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Karim Rashid

Karim Rashid is a globally recognized industrial designer and keynote speaker, known for his bold, futuristic designs. He inspires audiences with insights into creativity, design thinking, and innovation.

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3 experiences you get with Karim Rashid

  • Gain insights into creating bold, innovative designs and how they can transform industries.
  • Discover strategies to push creative boundaries and foster a culture of design excellence.
  • Learn from a global design leader to inspire innovative thinking and boost organizational creativity.

Karim Rashid is a renowned designer and thought leader, known for his innovative approach to product design, architecture, and branding. With over 40 years of experience, Rashid has worked across various industries, creating transformative and futuristic designs that challenge conventional norms. His work reflects his vision of design as a powerful tool for social and cultural change. A sought-after keynote speaker, Rashid inspires audiences worldwide to think creatively, push boundaries, and embrace innovation in design and beyond. For more information, feel free to contact us.

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Keynotes

Keynote by 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.
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Keynote by Karim Rashid: 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.
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Keynote by Karim Rashid: 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.
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Keynote by Karim Rashid: 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.
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Keynote by Karim Rashid: 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.
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Keynote by Karim Rashid: 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?
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Keynote by Karim Rashid: 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.
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Keynote by Karim Rashid: 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.
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Keynote by Karim Rashid: 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.
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Karim Rashid

Innovative insights into the future of design, creativity, and the impact of technology on aesthetics.

Karim Rashid is a globally recognized designer renowned for his bold and innovative work across various disciplines, including product design, interiors, fashion, and even book publishing. He is celebrated for his distinctive style that blends futurism with sensual minimalism, creating products and environments that evoke emotional connections. Rashid's designs often feature smooth, flowing lines, vibrant colors, and a futuristic aesthetic, which make his work stand out in the design world. His philosophy revolves around creating designs that improve lives and inspire positive emotional responses from users.

With a career spanning decades, Rashid has created iconic products such as the Garbo waste can, the Oh chair, and the Bobble water bottle. His work transcends traditional boundaries, with notable projects like the Nhow Hotel in Berlin, showcasing his ability to merge design with function in both the digital and physical realms. As a keynote speaker, Karim Rashid offers invaluable insights into the intersection of design, technology, and human emotion. He encourages innovation and creativity, urging audiences to think outside the box and embrace design as a tool for social and emotional change.

For those interested in booking Karim Rashid as a keynote speaker, his talks focus on the future of design, the impact of technology on aesthetics, and how to use design as a powerful tool for transformation. His engaging presentations provide a deeper understanding of design thinking, creativity, and how to harness these elements to shape the future.

If you're looking to book Karim Rashid for an event, contact us today through the form on his profile to make a non-binding request. Discover how Karim's visionary design ideas can inspire your audience and reshape the way they think about the future of design. For more information, reach out now! 

Introduction to Industrial Design - Karim Rashid

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LASALLE Public Lecture Series 2016: An Evening with Karim Rashid

Watch Karim Rashid in action!

Non-binding request for Karim Rashid

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