On one of those luminous days, with mounds of snow melting in recently blizzard-ravaged Connecticut, I went to visit with Niels Diffrient in his studio. He asked me to try out a working model of a lounge chair, his current project. Not your father’s lounge chair, this one is designed to accommodate the analog and digital media we use every day. As I stretched out and felt the comfort and support of the chair, I recalled that Niels had designed a similar chaise at the beginning of the digital revolution when we predicted that work would change dramatically, but had no idea what that change would look and feel like.

It was 1987 and I was working on a Metropolis article, “Chaises Longues,” writing, “For most people, working and relaxing suggest different body positions but the two can be reconciled by the long chair.” As one of our illustrations we showed Niels sitting, feet up with his bulky desktop computer raised to the ergonomically correct height and placed on the swiveling tablet attached to his then new Jefferson chair.

Niels Diffrient is a tinkerer, a fixer, an ever-restless experimenter, and an industrial designer who is not afraid to go back to his old ideas and make them better, more appropriate, more useful. His approach is aided and abetted by his constant search for new information and ideas, gleaned from the great big world of human knowledge we all have access to, but few bother to dive into as Niels does. He is truly a practicing generalist.

So when his new book, Confessions of a Generalist, a self-published and self-marketed biography designed by Brian Sisco, appeared on my desk, I was eager to dip into the details of a life that I knew only through anecdotes. To give you a shorthand idea of Niels’s thought pattern, I decided to excerpt a portion of the book, a section entitled “The Foundation of Generalism.” It’s a start. —SSS

The first thing to understand is that design is not art. As Oscar Wilde is purported to have said “Art is absolutely useless.” In spite of some topical conceits such as “Functional Art” or “Art Design” and other such oxymorons, art remains without utility; design is integral with utility and usefulness. This means fulfilling the needs of people which includes aesthetic considerations, separating it from engineering design and other technical, specialized pursuits.

The next thing to understand is that design, as currently practiced, is an activity not a profession. Whether one is a fashion designer, graphic designer, product designer or interior designer, one is still pursuing an activity or applied practice. Design, as a word, is a verb, not a noun, and as such is not a suitable identifier for a practice that has not yet reached the standards of a profession. Read more…