Karim Rashid

The Future of Design

The world is becoming very savvy – both visually, technologically, and information-driven. Since homo sapiens’ existence of more than 100,000 years, we lived in the physical analog world and now we are less than 30 years of the digital age. Analog is material and digital is immaterial so what will happen to our material world? How will it catch up to our digital age? How will design inform this change, and how will social behaviors change? The energy and times are hypertrophic, and consumers are perpetually interested in being stimulated, being excited about their physical environment, and most importantly, being inspired. It is the residue of the digital age. And everything needs to be designed to create a seamless pleasurable, experiential existence.

The future of our aesthetic world with cross all the aesthetic disciplines so that design, art, architecture, fashion, food, music, culture, and beauty, fuse together to increase our experiences and bring greater elevated experiences to our material and immaterial lives. Our motivations should focus on our conscious collective memory and a desire to fill it with ideas that are seamless between technology and life. But design must imbue differentiation, innovation, and human needs and desires.

Designs New Role

Today, designers approach their work from a different perspective. A poetic design has evolved based on a plethora of complex criteria – human experience; social, global, economic, and political issues; physical and mental interaction, form, vision, and a rigorous understanding of contemporary culture. However, manufacturing is based on another collective group of criteria: capital investment, market share, production ease, dissemination, growth, distribution, maintenance and service, performance, quality, ecological issues, and sustainability.

The combination of all of these components has come to shape our interiors, and inform our aesthetics, our physical culture, and our human experiences. These issues shape the business – its identity, its brand, and its value.

The Business of Beauty

Are companies really interested in people and in culture? Do manufacturers discuss personal rituals, the depths of private relationships, the warmth of family, the codes of love, the signs of human emotions, the regard for happiness, freedom, personal expression, and the well-being of our human existence? And do they address these questions through the product they sell? Industrial speed has had a great effect on progress, communication, the global economy, and our human psyche.

Yet our human experiences are becoming less apparent and products around us have taken on a banality and certain sameness due to rapid mass production, lack of research and development, lack of interest in cultural significance, and low-capital investments, all due to the great mass mechanization of the twentieth century. Businesses can only be holistic and comprehensive if they are able to address these issues.

Blurring Boundaries

I am a citizen of the global society where there are no boundaries, no borders, no diversity, prejudice, class, or racial differences. I love the shrinking unification of the world because it affords all of us to be inspired by every culture, every person, everywhere, and anytime. This is the omnipresent new age in which we live. With more choice, more exposure, more information, more exchange, and perpetual communication we become an evervast inspiring single world!

Globalization has opened up the diversity of the individual. As our world shrinks, we become more aware of the world around us, we communicate globally, we mix and in turn, we will eventually have one global culture made up of individual objective minds.

Plastik Blobular Worlds

The world around us seems to be getting perpetually softer, more amorphous, and blobular. Our objects are softer, our cars are rounder, our high-tech objects are organic and even our bodies are fatter. The digital age, the information society, the global village, and the leisure culture all are symptoms of a changing physical world where ‘Soft’ defines our landscape. This casualization of shape, form, material, and behavior is now a movement. This world is data-driven fluidity. Now the landscape will flow.

Analog versus Digital

100,000 years of analog and less than 30 years of digital. Analog was material and digital is immaterial so what will happen to our material world? How will it catch up to our digital age? How will design inform this change, and how will social behaviors change?

Sensual Minimalism

My agenda is to contribute objects in our physical landscape that inspire, engage, and encourage positive experiences. I define my work as Sensual Minimalism – where objects communicate, engage, and inspire, yet remain minimal. They can speak simply and directly, without being superfluous. My work is a marriage of organic and pure geometry, of technology and materials, as a motivator of human engagement. The softer, friendly, organic forms communicate tactility and express a strong visual comfort and pleasure. In response to excess, market seduction, and lack of sustainability, I believe that every new object should replace three. Better objects edit the marketplace.

I have been successful with this philosophy several times. I have collaborated with companies to decrease their product lines, streamline their production, increase their efficiency, and elevate the quality of their products. I act as design editor or cultural editor of our physical world. Ironically, the more products produced the more design is necessary, as the saturation of objects needs to be improved, with higher quality and new ideas. I am interested in developing products that are accessible to everyone and I believe design is democratic. Good design can also shift and change human behavior and create new social conditions.

The Future of Fashion Design

Design, architecture, music, literature, film, fashion, objects, spaces, furniture, and all the built environment as well as the virtual environment is part of our daily experiences, and they all impact our quality of life and touch our evanescent, public psyche. It is all part of the continuum of our future. I don’t see a difference between clothes and objects, architecture and jewelry. Design, be it fashion or furniture, is to touch all our senses, and shape our lives.

The important part of this non-stop, physical and virtual landscape is that it should create a better life, a more seamless, experiential, beautiful, poetic yet hyper-functional life. Fashion should be part of this shaping of our well-being and not a disparate exercise. We must fashion a better world.

Karim Kolor

Color is one of the most beautiful phenomena of our existence. Color is life and for me, color is a way of dealing with and touching our emotions, our psyche, and our spiritual being. Some colors are strong, some are soft, – what is important is the specific hue or tint, or saturation of each color and how they work together. Color can be used well or poorly but no one should be afraid of color. It is spiritual phenomelogical euphoria.