San Francisco-based Young Se Kim is a design celebrity in his native South Korea. The winner of a swathe of international awards for everything from LG cell phones to concept zippers, his current hit product is a cute line of Barbie-branded MP3 players disguised as make-up compacts. Glamour-starved UK tweens will be thrilled to hear they are coming to Europe later this year.
After studying industrial design in Seoul and Chicago, Kim set up Innnodesign in Palo Alto, California in 1986, expanding to Korea in 1999. Korean design is now part of the global consumer tech scene, not least because of Kim’s work on Samsung smart phones, LG fridges and iRiver’s H10 MP3 player, but also because Korea has an appetite for electronics second only to Japan.
So which Western designer does he most admire? Sorry, Jonathan Ive, it’s Giorgio Armani: “His capability of doing business and design together – it’s like emotional logic.” Great design should fulfill three roles, he adds. “It should always be beautiful, functionally convenient and easy to manufacture. I believe ‘Me’ is the design megatrend. It’s hard to impress consumers unless the design moves them.’’
Yet, in spite of his three-purpose rule, Kim still indulges in the playful and impractical – such as his concept for a flying car. “I don’t want to limit my idea by not having the answer,” he says. “The worst case is that we get a good-looking car,” Herbert Wright
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
