 |
ILLUSTRATED MAN: Holt’s
preoccupation with blobby design encompasses a regard
for the way illness has changed his body. The exhibit
at the San Jose Museum of Art included this Elizabeth
Paige Smith cabinet,
inspired by the pores of a bird’s beak, and Candeloos
(left), rechargeable lights designed by Andreu Osika.
Glenn Matsumura |
A shimmery, asymmetrical water bottle. A
bright, bulgy toothbrush. A watch whose crystal seems to
puddle on its wristband. A pugnacious, lime-colored British
coupe. A line of shampoos in plastic bottles that evoke a
woman’s
breast.
What do these objects have in common? The curved, fluid,
emotional, Rorschach-test aspect of these items makes them “blobjects,” says
Steven Skov Holt, MFA ’92, one of industrial design’s
leading educators. Holt, 48, says blobjects represent not
only a peek into the popular zeitgeist, but a trend in
product design that has become more common thanks to advances
in technology. Holt and his wife, Mara Holt Skov, have
assembled these products and several dozen more in an exuberant
exhibit they co-curated. Blobjects & Beyond: The New Fluidity
in Design runs through mid-July at the San Jose Museum of Art.
Blobjects, Holt says, have a comforting, hopeful, athletic,
intelligent, global appeal that is appearing in more and more
products, and those products are as apt to be found at mainstream
stores like Target as in a hip SoHo gallery. Blobjects “offer
new possibilities for finding delight, beauty and meaning in
our overwhelming yet interdependent lives,” he says.
 |
|
|
If anyone is qualified to speak about hope in the face
of overwhelming challenges, it’s Holt.
As an undergraduate at Brown University in the late 1970s,
Holt was not only the picture of health, but an avid
athlete and cyclist whose pals teased him about his “thunder
thighs.” In 1979 at age 20, however, his life took a
dramatic turn: for reasons doctors never unearthed, Holt’s
kidneys failed. He received a transplant. After five
months in the hospital, he battled back to health and finished
a degree in cognitive science.
Soon after, in 1982, Holt answered an ad for a low-level
job at Manhattan-based ID Magazine, the bible of industrial
design. Within a year, the intense Holt was editor of
the magazine that spotted and helped shape trends, and
it was a time when all sorts of new high-tech products were
appearing on the landscape.
 |
GOING WITH THE
FLOW: A motorcycle by Cory Ness has a hand-built
aluminum body that seems to speed ahead even when
the machine’s at rest.
|
In 1990, Holt, who had long expected that he would go
to graduate school, headed west to Stanford. He enrolled
in the MFA program and interacted closely with Stanford’s
burgeoning product design program, an interdisciplinary
approach to designing products with roots in both art
and engineering. Holt explains, “I
was not a prototypical design student and I was thrilled
by the things that Stanford allowed me to connect to,” from
poets to painters to prototype builders. After Stanford,
he immediately joined frogdesign, a legendary industrial
design firm based in Silicon Valley that’s run by
German design renegade Hartmutt Esslinger. Esslinger
is passionate that products should have forms reflecting
their emotional impact—often
a blobby path. Holt worked on futuristic concepts and
design strategies for a slew of big clients including
IBM and Hasbro. “Of
all the people I’ve met in America over the last
30 years, Steve is really one of the visionaries,” says
Esslinger, who employed Holt as his vice president
of strategy for nearly a decade. “He sees design
and art and pop culture as integrated.”
 |
DEEP SEATED: Karim Rashid designs
blobby chairs that engulf their sitters.
|
After frogdesign, Holt took on his current job as distinguished
professor of industrial design at California College of the
Arts, and he has served as guest curator on several major design
exhibits.
Even as his reputation as a thinker and design educator
grew, however, the toll of years and years of antirejection
medication was catching up with him. His eyesight weakened.
His bones became brittle. His immune system deteriorated.
Yet while his body was under siege, his heart was taking
wing: In 1995, a friend from frogdesign introduced Holt
to Skov, who had worked in the fashion and the art worlds.
They were married soon after. Within a couple of years,
they would have a son, Larson, now 8.
After a life-threatening infection in 1997, Holt’s transplanted
kidney began to fail. Holt subsequently has battled two kinds
of cancer, dozens of bone fractures, and other complications.
He receives frequent dialysis and is again on a very long list
of those waiting for transplants. The notion that his life
hangs in a fragile balance is a constant in their family, yet
both Holt and Skov—so animated and passionate about design—are
similarly thoughtful and optimistic about the future. When
Holt jokes about spending his life focused on how things look,
even as his own exterior cracks, Skov, 44, and as healthy-looking
as Holt is battered, gently grabs his hands. “You’re
beautiful on the inside,” she says, as he flashes
a big smile.
 |
CUTTING (OUT) CORNERS:
Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners designed
a larval National Space Centre in Leicester, England.
|
“There is a real affinity between blobjects and
me,” Holt notes. “The quintessential blob form—the
kidney—has played such a big role in my life. I have
found that other similar rounded shapes (for example,
beach rocks, beach glass and beach ceramics) have stuck
with me as well. I have come to the conclusion that blobjects
are the closest, most compelling man-made artifact to these
natural forms—they possess the same, almost ineffable
qualities of beach rocks.”
The language of industrial design can be jarring and
mysterious to the uninitiated. Most of us rarely think
of toothbrushes as athletic and optimistic, for example.
But the blobject show and a companion book, Blobjects
and Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design (Chronicle Books),
written by Holt and Skov, go a long way toward illuminating
the emotions and messages that designs convey: why
an iPod confers coolness or a motorcycle seems to growl
even before the engine kicks into gear. When he was editor
of ID Magazine in the late 1980s, Holt coined the term “blobject” in
response to the curves he saw appearing in more and
more home furnishings and cars, such as the fluid lines
on the Ford Taurus.
 |
SURFACE TENSION: Marc Newsom
made a stainless steel sofa called Lockheed
Lounge.
|
It’s not that industrial designers had ignored curves
prior to the 1980s. In their book, Holt and Skov note
that blobs have oozed in and out of design favor as well
as our cultural consciousness for decades. The 1930s
and 1940s gave us bulgy, curved outlines in cars such
as the Lincoln Zephyr and airplanes such as the Douglas
DC-3. In the 1940s, Al Capp’s
Li’l Abner cartoon introduced the Shmoo, a blobby
creature who changed to satisfy human desires, and
legendary furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames
experimented with fiberglass to create blobby chairs.
Kidney-shaped pools dotted backyards across the land,
and what could be blobbier than the original VW Beetle?
In the late 1980s, however, blobjects seemed to reach a
tipping point. A far-flung group of designers from
Canada, Europe and Australia began working with mostly hand-crafted
blobjects as diverse as lava lamps and chairs. At the
time, industrial designers typically would sketch their visions
for mass-produced products, and mechanical engineers then would
take over the process and impose more traditional engineering
and tooling specs on the objects. Straight lines and
right angles are simpler and often cheaper to engineer.
 |
THE PLOP THICKENS: Marc Schamburg’s
Regalio
di Canto floor lamp is made of polyethylene shells.
|
That changed in the early 1990s, when designers figured
out ways to use design software to turn early concepts
and sketches into precise instructions for the actual tooling
and production of curves and bulges. Especially in a new generation
of strong, flexible plastics, computer-assisted design
paved the way for blobby products such as the Nike Triax watch,
Oral-B toothbrushes, creative packaging forms, and all sorts
of curved electronic products, from remote controls to music
players.
For the exhibit, Holt and Skov chose products that
span a huge range of forms and functions. Take frogdesign’s
walkie-talkies for Disney. They’re identical to others
on the inside, but frog put them in a colorful, rounded,
slim case a child can easily hold. Products from international
design superstar Karim Rashid range from a curvy carpet
to sculpted dish-soap packaging almost too elegant to hold
such a mundane substance. The modest duty of supplying
dental floss becomes whimsy in the hands of Italian designer
Stefano Pirovano. For the Italian product company Alessi,
Priovano created a blobby little plastic man no bigger
than an apricot, called “Otto,” whose
arm unspools the floss.
As individual items, blobjects may seem cute or toy-like,
but more broadly, they represent the way “designers
are now applying principles of fine art to everyday objects,
from salt and pepper shakers to chandeliers,” notes
Susan Landauer, who commissioned the exhibit in her role
as Katie and Drew Gibson chief curator at the San Jose
Museum of Art.
 |
SHAPE SHIFTERS: Marcel Wanders
has named a series of “snotty” vases
for airborne germs.
|
The blobject show was so compelling to visitors that
the museum had to post extra security people and lots
of “DO NOT TOUCH” signs. “That’s when design
works,” notes
Yves Behar, founder of the San Francisco design firm
fuseproject and a longtime colleague of Holt’s. “When
people can’t keep their hands off it.”
Holt believes consumers love blobby forms partly because
they reflect the “supersized, near-effortless consumption” of
the new American dream. They visually represent how our culture
and products and even our identities “are constantly
changing, morphing and intertwining toward a new kind of fluidity.” His
own attraction remains more complex: “Blobjects are an
evolutionarily successful form. Just looking at the 20th century,
the blob form shows up in movements as diverse as art nouveau,
surrealism, 1950s modernism and 1960s psychedelia. It just
keeps cropping up. Like blobjects, I guess I’d like
to think that I am a survivor, able to roll with the
punches and whatever comes along.” |
