Transcript: The Prince of Plastic

Kim Thúy [00:00:02] Imagine a museum of the future … made up entirely of the stories we tell each other. Not the history that is captured in textbooks, but in the voices of the people who lived it. Which stories would resonate with you? Which ones do you think will last? And which will go on to shape how we live our lives, now and in the future?

[00:00:31] Welcome to Artifactuality … a podcast series featuring remarkable stories generously shared with the Canadian Museum of History. I’m your host, Kim Thúy.

[00:00:45] On this episode of Artifactuality: The Prince of Plastic.

Karim Rashid [00:00:53] Design is for everyday life. And design is, you know, these objects that are around us, if you’re going to put all this work and engineering, and all the tooling costs, and all the people involved, and two years to develop, why not be poetic, more beautiful, you know, function better, right?

Kim Thúy [00:01:10] Karim Rashid has been called one of the most famous industrial designers in the world. Even if you’ve never heard of him, you’ve likely seen his work. You might even own a piece or two. One of his most iconic designs is a simple garbage can called the Garbo, that he made for the home decor store, Umbra, in 1996. The curved plastic container with oval cutouts for handles, and an opening wider than its bottom, practically invites your trash inside. It’s emblematic of Karim Rashid’s work … colourful, sensual, curvy, no rough edges … very functional and very beautiful. And his work runs the gamut from high art to everyday household objects. He loves working with synthetic rubber or silicone. And materials like santoprene and evoprene because he says they imitate the silkiness of human skin.

[00:02:22] But before we had his work — the physical objects he creates — there is the story of how the work came to be … the forces that shaped his aesthetic, and places where he developed his singular philosophy — that even the lowly garbage can deserves our attention…

[00:02:48] Karim Rashid was born in Cairo, Egypt, as dense and bustling a city in 1960 as it is today. But his childhood took him around the world. After Cairo, the family moved to Rome, then eventually London, where the soft-spoken Karim did his early schooling.

Karim Rashid [00:03:10] I remember England quite well. I did my kindergarten there, and I remember they used to beat my hand with a ruler because I was left-handed. So they made me write with my right. That’s one of the biggest memories. Which is good now because I’m ambidextrous now, which is great.

Kim Thúy [00:03:28] After London and a short stop in Paris, the Rashids boarded the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner all the way to Montréal. Crossing the Atlantic with his family was one of Karim’s earliest and most formative memories.

Karim Rashid [00:03:47] We took the ship and the ship was about 12 days, I think, and there was a drawing competition on the ship. This is why I remember the ship very, very well. And there was maybe 100 children on the ship, so we all had to draw. We had like, I think, a half an hour and I was sitting with my brother and all the kids. I remember this very vividly and I didn’t know what to draw. And so I thought I was going to draw a building, but it didn’t seem like the right context, I remember. And a lot of children were drawing like family and the ship itself and the sun and water. And I was very fascinated with the fact that we were going to a new country, right. And my parents somehow managed to take everything, all our belongings, and put them in a few crates and a few suitcases. So I was fascinated with this idea of this, like compression of storage and things.

[00:04:38] So I drew luggage. That’s what I drew. I remember drawing the kind of vertical luggage opened with shirts stacked in it and shoes. And I won the competition. So that’s why I remember that period very, very well. For me, it was like, I’m so proud of the child, you know?

Kim Thúy [00:04:53] The Rashids disembarked in Montréal at a time when the city and the country were coming into their own. And nothing signals Canada’s arrival on the world stage like Expo 67. This was a groundbreaking event, especially from a design perspective. Expo was the site of Habitat 67, the famous apartment complex — made up of squares stacked on top of each other — that was designed by the legendary architect Moshe Safdie. It still stands today. But it was at Expo that the seed planted on that ocean liner started to take root and blossom.

Karim Rashid [00:05:51] I think it’s what made my brother and I go into design and architecture, and my father would take us almost every day. We went to Men’s World and Habitat and all. It’s fantastic. And I think it was one of the last really radical expos in the world, actually, and it was very important for Canada. That Expo, it really put Montréal on the global map.

Kim Thúy [00:06:13] The family’s time in Montréal was short lived. Karim’s dad got a job designing sets at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, so the family settled in Toronto. Back then, the suburbs were still surrounded by forests and rivers.

Karim Rashid [00:06:31] It was near Burnhamthorpe Road, I remember. And a new high school was being built and the roads were just dirt. They weren’t even paved yet and they were all just new little houses, you know. It was nice to move there because it wasn’t really suburbia in a way. It was the country because behind our house was a railway track and then just apple orchards. And then there was a huge forest nearby with the Mississauga River and we used to go over that river and fish and bike and hike and camp.

Kim Thúy [00:07:01] There, in this idyllic environment, Karim’s father helped lay the groundwork for his aesthetic, giving him the sense that our own surroundings are things we can alter to perfectly suit our tastes.

Karim Rashid [00:07:16] So we moved into this suburban home, but my father decided to break the wall down and cut a circle to walk through from one room to another with huge super graphics going on all the walls. Put up these really strange, interesting posters, like, flush on the walls, and there was a lot of colour, you know, turquoise chair, and he had this pink couch. So my father was very painterly and his work used a lot of colour, and he ended up making a workshop in the basement designing his own furniture.

[00:07:46] I saw something poetic and very unique about my father. I mean, he would draw. We would do this thing Sunday mornings where we break up the family, we draw each other. So we would sit at the breakfast table. After breakfast, I would maybe draw my brother, and my brother would draw my sister, and my sister would draw my dad. You know, it’s very nice. We did things like that. But he never really forced us to be creative or go into creative professions. But I think the environment and just watching him behaviourally, it was inevitable in a way.

[00:08:19] And I was also quite impressed by the objects we had in the home. And my father would buy really nice things, very few things, because again, we weren’t wealthy. But when he bought something it was really nice. And he bought me an orange Braun alarm clock radio. So beside my bed was this bright orange plastic radius, nice, clean, minimalist object. And I ended up loving that thing. And I loved plastic and I loved soft things, and I don’t even know where that came from. They just seemed so human to me. So they connected with my body and my mind. And it was a calming effect to have those kinds of objects in my environment. And I think some of the furniture my dad had had the same kind of thing.

Kim Thúy [00:09:05] But when it came time to go to university, he applied to study architecture at Carleton. Because that’s what you studied back then, if design intrigued you. Luckily for him, there were no slots left, so they put him in their new industrial design stream … and, well, Karim Rashid’s fate was sealed.

Karim Rashid [00:09:29] I think for any student, I mean, that’s kind of a very important time of your life, right? Because it’s all new social milieu with people from all over, and you’re away from your parents and you’re doing what you are passionate about, hopefully, you know. So they were great and Ottawa was a very beautiful place to study because it was a quiet town. So I kind of like that remoteness. And we used to, like, skate in the winter on the Ottawa River to school, things of that nature. I mean, the winters were a bit brutal, but I really loved that time. Yeah.

Kim Thúy [00:10:02] After Carleton, everything changed. He did his post-graduate studies in Italy, living in a kind of a Hogwarts for designers on the Amalfi Coast.

Karim Rashid [00:10:16] So we ended up living in this house where we were studying, and it was cantilevered kind of on a cliff and looking at the island of Sorrento and Capri. So it was an amazing place to spend … I spent, I think, eight months there for the fall, the whole winter. And at wintertime it’s very closed, you know, it’s very strange. It’s a bit haunted, you know. It’s like everything shuts down and everything because there’s no tourism. So it was kind of — it was a beautiful time to study.

Kim Thúy [00:10:39] Living in that house in Italy, overlooking the sea, Karim was inspired by designers from all over the world. One from Japan, who designed watches for Seiko. A fashion designer from Denmark. This is where he learned to think about design in a global way.

Karim Rashid [00:11:02] Products inevitably need to be global. So if you design a mobile phone and you’re going to have a million people holding it and interfacing it, you’ve got to think about all the users. But the language of it also has to be collectively accepted. It can’t be too colloquial or too culture specific. So that’s one thing I kind of learned in a certain sense about their language in general. And it was a certain, I guess, minimalism in a way. I don’t like that word very much, but a more reductive — nice things, beautiful things — but more reductive that I appreciated from Italian design.

[00:11:37] The other part I learned was that a lot of them, a lot of the companies were determined to do something original. And I always believed in that sense of originality. And it was the opposite of the way I was even educated.

Kim Thúy [00:11:48] After Italy, Karim taught at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design for a while, but was fired for his theoretical approach to teaching — which stressed the philosophical over the practical. He landed at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and when he wasn’t teaching, he began pounding the pavement in New York, looking for companies that wanted his designs.

Karim Rashid [00:12:18] I thought, you know what? I have loved this notion for all my life, this democratic design. It goes back to the little orange clock I had and the things that were in our parents’ apartment because my parents didn’t have a lot of money, but they were buying nice things. I thought, that’s just what design is. Design is for everyday life, and design is these objects that are around us. If you’re going to put all this work and engineering and all the tooling costs and all the people involved and two years to develop, why not be poetic, more beautiful, you know, function better, right? So I was determined.

[00:12:50] So I contacted 100 companies — and this is a true story — and I went to the New York Public Library at that time because you had to look in phone books to contact companies. You know, it was hell. I would come home after like eight hours there with maybe four phone numbers and I would call, you know, you just blindly call. And then I talked to a secretary and I have to get to someone and say, “Listen, I want to work for you. I want to do a project for you.” And I contacted Gillette, LazyBoy, Coca Cola, all the mass, mass companies, because I wanted to do the mass commodity. Brita, the filter company, which are a lot of those brands, were still huge. And then I contacted Umbra because I was going to Toronto to visit my family and I thought, you know, maybe they’ll work with me. And I met Paul Rowan, Les Mandelbaum, the owners, they were very nice and gave me a brief and the brief was to design some wastepaper baskets.

Kim Thúy [00:13:43] In typical Karim fashion, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the task. He drew up hundreds of designs. Paul and Les at Umbra pared it down to three versions they liked and brought the drawings down to the famous Housewares Show in Chicago. Their big clients, like Bed Bath & Beyond and Staples, got a sneak peek at Karim’s early prototypes … including one he named the Garbo.

Karim Rashid [00:14:14] We wanted to get feedback because the tooling to make a can like that, which a lot of people don’t know, is maybe $100,000. The can, Garbo, that I designed was basically vetoed by all the buyers. None of them bought … and Les Mandelbaum was sitting in the booth in Chicago. And he turned to me with, “You know, I don’t know. They just don’t. They think it’s too wild or too progressive or something.” And I’m like, “It’s just a garbage can, come on now. It’s like a big vase, it can be anything, right?” And this was smart, it was priced well, and the material was going to be right on. Everything was like really figured out. I made the handle so you wouldn’t touch the garbage with your hand. I made a round bottom inside so the coffee wouldn’t get caught in the, you know, or the liquids wouldn’t get caught. And then Les just turned to me and said, “You know what, I have confidence in that can. We’re going to do it anyway.”

Kim Thúy [00:15:03] The launch of the Garbo can in 1996 was a game changer for Karim, for Umbra, and for Canadian design. It went on to sell over 2 million units in its first two years of production, and it remains one of the most popular pieces Umbra has ever sold. A Garbo is even in the design collection of the Canadian Museum of History, along with a smaller version nicknamed the Garbini.

Karim Rashid [00:15:38] I remember being so proud, like walking to Bed Bath & Beyond and seeing the window of the garbage cans. Like “Woooow.” I felt like I finally did something, you know. Companies who have done radical things in this world, they do it on intuition, not on focus groups, marketing and all this. And I’m up against this perpetually with every company I work for. It’s interesting because what I was doing at the end of the day, I was getting known for making these banal objects that nobody cared about.

[00:16:02] And I remember sitting on an airplane, and I think it was the first time I flew business and I don’t know where I was flying to. And the guy sitting beside me, he picked up that kind of emporium magazine, you know, looking at all the stuff. And we started chatting and he said, “What do you do?” And I said, “Oh, I’m an industrial designer.” And he goes, “What’s that?” “Well, I design products and things. And product design really.” He still didn’t kind of get it. So I said, “Oh, see that stuff in the magazine? We design things like that.” And he looked at it and he said, “Oh, really? Oh, wow, that’s very interesting. So what are you working on now?” And I said, “I’m working on a garbage can.” And the guy laughed for the next hour of the flight. And at that moment I thought, what am I doing? That’s what I’m doing. I’m designing these really banal things and I was so disappointed with this idea that these objects around us that people don’t even think are designed, you know, they just fell from the sky. Yet there’s people, a lot of work behind all this, you know.

Kim Thúy [00:16:57] Since that plane ride, Karim has made it his life’s mission to educate people about what goes into designing everyday objects around us. And in recent years, that mission has included putting a greater focus on sustainability by working with more recyclable and disposable materials.

Karim Rashid [00:17:22] We want to make the world better. Stuff should be better. And that’s been my agenda probably since I started my practice in New York. I think that I’m just a designer. I’m a philosopher too, maybe, but I’m a designer. I’m not an athlete or a Hollywood star. You know what I mean? So it’s hard for me to like imagine myself being looked up to like that…

[00:17:44] I had a client here a couple of days ago and they were all nervous at the table, like, “I can’t believe we met you.” I don’t get that. I guess because inside me, I don’t think I’ve really changed that much. I think there’s something that — and this is very honest, and I’m not saying this just because you’re Canadian — there’s a certain humbleness, I think, with Canadians, you know, very down to earth. And I think because, really, I was brought up in Canada, at the end of the day, I feel Canadian. There’s a certain humbleness that doesn’t allow me to become this kind of arrogant, “Oh, aren’t I famous or aren’t I successful, aren’t I?” You know? I just keep enjoying and doing what I’m doing and the ups and downs of it. I want to see the world become this kind of free place.

[00:18:24] And lastly, I’ll just say one more thing. The greatest thing that can happen in one’s life is that you are doing a job that you have passion for or you are in this world doing what you were meant to do in this world. There is a reason every one of us is on this earth. We have a meaning of some sort and we need to find it and it would be a beautiful world … to create a world where every one of us are doing what we were put on this earth to do.

Kim Thúy [00:18:54] Karim Rashid’s incredible story shows how his history is woven into his life’s work, along with the ideals that guide his personal philosophy. Things like democracy and accessibility, functionality and inclusion, and a commitment to what he calls the rigorous beautification of our built environment. Perhaps these are the artifacts that will long endure.

CREDITS:

Kim Thúy [00:19:33] Thanks for listening to Artifactuality, a podcast of the Canadian Museum of History. I am Kim Thúy.

Artifactuality is produced by Makwa Creative and Antica Productions. Tanya Talaga and Jordan Huffman are the Executive Producers at Makwa. Lisa Gabriele is the Producer, Andrea Varsany is the Associate Producer, and Sophie Dummett is the Researcher for Antica. Laura Reghr and Stuart Coxe are Executive Producers at Antica. Mixing and sound design by Alain Derbez.

Jenny Ellison and Robyn Jeffrey of the Canadian Museum of History are the Executive Producers of this podcast.

The interview with Karim Rashid was conducted by Laura Sanchini, Curator of Craft, Design and Popular Culture.

Daniel Neill, Researcher, Sport and Leisure, is the Museum’s Podcast Coordinator.

Check out historymuseum.ca for more stories, articles and exhibitions from the Museum.

For more information about Karim Rashid, the Garbo, and the Museum’s design collection, check out the links in our show notes.