Portfolio Retro: My interview with Karim Rashid
In 2008, halfway through my first year as an M.F.A. graduate student at the Savannah College of Art and Design, the school engaged award-winning industrial designer Karim Rashid to give a lecture. This turned out to be a highly formative moment in my professional development. Rashid was fiercely eccentric — outfitted in pure white with tattoos and large glasses — and a magnetic speaker, dazzling us with the fluid morphic shapes and electric colors of his product design portfolio. I’d never seen someone so passionate or outspoken in the design community, with such a tall point of view and an agenda about the power of design, and I soaked up the message of his manifesto like a sponge.
“When I design something, I want it to make your life better.” — Karim on his Kone handheld vacuum design for Dirt Devil
“Every business should be completely concerned with beauty - it is after all a collective human need. … Design is about the betterment of our lives poetically, aesthetically, experientially, sensorially, and emotionally. My real desire is to see people live in the modus of our time, to participate in the contemporary world, and to release themselves from nostalgia, antiquated traditions, old rituals, kitsch and the meaningless.” — Karim Rashid's Karimanifesto
At the time of Rashid’s talk, I'd recently resigned my first job designing layouts for an Atlanta weekly newspaper to attend graduate school at SCAD. I’d earned a bachelors in journalism a few years before, though, and to keep writing skills sharp, I published the occasional freelance article for the paper during my time there. When I heard Karim was coming to SCAD-Atlanta, I rang up one of the editors I'd worked with to offer a profile piece. Happily, she commissioned the work, which meant I could request a one-on-one interview with Rashid as an official member of the media.
I was scheduled to meet Karim the morning after his SCAD presentation at the Four Seasons lobby for 30 minutes of questioning. Rashid appeared a few minutes late, but promptly sent his SCAD staff escort to fetch coffee so we could speak sans moderator. This was the first of many gestures made over the hour we ended up talking to channel his full attention on the interview and wield maximum influence. Up close, Karim was as charismatic and articulate as he was in front the student crowd. As focused professionals are so capable of, he turned the tables on my questioning, answering questions with a question and pushing me on what I thought design was, and how it could be used, and what this meant for people.
Ultimately, I learned more about myself than him. Looking back on the experience, I think this may have been his goal for the interview, above and beyond exposing his own accomplishments for the benefit of the press.
Below is my full published piece for The Sunday Paper, which reflects a certain amount of charmed student enthusiasm. But ten years later, I’m still inspired by Karim’s philosophy. He advocates that our energy is best spent focused on the present day and moment, and that we release ourselves from looking backward and staying influenced or caught up in modes of the past. In his presentation, Karim emphasized that he considers none of his work to be ‘futuristic’ — it’s actually ‘right now’ or ‘present,’ but seems futuristic to others because it is devoid of influence from pre-existing aesthetics (unlike everything else we find around us). His point of view can be leveraged not just for design practice purposes, but as a personal outlook on life. Karim achieves true originality, a deceptively difficult yet worthy feat for any designer.
Check out more of my design and writing work for The Sunday Paper on Behance.