“Early Industrial Designer”
Joseph G. Brin © 2012

“Fluid, intuitive, plug and play, out-of-the-box” - all characteristics of user friendly experience endlessly hyped by many companies these days. However, they remain elusive – an industrial designer is one person actually trained to deliver them to us in our daily encounter with objects and information.

A Conversation With Stephan Clambaneva, North East District, V.P. Elect, Industrial Design Society of America, IDSA

Joseph G. Brin: When you all arrive in Philadelphia in April will your attendees somehow showcase what ID thinking can do for the City of Philadelphia? That’s something I’d really like to see.

Stephan Clambaneva: We are working on trying to pull this off, still in the initial planning stages.  The workshop is called a “Sense of Philadelphia.” We intend to conduct a workshop to develop a “sensual” map of Philadelphia… Read more…

This morning, two of our editors separately filed admiring reports on a pair of new Karim Rashid pieces at the Council booth:

Could you pick this humble desk out of a police line-up? The furniture world version of the blind taste taste? If someone asked me to guess the designer of basiK, Karim Rashid—he of the swoop, the blob, the bubbles, the…wardrobe—would not make even a semi-short list of ten. And that’s a credit to his rigor as an industrial designer, and to his client, Council, the San Francisco-based company that continues to impress me with its taste, curatorial eye, and attention to detail. For basiK, which was just completed two weeks ago, Rashid rests the elegantly proportioned plywood desk atop a thin and playful steel frame. The two forms complement each other in an almost effortless way. At $1,200, this has DWR written all over it. Here’s hoping. —Martin C. Pedersen

You’d never guess that the Careem chair, by Karim Rashid, was once produced by Cappellini. Council has given the design fresh life with the less technical production processes and a new material palette. The upholstered tops still separate from the bases for stacking. The version with wood legs is especially surprising. “It looks like it could be Scandinavian,” says Derek Chen, Council’s founder. A recycled PET shell is in the works. —Kristi Cameron Read more…

Since Gary Hustwit’s upcoming industrial-design documentary, Objectified, is all about products and the people who make them, here is a helpful (though incomplete) cheat sheet to what you’ll find in the just-released trailer: Naota Fukasawa’s hand, the wall-mounted CD player he designed for Muji, a Panton chair, an Apple laptop, a Mercedes-Benz (wild guess—it looks like the Stuttgart museum to me ) convertible, a Leica camera, a Braun radio, an Oxo peeler, Jasper Morrison’s Air chair being manufactured, a mess of cell phones, Muji and IKEA stores, Smart Design’s Flip Mino pocket video camera, and an ad for an Sanyo’s waterless Aqua washing machine. Oh, right, and Karim Rashid, too. God knows he needs the publicity.

See what else you can spot!