Word: rashid
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Trophies he may despise, but accolades Rashid can handle. The problem with being the Most Famous Industrial Designer in All the Americas is that you're still less famous than someone who got kicked off Survivor the first week. Most people cannot name the designer of one nonclothing item in their homes. Rashid, who was born in Egypt, raised in Canada and is living in New York City, is more than happy to bring an end to this anonymity. Not just because he wants to be famous, although there seems to be that, but because he believes design should...
...many ways Rashid is more like an itinerant industrial evangelist than a designer. He traveled 200 days last year. He claims to have been to every major mall in the country, where he signs his products in high-end design stores and trolls about observing humans interacting with the objects around them. He has taught at design schools for more than a decade, and his work has been in 11 art shows in the past eight months. But mostly he has proselytized the barbarians--corporate America. And like any good missionary, he has learned to speak the language...
...Most industrial-design studios try to interpret a client's needs and come up with a style," says Paul Rowan, co-founder of housewares manufacturer Umbra. "Karim has his own personal vision." It helps that Rashid's vision incorporates things that Rowan needs, like a design that will stack and ship easily and that creates little waste in the making...
...Rashid's father was a set designer for Canadian TV who rearranged the family furniture every Sunday. So perhaps it was ordained that Karim would grow up to become one of the pioneers in non-cheesy plastic, making objects that have energy and personality but aren't wacky. He, like many of his generation, has championed the could-only-be-designed-with-computers blob. But his is not just a blob for its own sake. His Oh Chair is reminiscent of a pelvic girdle. His New Move glassware for German manufacturer Leonardo looks like a forest floor, with mushroom bowls...
Then there's multifunctionality, the watchword of '00s design. Rashid didn't invent it, but he has pushed it. "Every new object should replace three," he says. His packaging for an Issey Miyake perfume was a corrugated polypropylene envelope that could double as a toiletries purse; his Bozart children's chair is also a toy box; and his Q Chaise converts from a table to a chair-and-footrest and then to a daybed...