“When I do design…it’s not for me, it’s for all of us”

On November 10, 2024, Dubai hosted the second Russian Design Forum, a key event for design and architecture professionals organized by Olga Melnikova. The Forum, which gathered more than 250 Russian-speaking professionals, became an important platform for sharing experience and establishing contacts in the international design environment. Special attention was paid to the development of design in the Emirates, where Russian designers are confidently asserting themselves, setting trends and creating unique solutions that harmoniously combine innovation and cultural traditions.

The forum culminated with a speech by Karim Rashid, one of the world’s most renowned designers, who inspired the participants with his views on the future of design and expressed his opinion on the role of Russian-speaking designers in the interior design world.

The event also emphasized the importance of sustainable design, new technologies and materials, as well as the role of forums as platforms for the presentation of the latest collections in the interior sector.

Here is the full text of an interview with Karim Rashid

Question: So, your office in New York City is situated between Lincoln Center and Modern Art Museum. And your creative works are on the cutting edge of design of contemporary art. Do you think that design goes to the art? Or are they going similar, some merging?

Karim: I think art and design are very different and very separate.

We want to believe somehow that they’re much different. But, you know, design is about solving problems in everyday life. Design is about us navigating through the world, interacting and touching and engaging physicality and virtual. So, if I design interface in a phone, I have to do it in a way that people can have a good experience, easy experience. And design in a way is about that, making life easier, even elevating and making life more pleasurable. So, design will always embrace function, of course. And it embraces our daily experiences.

Art, on the other hand, is something completely different. Art is sort of a message, a communication, an emotional relationship with us, but it doesn’t really provide a physical or a virtual function, you know. One could argue art is unnecessary, you know.

I’m a big advocate of art for many years and I love certain artists, very contemporary ones. And art also taught us the history of humanity, right? It was in a way art was originally a documentation of us.

But design is not something that’s either produced by a machine or by a crane or by a rapid prototyping machine or injection moulding. Design is, we need to be able to… Live our physical life and virtual life with these things around us.

Now you can make design that’s very creative. You can make design that’s very interesting or very provocative or emotional. But still, it provides a function.

And I don’t know why we want to merge the two. Why do we talk about this all the time? Or why do we even call design art? I even question whether a museum should have design in it if it’s an art museum. If it’s a design museum, it’s a design museum. But if it’s an art museum, why should a chair sit in it? It doesn’t make sense.

If I call myself an artist, I make art. If I call myself an architect, I make architecture. If I call myself a designer, I make design. There are different disciplines. They’re all creative disciplines.

The only connection is that they’re creative. That’s all. The mistake that’s happening now, and I noticed this even at the fair.

Did you go to the fair, to D3? There’s a section called Additions. That’s more art. The other section is design. If I buy a lamp from Artemide, it’s design. Now, in Addition, so many designers are trying so hard to craft a cool chair and make something that’s trying to merge the two, right?

But my advice to them, if you want to do art, do art. If you want to do design, do design. But when you merge, what is it at the end? Craft? I don’t really know what it is. I don’t know what it is, you know. They call that movement art furniture, right?

There was a nice guy from Iran. He showed me his furniture, but he’s calling it art. And I said, well, I would never sit on that thing that you make, right? To me, it looks dangerous. I don’t want to sit on it. And I said, you know, what do you really want to say? Like, why are you making a chair that looks a bit uncomfortable and frightening? And he didn’t really have an answer.

I said to him, you know, you seem the type, you seem like an artist, right? Do art. Forget that you have to sit on it. Make a sculpture, if that’s what you want to do. Don’t make people look at it and think chair. You’re a sculptor, obviously. Do sculpt, because it doesn’t work as a chair. And it sort of doesn’t work as art.

That’s the problem.

When I work, I show in museums. I have an exhibition, art exhibition coming up in Paris. When I do art, I show art.

When I do art, it’s a selfish act. I do whatever I like. Artists are the most selfish people in the world. You realize that, right? But when I do design, design, and it’s not for me, it’s for all of us. So, I have to think as a social act, art. I mean, sorry, design. Art is a creative act to say whatever I want to say. So those are two very different, distinct things.

And the two egos can live in one person as well. I mean, you may be selfish when you do art, and in design, you can be selfless.

Sometimes you have to be selfless. If I design the cockpit of an airplane, okay. Yeah, I never have. But if I had to design one, someone has to design this cockpit with all the instruments. You can’t sit there and go, oh, I’m going to… No, right?

You have to be efficient, smart; it has to be semantic.

What’s most important first, second, third, right? That’s design. That’s selfless. Now, if I design a line of vases for Venini or something, right? Well, they’re sort of selling it in production. It’s production. It has a tool, everything. So, it is design.

But because it’s a vase, I can express myself more. In design, you have some things that you can express yourself a lot, and then things like the cockpit of the plane, where it’s not about self-expression at all. It’s about safety. It’s about the pilots, right?

I always say there’s like a pendulum. Here, I’m the most creative. And here I’m the least creative, and it depends on the job. I’m designing a hospital now. So, the hospital is somewhere over here somewhere in the safety realm. It’s quite creative, but it’s so much function, so much concern about making it efficient, smart, hygienic, etc.

The purpose of a designer is to make even that cockpit beautiful, make it functional. I’ve seen Heidelberg printing machine created in 1892. It was working, still working until now, 10 years ago. It was the most beautiful industrial design.

When you talk about beauty, the problem is you have to define beauty, and beauty has not been well defined.

When we think about the word beauty, we tend to think on a superficial, right? Like even the word is associated with makeup. The word is associated with fashion. But beauty is not the superficial surface. Beauty is when something has really strong content in it. So, the beauty of the Heidelberg printing machine is the intelligence of the engineering, the materials. It’s a combination of all those things. That’s real beauty.

I always say for a person to be beautiful; they can do everything they want physically. But if the inside is not beautiful, they’re not a beautiful person. it’s what’s inside and outside. If they can work in certain sort of harmony, that’s beauty.

Inside and outside. It’s like you look at a Picasso painting. You go, oh, that’s beautiful. Why is it beautiful? It’s not only the color of what you see on the surface. It’s the concept and the idea and the way he saw the world that’s in the painting that we appreciate.

Question: You’re a master of new shapes, new visions, of ordinary things surrounding us, everyday life, furniture, whatever in our interiors, and they’re both hospitality and residential, right? What does inspire you to make that?

Karim: What inspires me first of all is people, human beings. How they live, how they sit, how they think, how they gather, how, you know, us, how we move. This inspires me a lot to watch social behavior of people.

Second, technology inspires me a great deal. What can I do with new machinery, new technology? Is there an opportunity to do new things? You know, so I’m very inspired by how something is made or how we can produce something. The technology of software and hardware and the tools that I can play with. Technology inspires me in the sense of human communication, how these instruments and things around us are making a new world. That’s inspiring.

And the third part I think that is inspiring for me is to think, to step back a little bit and think about solving problems. Just basic problems. Problem solving was what design used to be about. That’s what people used to say, right? And then we forgot to solve problems. We thought all the problems had been solved. Turns out we created more problems that need solving. And design, a lot of what’s around us that we call design, is actually creating problems.

So today, if you design a chair, it doesn’t matter how beautiful it may look. If it isn’t super comfortable, it should not exist. We should be the best. And there’s no excuse for an uncomfortable world. Period. But as you said, we became so, so focused on image that we’re forgetting that there’s problems to be solved.

So, you are doing this for 40 years. You are in technology. You have started when you had…

You know my first design job? My first. I was in second year at university, and I got a job for the summer in a telephone company to design business telephones. Big ones with a handset, lots of buttons.

And when I got that job that summer, it was only the head of the

design and four other people in the design department. But the company had 10,000 employees because it was a big high-tech company. The head of the department had some health problems, so he left me with all his work. I was 20, I had no idea what I was doing, and I had six phones to design in six weeks. And I didn’t know enough about this stuff. I learned fast. And looking back they weren’t bad. I actually did pretty good. I still have the images of the phones and I put them up on my Instagram. That was when I was 20; I’m 64, so that’s 44 years I’ve been designing.

So, but during these years, technologies have been changed, even your tools have been changed. How do you feel with that? The design became more comfortable for you, easier for you?

For sure easier. And that’s why I say there’s no excuses to do bad work because there’s so much available to us. The process used to be drawn with the pen. And you’re designing something complicated, a portable computer for example., that drawing you made took forever. Then it goes to the plastic injection company, and they do a change, the wall thickness, and then it goes to mold. You have to build prototypes. The process was so long, and you really only got one or two chances to get it right. Today, in one day, you see 30 variations.

So, you can make something perfect, and the whole process is shorter. Even the production, the tooling, everything goes to market faster. So, it’s a beautiful time in that regard. It was very labor-intensive at one point. And architects are the same. You draw a plan, and you draw the building, and you used to have to have also a hundred people drafting. Today, you need one.

My father was an architect.

So, you know, remember his office then? Relying on the T-square. We’ve come a long way. And now, the reality is AI is designing for us.

Question: And two short questions about technologies, which always impact on the trends. And I would like to speak, I think you have spoken about it, artificial intelligence and copyright, intellectual property. How will it work in the future? How do you feel with that? It’s another technology. Are you going to use, for instance, artificial…

I’ve used it for three years now. I used it a lot.

Aren’t you afraid that tomorrow it will just… Take over?

First of all, I’m not afraid of anything.

The biggest problem with humanity is fear. We are afraid of everything. We’re afraid of our parents, we are afraid for relationships, we are afraid of our boss, we are afraid of job, we are afraid of change, we are afraid of our other cultures, we are afraid of skin color, we are afraid of whatever.

Fear is that it’s big culprit and demise of humanity. I time many years ago made myself a commitment that I won’t fear anything and it will change. AI will eliminate a lot of creative people, and a lot of designers will be gone. The problem with the designers is that we are soft costs in a project. If tomorrow you’re going to build a building here in Dubai, that 5% or whatever it goes to the architect and that other 5% that goes to say two interiors designers, and you want to cut costs, the soft costs of a designer goes first. The hard cost are that I still have to buy the floo, and the walls and the construction. Even the civil engineer will go. He’s soft cost too, right? Mechanical engineer, gone. But I still have to buy the air conditioning. So, Designers go first. It’s happening now.

I was designing a hotel plan with AI and I saw 30 variations of reconfiguration of all the rooms of a hotel in 6 minutes, and I picked the best one. And I thought, I have these tools in front of me. While I have work and a job, I might as well use them. And by the time I don’t have a job, I’ll probably be dead anyway.

I feel sorry for is the rest, the young people. If I’m 18 years old today and I’m going to go study design, what the hell am I going to, what are my teachers going to teach me?

And what am I, how am I going to learn? The world’s flipped upside down now.

A guy came up to me a couple days ago, and said to me, I have my undergraduate in design and architecture. I’m thinking about doing a masters in neuroscience. Do you know where I should go? And I said to him, don’t go for three years to university. Go online. There’s a whole bunch of courses you can take. And in three, four months you

can do lots of course on neuroscience. Why go spend three years in a university? And I feel bad saying that, but it’s the truth, it’s the reality, right?

Question: And the last question, I think all of these people would like to ask that question about Russian designers. And Russian, how can I say it, the potential of Russian designers, particularly here.

I like the question. I have to say, Russia was self-sufficient for a century. It produced cars and refrigerators and ovens. It didn’t need anybody else, right? It was a closed community, right?

Under the rule of Communism, it did everything. It beat the world to

space. It was full of technology and brilliance. The Russian people are so well educated.

The knowledge, the know-how, the infrastructure, the natural resources, it has everything going for it. Amazing country. I was so thrilled when I went 25 years ago the first time. I couldn’t wait to go to Russia. I loved the country, you know? I loved the deconstructivism movement. I loved the Russian painters. I loved everything that came out of the culture. I get there, I meet amazing, interesting people, I see the change.

In 25 years, it just boom, boom, boom, boom, change. And every time I flew back to New York, or wherever I went, I would say to people who are so ignorant that Russia’s a great country. I said, Moscow’s a better city than New York. And nobody listened to me, nobody really believed it, right? And all I wanted in my heart was for Russia to open its borders so that it would unite itself with the rest of the world. And what did I see? I saw it closing more and more and more. What a shame, you know? And it could be a powerhouse like China now. It could be bigger than China now.

And even China is fairly closed. But Moscow could be having 50 million visitors a year. The country is so rich with culture and know-how. And sadly, it went the wrong way, but it’ll turn around. I think it’s going to turn around.

I see so many talented young students, designers. I judged a lot of competitions there. I made a lot of lectures. I visited a lot of schools. And I saw that the Russian creativity is amazing. I saw that painters, sculptors, and the applied and major arts is so important to the culture. Everybody feels attached or interested in the applied and major arts.

In a lot of cultures most people couldn’t give a shit about that stuff. They don’t know anything. They don’t care. Sculpture and art design were all part of most Russians people’s lives. I follow quite a few Russians architects and my wish is for your country is to embrace the world. It’s amazing that Russia’s now has a bad reputation but the people are amazing. It’s sort of unfair.

A couple of years ago in New York, every Russian business had to close, you know. Why? These are people who lived outside of Russia for 40 years with restaurants and stuff. So hopefully things will turn around. I really hope.

I think it’s in the blood. Within every very culture I look at the talent, whether they were an industrious country, which Russia is, and a country that was very concerned with progress and technology, generally they produce really good designers and architects. It’s in the DNA of the culture.

I’ll give you a good example. I don’t want to criticize, but I’m allowed to, because I’m half Egyptian. The Middle East… Stopped designing thousands of years ago. Industry, technology was never a part of the culture here. They relied on natural resources. They still do. Hence, you don’t see really that talented Middle Eastern architects and designers because it’s not in the DNA of their history.

People keep looking up to Italians. Why? The Italians have been steeped in art and design for 3,000 years. It’s part of their blood. So, when I sit down with Italians and the engineer says we should move that line. I look at the engineer and say you’re right. You’re better than me. You should design the product.

You don’t find that in almost any other country in the world because it’s in the DNA of their history. You can go around the world and critique every culture about why there is good design and architecture, being generated, or not?

But without being critical of other countries, everybody has their strength. It could be something else from those countries. But when it comes to design, Russians have it in the blood.

Deconstructivism was one of the most powerful movements

of history in architecture and art and graphic design. All those propaganda posters and beautiful fonts went on for a period of about 40, 50 years, that’s in the blood of the DNA of Russians.