Karim Rashid

Today, designers approach their work from a different perspective. A poetic design of interiors has evolved based on a plethora of complex criteria — human experience; social, global, economic and political issues; physical and mental interaction, form, vision, and a rigorous understanding of contemporary culture. However, manufacturing is based on another collective group of criteria: capital investment, market share, production ease, dissemination, growth, distribution, maintenance and service, performance, quality, ecological issues and sustainability. The combination of all of these components has come to shape our interiors, inform our aesthetic, our physical culture, and our human experiences. These issues shape the business — its identity, its brand, and its value.

Are companies really interested in people and in culture?? Do manufacturers discuss personal rituals, the depths of private relationships, the warmth of family, the codes of love, the signs of human emotions, the regard for happiness, freedom, personal expression, the well being of our human existence? And do they address these questions through the product they sell? Businesses can only be holistic and comprehensive if they are able to address these issues.

The world around us seems to be getting perpetually softer, more amorphous and blobular. Our objects are softer, our cars are rounder, our high-tech objects are rounder, and even our bodies are fatter. The digital age, the information society, the global village and the leisure culture all are symptoms of a changing physical world where ‘Soft’ defines our landscape. This casualization of shape, form, material and behavior is now a movement. This world is data-driven fluidity. Now the landscape will flow.

I am a citizen of the global society where there are no boundaries, no borders, no diversities, prejudice, class or racial differences. I love the shrinking unification of the world because it affords all of us to be inspired by every culture, every person, everywhere and anytime. This is the omnipresent new age in which we live. With more choice, more exposure, more information, more exchange, perpetual communication we become an ever-vast inspiring single world! Globalization has opened up diversity of the individual. As our world shrinks we become more aware of the world around us, we communicate globally, we mix and in turn we will eventually have one global culture made up of individual objective minds.