The Redesigning Of America

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Corporate demand for these new design strategies is surging. Fitch's Bill Faust says his design shop got so many big corporate clients that he went back to school to pick up an M.B.A. "Designers are being invited to the table more and given a voice in making business decisions," says Faust. "I wanted to give the executives more of a reason to consider a design than 'We think this is cool.'" Well, cool could be enough. General Mills is re-examining cereal boxes, Kodak has ditched the black-box camera, Swingline has streamlined its standard stapler. Any company without in-house talent is reaching for a hot design consultant. "Manufacturers recognize that consumers are looking for more than functional benefits," says Barry Shepard, co-founder of SHR Perceptual Management, the design consultancy that helped conceive the Volkswagen Beetle. "A product that matters needs to say something about the person who owns it."

And it doesn't have to say it for long. Buying a cool toothbrush is a way of expressing your personality without making a huge commitment other than to dental hygiene. Your sense of style changes, you buy a new toothbrush. Starck was one of the first to sense this with his translucent Brancusi-esque dollop of a toothbrush for Fluocaril in 1989. Now pharmaceutical companies have released a plethora of toothbrushes--ridged, twisted, tapered, with bands, dots and swirls. The same philosophy applies to dozens of products we used to regard as banal--garbage cans, toilet brushes and cheese graters. They're cute, they're cheap and they're disposable.

Cheap is O.K. by Starck, whose cheerful whimsy with juicers, bottle openers and hotel rooms did much to spark America's current fling with design. He says he wants good design to be a commodity--but without being wasteful. He points out that every time he designs a chair, it's less expensive than the one he designed before. "I want everybody to have the best products for the price of any bulls___ in the grocery store," he says.

Inevitably, not all the design efforts out there reflect the sensibility of an artist, and even many that do are downright, well, dysfunctional, like the Lexon radio on the cover of this magazine, which despite appearances is not waterproof. "Functionality has become more dimensional," says Susan Yelavich, assistant director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, which last week opened its first National Design Triennial. "Function now embraces psychology and emotion." Or, as Karim Rashid puts it, "The more time we spend in front of computer screens, the more the look of our coffee cup takes on added importance."

The question now is whether the design economy can be sustained or whether, when America's wave of prosperity recedes, we'll all edge back to plain-vanilla functionality. If he were around, Raymond Loewy would remind us that he got his start during the Great Depression, so perhaps the real design revolution is still to come. If so, Constant Nieuwenhuys is looking more prophetic than ever.

--With reporting by Julie Rawe/New York and Sheila Gribben/Chicago