Karim Rashid and Tom Dixon: The Poetics of Product

Written by Ellen Berkovitch // October 3, 2011 // Design // No comments

Doride by Karim Rashid for Artemide

On October 6 Karim Rashid speaks on a poetics of “product” at the World Design Insight Forum in Seoul, South Korea. His Karimanifesto deals in how the human experience criterion leads design (body as site of poetical intervention?). Manufacturing, next, enters the picture. “The business of beauty,” per Karimanifesto, is a complex physics of “capital, market share, production, distribution, maintenance, service, performance, quality, ecological issues and sustainability.”

Never mind. Sometimes things of beauty are indeed glorious and such is the case with the Doride floor lamp by Rashid, for Artemide, which if I had $3000, would be my first expenditure (actually, second, after a new laptop). The light is fluorescent, the shape is cobra, the color is panther black (or white, but the white’s too Sleeper for me.) Doride won a 2011 design award; Karim Rashid also last year got a special commendation from the UK LEAF awards 2010 for a University of Naples subway station.

The line in short between product and environment is shrinking, and such is the principle of a local design retailer, Molecule Design, where Adriana Siso used the occasion of Design Santa Fe weekend to spotlight a new product emphasis on the work of Karim Rashid’s fellow British designer, Tom Dixon.

Tom Dixon works can be seen locally, and Dixon has carried out globally (in wider-scaled interiors projects) the notion of British social club, into such contexts as Tokyo, or restaurants, with a very late-modern-contemporary sensibility. This short post offers up two new light forms as exemplary of how great a light is as a design “product” that transmutes into a poetics of experience. I dare say.