Intelligent design (ft Karim Rashid)

hello and welcome to worlds apart the pledge to make the world a better place is one of the most overused tropes of our time politicians activists even terrorists have all attempted to do it in that own way our guest today is one of the world's most celebrated industrial designers and changing the world is also part of his life manifesto Karim Rashid welcome to worlds apart thank you thank you for inviting me what's wrong with the world as it is why is everybody so bent on changing it you know it's it's it's strange I I wrote a book in 2001 called I want to change the world and I really got fairly slammed for that by the media and press you know because they thought it was a kind of an arrogant statement and they also said how does design change the world you know because sign wasn't really considered how can I say a catalyst for change but I noticed it in this last all of a sudden 50 13 years it's amazing how much that term is used and kind of overused in everything everything is kind of like shocking this change the world where I got that term from actually was probably my teenage I was inspired by it because there were many songs that were written by it probably is like a new revolution in sense of what happened in the 60s so there was a lot of talk about change the world in 60s and I was a child so it was probably somehow part of my behavioural kind of learning at that time that I felt like I go out and do something in this world to make it a better place now I think one of the person who may also have inspired you with Mahatma Gandhi because you quote him in one of your 50 commandments that you published some time ago yes I think you his quote was about being a change you want to see in the world but I think I may be mistaken but I think your ambitions go a bit further than that I mean you you're probably not satisfied with changing your immediate environment you want to project that yeah well yes oh you said how can you know or what are the problems that need to be changed let's say which is really your first question is it when I travel the world I work in 42 countries right now and I work on a plethora of projects so I work from InDesign from I would call micro to macro you know so I'm doing everything let's say from a jewelry line or a mobile phone to an actual piece of architecture or a hotel or an office or a building and with that I find that I realized and this is a bit of an epiphany I've only had in this last ten years of how poorly designed the world is and how uncomfortable the world is and how the world in a sense is this weird at least in the physical sense of the word is driven on this nostalgic machine where we're constantly looking in the past supposedly for inspiration we're constantly trying to derive the past or appropriate the past you know and it's kind of as if the past was better when an actual fact we have a whole bunch of issues and problems that are really something that grew out of the Industrial Revolution you know in the world has become kind of relatively toxic we have a billion cars on the road etc etc so really in a sense you could argue that the past is has caused damage to this world and not hasn't been for the betterment also design itself really originally was a social agenda with this idea of a betterment of society that we're going to make a better world for all of us and it has happened because the world has changed drastically and just in since the digital age in the last thirty years it's changed an enormous way so the world is a better place now you are in Russia and Russians like to quote Russian writers just basically being one of them and he famously said that beauty will save the world and everything I read about you so far points to the fact that you you seem to agree with him yeah I you know well I don't think beauty will save the world at all and I don't agree with that whatsoever I I agree that for me beauty is an essential need and desire of humanity so if you look back at a hundred thousand years we've always been obsessed with the notion of beauty but I think for the first time and again going back to Industrial illusion for the first time we have much more complex and deeper problems and the deeper problems made really if anything is science and technology that's going to save us and it is saving us and I'll give you just a very quick example in the last hundred thousand years of humanity the world was analog what I call analog right so it's very physical and in that physical world we depleted this earth of everything from oil to every mineral to you know its marble and diamonds and gold and nickel copper you know we just like taking and taking we rape raping the earth the digital age comes along which is only now thirty years old so it's not so new that we were kind of fortunate in a way to be at this new kind of turning point this pivotal moment in human history where we have this thing called microchip and we have a universal language which is binary notation 0 & 1 to allow us to all communicate so the world is all of a sudden that's digitally changing drastically but also the digital age has come along because it's about dematerialization it's the reduction it's the removal it doesn't require energy it doesn't require or at least amount of energy that we did with the analog code room at the same time humanity at its highest consumption levels at the moment I mean we are consuming more gas more fuel more energy more food than Society migration exactly that's why the digital ages are absolutely necessary you know I always think if there is a god or there is some sort of atheist but if if there is a god there's some sort of master plan here and the master plan is really to have made the digital age because the digital age affords you and I and the majority of the people in the world to communicate and have phenomenal digital or immaterial experiences not physical ones what that means is is that that little laptop that little iPad that you have in front of you that we're spending roughly seven hours a day engaged in these things don't require the physical raping of the earth and the amount of energy and the amount of toxins and the amount of problems that we created from the physical world it's kind of beautiful in a way you know it's really like it's it's it's it's a it came for human survival now some people may take an issue with that especially people in some European countries that have experienced austerity and you believe that may be a good thing but for many of them it's a really difficult thing I wonder if this age of austerity has had any impact on the kind of projects you get involved in mm well you know as I said when I started as a designer it was you know really when I really got going as a designer as I say the late 80s or so and it was really a decadent period I think you know and it was all about what one philosopher termed a British philosopher termed he called design at that time yuppie porn which I thought was was really fantastic but just in the last and I would say at the most 10 years or so I started doing a lot more projects and things that I that I would consider much more responsible and in my interiors my architecture I would definitely try to get what they call a standard of what they call a LEED standard which is to make a sustainable spaces so I aim to get silver or gold and every one of my projects and I make sure all my materials are completely you know either biodegradable or sustainable or recyclable so I'm very conscious now of all these things I'm using all these new polymers by the way which are fantastic that are made really from a chai fruit and from sugar cane so they're plastics but they're not made from petroleum so I'm trying to do all these partners see other projects I'm trying to do really is things that are really going to help the let's say poor conditions in the world so I be working with a company the state's doing these filtered bottles that are all about filtering water that are incredibly inexpensive that that are can you know you can basically clean water you know from your tap at 120 countries like I give you example I landed in Cape Town about 10 years ago and I read this article about they were making poor housing for the poor because they have something like 6 kilometers of shanty towns so they were on the front page of the newspaper was this concrete box frightening depressing little concrete box on the door in it and a square window and they said oh they can build these houses for $3,000 each and they're going to build I don't know how many something like three 400,000 of them for these poor people when I flew in on the plane and I looked at the shanty town there were almost beautiful like colors and fabrics and materials at least from a perspective of the airplane of people personalized their homes what doesn't matter what they were made out of they were very personalized they're going to basically give them like little jail cells so at a lecture there you know the mayor of the city said to me what what could you do for our city and I said well frankly let me redesign those homes for $3,000 each I could make a home that these people could really reconfigure could be made out of really fabulous materials could provide much more daylight etc etcetera but I never got that project as you were describing that project that reminds me of the Soviet Union when we had very little access to the most basic stuff regardless of whether it was you know ugly or beautiful people had you know real shortages and I remember that back then the natural thing to say was you know look at all that Westerners you know they are all concerned about material things but we Russians we have our deep Russian soul but now of course Russians are much more given to consumerism than they used to be then probably many people in the West and I wonder how do you personally you know define that balance between the person's exterior and his interior yeah how it's funny we see that it's funny you say that because you know I here I am as a child and brought up in the 60s with all these documentaries on Russia right and my father was like obsessed with this stuff and and he'd make us watch all these documentaries and I remember let's file this documentary of like in Siberia where a woman was buying milk and she'd buy a slab of frozen milk like carry it home and put it in a in a seal santé steel pot and as it melt you would drink it over the couple of days right amazing when you think about what that means it was no packaging no waste nothing you could argue that that is what we should be doing today you know in a sense it's it takes those issues of the levels of incredible frugality or real difficult conditions to see how humans can survive and not be so wasteful or not be so extravagant at all that I guess it makes sense that your reaction to having nothing is almost the opposite is to become quite decadent because I see it now in Russia the people with money it's just consumption consumption much more than it is in general in the West and in the States I guess my question was more to the point of this self-actualization this focusing focus on how things look how beautiful they are you know sometimes you can argue that it's way beyond what is necessary and I guess even doctors now saying that people you know may suffer from too much stress on how things or how they look how do you draw the balance because all the yeah that's true okay so very important yes I agree you know let me say to this first of all there was this idea that beauty and beautiful products and nice things were all for the elite and for the rich but I've been arguing for 30 years as a designer that it should be for a majority now I'm not saying poor necessarily but at least middle-class so any if you watch what's happened with robotics and technology and product design we buy things that are be incredible for so little money it's quite amazing actually and I think we forget really how brilliant we have a kind of technology that costs so little you know so in the sense of we got a better world and it's not like we have to be well off to have it right so in that regard that's number one number two is is this obsession with kind of you know like it's always being there as I said it's been a part of history if you look back it I don't know the Ming Dynasty or the ancient Egyptians or everything it was obsessed the ancient Egyptians invented plastic surgery they made they had nose jobs four thousand year four thousand years ago yeah at that time it was half won that's the difference I think of now though but you could argue now is why the world is better than it's ever been before history is because a majority lives a far better life at one time the world was peasants like our peons and affluent like that and now if you look at what the what's one calls a middle class its enormous meaning that there's a lot of us that we may not be well-off but we can live a comfortable life we could have nice things in our lives we can wear nice clothes look at the democratization of fashion you know the luxury market is having a hell of a time trying to figure it out because you have the HTML and the mangoes and the you know glows and all these companies that are doing really honestly good object good product very low-cost very accessible you know so you can still you know live and have a beautiful aesthetic life and have very little but is there such thing as too much design should design be consumed in moderation like sure I love and hate that question because the mistake is that we think of design as style but design is about you holding that thing in your hand and it fits comfortably and it feels good and the chairs you know perfect for your posture design is supposed to be about shaping this better world but I think you're talking about style so you run around the world and we start styling stuff right its dialects like most of the style has it's irrelevant to us it's it's poorly done and it just gets in the way and you could argue yes that's an obstacle Korean we have to take a very short break now but when we come back arts and design are universal languages in a world that looks increasingly divided our artists and designers the new diplomats that can bring humanity closer well that's coming up in a few moments here on worlds apart welcome back to worlds apart we are discussing the role of design in our lives with Karim Rashid Kareem you said previously that you worked in 42 countries and I heard you say in one of your interviews that the world feels like home to you and indeed a couple of years ago it felt like the world was becoming this singular place you know as John Lannan put it the world will be as one but I wonder if that filling of the world as a singular place is still with you because I think many people would argue that it's not the case anymore I would say more so I feel like I really feel like a global citizen and I think that eventually and I would say if we could project 50 years from now I think we're all going to be global citizens I think this idea of territory and boundary and border is going to dissipate it's not going to continue but what about not necessarily the borders traditional borders like land borders but let's say different ideologies that tend to divide people because as a former war correspondent I had to cover a lot of conflicts in recent years and many of them in the Middle East you know the part of the world where you trace your ancestry from your father was Egyptian so I wonder how do you see the events that are taking place in that part of the world where people are killing each other because they disagree yeah well I mean first all people killed each other for the last hundred thousand years and this is these kind of disagreements of whether it be religion or territory or money or all other things that you know it's it's sad but part of I guess you could argue that it's innate in human nature to have this level of aggression I was joking yesterday at press conference because I said you know what the only way to change this world is to make women run it not men well there's an original idea I guess no it's not it's not yes yeah and it's because of I think that testosterone is like the big problem here you know is it that all the megalomaniacs in the world and the people who feel like they want to control really it's it's this male testosterone like a like a virus like a disease in a way that's really shapes a lot of these problems in Wars and going back to what you said about you know these these conflicts is that you could argue that a lot of uprising has happened as of recent because of the Information Age so what happened in Tunisia and what happened in Egypt and what happened in Libya and you know and you could argue what's happening Ukraine all this has a lot to do with this information age in which we live that people are seeing everybody else they're seeing how other people live they're engaged with the rest of the world nobody anymore is removed or isolated or ignorant nobody can think locally anymore or just regionally they think globally all business practices nobody thinks locally anymore they think globally so you can feel that we're only at the beginning of this shrinking world and I think that these surprises are a necessity because they are showing that there's going to be this kind of global enlightenment as global change of a unification of humanity if I can take you on that point many of the Arab uprisings were initially presented as democratic movements but what I think they disintegrated into is a clash between the forces of modernity people who want to bring change genuine change to their countries and the forces of well you can call it retrospection but really you know the forces who very strongly opposed to any change they want to take those countries back to the Middle Ages or probably even further than that and I think many of them would see you or you know something that you do as sinful because you know they derive their ideology from the very very rigid interpretation of Koran I wonder if you see that movement which is gaining momentum in in the Middle East as in a way a backlash to what you've been trying to do you know like to bring that you know yeah it's you know yeah on one hand I you know I'm a bit of a idealist so I believe that this is just a momentary issue and why I say that is because youth culture and younger and younger younger people are going to make those changes I don't think the the really young people are interested in any sort of progression because they don't know anything about it countries who are staying or let's say regressing it's a problem big problem for them because they're gonna fall away and basically iSight themselves from the global economy and from the way the world functions if you look at a country like Egypt for example sadly enough that's very high poverty the reason is high poverty I think is because the religion is actually causing the boundary and the border and that's the kind of form of suppression if you look at the liberal miss let's say if a country like Turkey although it's 99 percent Muslim the economy is booming it's doing the nice - boom it is still the latest crisis and the corruption scandal and well yeah okay yes I agree but it's still still in comparison you can't even compare there to Egypt and and Turkey in that regard and also you know so there you have a Muslim country but it's it's relatively liberal I think that in general religion itself has to understand that it has to like everything in life move with the times it has to have be flexible as to open up it has to change this happened with your with the Orthodox Church just is happening with the Roman Catholic Church you know there they have to you know what we call the so-called New Testament it has to progressively become newer and newer and newer no on the other hand you can argue that Islam as one religion for example they've been progressing in a sense that even al-qaeda for example uses modern technology they are connected to social media they use Twitter and Facebook to recruit you know new members but I wonder if you really see that clash of ideologies here because on one hand Islam for some time censured you know send you know visual and sensory experiences that's one of the reasons why thinking for example has never taken off in many of the Islamic cases and you are actually your whole philosophy is based on you know stimulating those visual and sensory experiences do you see any clash here between the ideology and what you've been trying because it seems to me that you're the opposite ends yeah III don't know maybe that's why I have no work in the Middle East you know listen I I think that that I don't I don't have the answers to these things I think that's really the reality is I just feel like that religion was here at one time for a certain sense of understanding of human existence why we exist the bigger questions and it was a form of civility we have civility in fact I think we understand so much more today about human existence than ever before in history and I don't really see a real position for religion anymore a lot of what you were just talking about is has really at the end of the day nothing to do with religion you know that the whole thing of al Qaeda at the end of the day it's beyond what the religion or the Koran really stood for in or source stands for in a way so I I'm just hoping and I'll say I'll just say this again is it young people and I and I I'm a very hyper aware of young people and a lot of my market and things I do are young and I'm very young in Seoul in a sense is it they're they're interested in a very very very very different world you know they're interested in this survival of this world because they see the problems they're aware of it and they're interested in this kind of highly community to the world and they're interested in a kind of hyper I would argue a kind of hyper stimulated world meaning that it's full of imagery and beauty and and experiences and you know things that that we already say an analog world never even had the opportunity to experience now if I can switch gears a little bit and your visit to Russia comes at a time when politicians both here and in the West are talking about a new Cold War you know the possibility of introducing economic sanctions or visa bans we don't make you know the movement of things and people much more complicated and I'm not going to ask you whether your would support something like that I guess no but I wonder if you think that could be an effective tool an effective and effective tactic in making one country to change its policy if access to good design to new ideas to you know new places new people was somehow curtail design can be a kind of catalyst for social change and turn slash I would say political change because all the way to see how one could live a better life for a better world affords people to aspire to that and if they aspire to that then they want change and it won't change where they are from or where they live etc etc I think you can't hold anybody down anymore you know that like this idea of suppression of the masses and all that are gone and what I find fascinating about the world we live in now is is that in that hundred thousand years you know generally everything was about collectives it was about it was either like you know religion it was how can I say a militia this politics politicians it was always that we were all conforming and controlled to a certain extent and the majority of people and in creative people too were suppressed right in history all of a sudden now nobody is really controlling your life anymore because we are all individually empowered for the first time ever in history you tend to be more optimistic than and probably even idealistic than most people because I think with all the recent revelations about you know surveillance and how much the government can do to control your life not only here in Russia but also in the United States you know that sort of challenges you're still in control though you you have total control if for example the American government decides to refuse visas to 143 million Russians I mean they may be in control within their own borders but yeah yeah well sure sure at this point in time we still have we you know basically we we have these countries that are kind of controlling territorial etc but I think all this is breaking down quite quickly that's that's that's my Oni Oni here is that we're at the beginning of everything the other thing I want to say is I I believe in this idea of that everybody is creative everybody can have like a creative kind of contribution all of a sudden we're all photographers we're all critics we're all writing every day we all you know it's this kind of amazing we're all kind of making images we're making film or making video we're making music there's more people making music today than ever before in history you know this is a new world in that regard it's a beautiful world creativity is a way of contributing originality in the world and we're all capable of originality whether we're playing piano or were you know making a video and we're born that way and I just had a child I want to say this you know I'm 53 I never had a child before okay so I have a child 11 months and I see her you know I put pins in her hand and I'm showing her how to draw the minute she starts drawing she's gonna draw like no one else draws because every one of us and this is something we forget about human existences we are individuals and we all have a different fingerprint so we have a different mind and she heard lines and her desire at the age of 11 months to create is obvious we all want to create so we're kids we all want to create then what happens to all of us conformity and suppression and the institutions and schools and politics and rules and regularly and next thing you know the majority of you know how many people I meet and they say oh oh I wish I could draw oh I wish I could be creative what are you talking about you were and it's still in you but now it's dormant because it hasn't been exorcised and it wasn't encouraged and it wasn't pushed well Kareem I think it's a very optimistic note to end an interview on thank you very much for your time and to our viewers please keep the conversation going on our Twitter YouTube and Facebook pages a Cuba okay see you again same place same time here on worlds apart

Channel: WorldsApaRT

Views: 25,443

Rating: 4.2283463 out of 5

Keywords: RT, Russia Today, Oksana Boyko, Worlds Apart, Karim Rashid (Visual Artist)

Id: Ci3rZBqsTxU

Length: 26min 51sec (1611 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 24 2014