with the heat and pressure of your weight, with an attached, heavy crescent of metal that gets tossed over the back of your chair as an anchor.
But why Vent? "One guy joked that it stood for Very Exotic New Technology," Peart says, "but I've also had it pointed out that the word can mean what comes out of the rear end of animal."
Yet a serious idea rests in the root of the word: Peart and his designers aim to vent the capabilities and ideas of organizations hobbled by their own size. "Big corporations are like supertankers; they move very slowly," Peart says. Vent, he adds, is the pilot who comes on board to make the turns easier.
Vent Design: +1 (408) 559 4015.
