Word: designated
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...invariably named after a once exotic herb, say Lemongrass-halogen lamps spotlight rarified stacks of food, borne on asymmetrical plates. The spa (known simply, perhaps, as The Spa) is expensive, padded and white, as if catering to the insane. None of these things are necessarily bad in themselves. But design-led hotels were supposed to free us from homogeneity. Instead, behind individual façades, they have been palming us off with the same formulaic, outmoded minimalism. That's my beef...
...bland chain hotel. Vacationers of the 1950s or '60s took out second mortgages to afford jet travel, supposedly to find, as they hurtled from destination to destination, that a hotel room in Melbourne was the same as one in Manila. Innkeepers were accused of rolling out design templates such that no matter where you awoke in the world, the features of your room-the bedside panel, the writing desk-looked identical. Indeed, the very words Holiday Inn or Hilton took on a pejorative connotation: they were globalization's earliest villains, blamed for destroying a sense of place with an imperialist...
...might have thought that travel publishers and style professionals would be thunderous in their denouncement of such conformity, but they are its ideologues. Design Hotels-a group whose 142 member properties probably corner the world market in white furniture and puzzling chrome ornaments-compiles the raving apologia of academics and designers in its own, biannual journal (sample: "Hotels of the avant-garde are rapidly becoming the starting points for experiences of reality that allow orientation in a world that is both falling apart and coming together"). Thames & Hudson publishes the Hip Hotels series, an anthology of vacuity, as well...
...designs for MobiTV's user interface, the screen configuration that consumers navigate to get to the programs they want, which also helps define the brand visually. He cut his teeth eight years ago designing PC software for a long-dead start-up called DoDots, then spent five years on DVR software design at TiVo--creator of another revolutionary product and one, he says, "people can no longer imagine living without...
...hope that something strikes large in the company," he says. Perhaps it will be Pressler. MobiTV outsourced the design of a demo it needed for a consumer-electronics show, and over two months the Manhattan-based firm that got the job produced many designs. But one that Pressler did for another product beat them all. "That was my shining moment thus far," he says...