New York designer Karim Rashid wants to change the way you feel
Karim Rashid has seen the future, and it is soft. To be specific, it is heat-resistant silicone rubber. And project by project, the 40-year-old New York designer - creator of such celebrated blobjects as Umbra's Garbo trash can and the Nambé line of dinnerware - is taking us there. In Rashid's world, there are no hard edges, and even the most common household items flaunt sexy curves.
The P3 concept study, Rashid's first foray into consumer electronics, attempts to "deconstruct and radically rethink a typical high tech component." The curvaceous CRT TV presents its upturned face to you as it balances on a rounded base - a single expression of fluid lines. A curved piece of rubber forms a second television concept, with an LCD screen and Memory Stick-like storage strips that play movies. An alarm clock/CD player mimics the shape of the disc while displaying the time on a rounded panel that suggests an open hand. Poised in space, the devices are like sculptures: You can admire them from any angle.
"What's important about these objects is that they are omnidirectional," says Rashid. "They're also all slightly off balance, waiting to be manipulated."
Rashid is developing his P3 line in collaboration with New York design shop Totem; the first products will hit the market in fall 2001. His other haute curvature can be seen everywhere, from Issey Miyake perfume bottles to the so-cheap-it's-almost-disposable Oh chair. He designed the packaging for the recently launched Prada fragrance line and is bumping up the scale on his ambitions with schemes for hotels in Los Angeles, Athens, and Miami. And next spring, Rizzoli will publish his monograph, Karim Rashid: I Want to Change the World. Rashid describes his work as organic, though what makes his flowing forms possible is not a return to nature but CAD-driven manufacturing - almost any shape he imagines can be rendered onscreen, modeled with laser cutters or high-powered water jets, and sent to a factory that will translate his 3-D map into millions of finished units, with curves as soft and perfect as the CRT TV's.
Coated in a pliable and forgiving rubber, the P3 components move beyond the iMac trend's soft-edged look to the literal feel. "I don't want things to just sit there - I want to make things that are pleasurable to interact with," Rashid says. "I want to capture the soul of an object in solid gel."
