Last month's design-education spectacular is over, but please indulge us as we present one more piece of (belated) back-to-school content. As we were compiling those interviews, confessions and FAQs, we thought it would also be fun to ask some established designers to tell us about their own most memorable d-school moments. So we reached out to a bunch of folks and asked them each the same question:
What's the craziest, most outrageous or most regrettable product or project you dreamed up during design school?
Here are answers from ten noteworthy contemporary designers.
Initially, I was sure it was this thing I made called the Unimelt 5000, which melted chocolate creatures and turned them into hot chocolate. Inside was some pretty wily electrical work, including a hair dyer, a milk frother, a blender and a garden hose. But then I was looking through some school photos, and there's a laundry list of questionable choices! Others include a coffee table that you had to lube up and spin into an orgasm; a giant waffle standing on syrup drips; a cast rubber chair; and a giant wall-mounted wrecking ball.
I was far too serious in university to develop anything really crazy and outrageous. But when I was teaching at RISD in 1991, I developed concept projects to inspire my students. I would produce pedagogy based on our future digital tools. Here is a mobile phone "tree" that was composed of a small mobile handset and removable touch screens with real-time images so you could leave your last video call image up on the tree to remind you of your family or friends. In 1991 this was only a fantasy that now is a reality.
The first thing I thought of was this project for Nike to design the shoe of the future. I came up with a shoe filled with live bone cells, and the structure of the shoe would form/grow around your foot as you walk. I still think it's kind of a cool idea, but pretty far out-there. As I recall, my teachers were not so thrilled, nor was Nike. Some fellow students found it to be as awesome as I did, while others thought that it's super icky (which it is). No regrets, though!
In 1995, I took a semester off from industrial design at RISD and studied in the sculpture department. A friend of mine had a private studio that he never used and let me take it over. I did not have heat but I remember working long hours wearing fingerless gloves, listening to the radio and eating a lot of hot chili. Here is a project from that time—it's really not that crazy, even though I made the pieces out of pantyhose and Latex.
In my first year of design at university, I made a series of bent plywood stools that could stack on top of one another. The forms were zoologically inspired, with little heads and arms and legs. I thought they were pretty cute and innocent. When stacked, however, it looked like the stool animals were, well, mating—and I definitely got poked fun at for that, big time.
My most ludicrous student project was this chair that incorporated a dog bowl for feeding the dog at the table!
The only school project that left a mark on me is the Water Room, my thesis at Pratt Institute. Bruce Hannah was my advisor and a great influence—he really knows how to encourage his students. My favorite part of the Water Room was the summer I spent on my friend Stefan Sagmeister and his roommate Paul's roof in the Lower East Side. Summer was especially hot and we all went to the outer boroughs one day and bought a kiddie pool. You could only get onto the roof from the kitchen window. We filled the pool up with a hose connected to the kitchen sink and would spend our days lounging in and around the pool. One day I felt like I needed to work on my thesis a little more seriously (and in this I was probably influenced by Stefan, who had a very good work ethic and a way of making work look like fun) so I bought all sorts of things on Canal Street and started taking pictures of them in the pool—little wind-up fish, mirrors, colored plexi, metal sheets, marbles. I splashed, hosed, poured, pushed and pulled water and documented all of it on Kodak film that I would develop and sometimes glue together end to end to show water in motion. My friends would just watch me do it. Paul, who has since opened Cafe Steinhof in Brooklyn, would make flourless chocolate cakes for his catering business and grill fish. It was a great summer. Ever since, I have associated vacation, lounging around with friends and having a good time as the build-up to great work.
To be honest, the only project that was crazy from my perspective was a 130-page theoretical Master's thesis at Pratt Institute with Core77's own Allan Chochinov as my thesis advisor. He did everything within his power to pull me out of my comfort zone and tear me away from physically designing anything. It was a nightmare for me to spend an entire year on a theoretical argument on the correlation between the design process and Darwinian evolution (I know, right?), but in the end I'm so glad he pushed me in the direction that he did. He made me a smarter and more ethical designer for it.
One of my thesis projects was called the Unfolding Chair. My thesis explored how to design objects that had a symbiotic relationship with the user, getting better with time and use. Using objects like cast iron pans and blue jeans as my inspiration, I set about creating a body of work that tried to achieve this goal. The Unfolding Chair was a design for an outdoor folding chair where the act of opening it up would actually change the shape of the armrest. Sanding blocks connected to the chair would slide up and down the wooden arms, gradually changing their profile from rough rectangles to half rounds.
I became radicalized by Italian design during my studies at Pratt Institute's MID program in the early 1990's. The very different modernist tenets and graphic standards we were learning at school clashed with my poetic ideal of design, but they wormed their way also into my school design projects and later my professional work.
The best example of this period of my life was my Master's thesis of the Wizard-of-Oz Appliances. The series consisted of eight 1:1 prototypes for household appliances based on characters from the film The Wizard of Oz. Appliances included the Dorothy Toaster, the Wicked Witch Blender (below), the Good Witch Ice Cream Maker, the Scarecrow Crockpot, the Tin Man Coffee Maker and a full-size Oz Washing Machine! Although befuddled by this weirdness, my professors were kind and they generously allowed me to graduate. Shortly thereafter, I was invited by curator Ellen Lupton to display the whole project in a wonderful museum exhibition called Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office, at the Cooper-Hewitt. So the takeaway from this, 20 years later, is that crazy is in the eye of the beholder.
Create a Core77 Account
Already have an account? Sign In
By creating a Core77 account you confirm that you accept the Terms of Use
Please enter your email and we will send an email to reset your password.