A blobject is a design product, often a brightly-coloured household object which has smooth curves and no sharp edges. The word is a portmanteau of "blob" and "object".
Blobjects can be made of any material in any size or scale for the home, office, car, or outdoors. Common materials used in fabricating blobjects are plastic (especially polycarbonate, polypropylene, or polyethylene), metal, and rubber, with the aim being to give a more organic and animate feel.
The origin of the term is disputed, but it is often attributed to either the designer-author Steven Skov Holt [1] or the designer Karim Rashid.
Holt has defined a blobject as a colorful, mass-produced, plastic-based, emotionally-engaging consumer product with a curvilinear, flowing shape. This fluid and curvaceous form is the blobject's most distinctive feature.
Rashid, the contemporary designer who wrote the book I Want to Change the World, was an early leader in creating blobjects and has become one of the most celebrated designers of his generation.
While often viewed as a modern concept, Blobject can be traced all the way back to prehistoric sculptures like Venus of Willendorf. In the early 20th century, in the work of Joan Miró and Jean Arp, these characteristics appeared. After World War II, these design started appearing in home goods like La Chaise chair. [2]
In the 1990s, designers like Philippe Starck, Marc Newson, and Karim Rashid led the way with the use of technology. Many of the most famous blobjects appeared in this decade. [3]
Blobjects can also be found in most areas of contemporary visual culture. [2] A blobject can be a typographic font (cf. Neville Brody), an animation (cf. Monica Peon), a piece of furniture (Marc Newson), an article of clothing (Rei Kawakubo), a motorcycle (GK Dynamics), a car (GEMCAR), a building (Future Systems), a painting (Rex Ray), a piece of sculpture (Hadeki Matsumoto), or ceramics work (Ken Price).
The blobject trend has largely been driven by advances in computer-aided design, information visualization, rapid prototyping, materials, and injection molding. These technologies have given designers the chance to use new shapes and to explore transparency and translucency without significant extra production costs.
A chair is a type of seat, typically designed for one person and consisting of one or more legs, a flat or slightly angled seat and a back-rest. It may be made of wood, metal, or synthetic materials, and may be padded or upholstered in various colors and fabrics.
Repoussé or repoussage ( ) is a metalworking technique in which a malleable metal is shaped by hammering from the reverse side to create a design in low relief. Chasing or embossing is a similar technique in which the piece is hammered on the front side, sinking the metal. The two techniques are often used in conjunction.
A gobo is an object placed inside or in front of a light source to control the shape of the emitted light and its shadow.
Karim Rashid is an Egyptian-born and Canadian-raised industrial designer. His designs encompass a wide range of products, including luxury goods, furniture, lighting, surface design, brand identity, and packaging. According to Time magazine, Rashid is hailed as the "most famous industrial designer in all the Americas" and the "Prince of Plastic" for his innovative work. He is primarily located in New York City but also maintains offices in Belgrade, Miami, and India.
Blobitecture, blobism and blobismus are terms for a movement in architecture in which buildings have an organic, amoeba-shaped building form. Though the term blob architecture was already in vogue in the mid-1990s, the word blobitecture first appeared in print in 2002, in William Safire's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine. Though intended in the Safire article to have a derogatory meaning, the word stuck and is often used to describe buildings with curved and rounded shapes.
Marc Andrew Newson is an Australian industrial designer, creative director, and artist who, in a career spanning nearly four decades, has worked in many industry sectors including furniture, product, and transportation design, luxury goods, fashion, and fine art. His work is primarily characterized by smooth geometric lines, organic shapes, an absence of sharp edges, and the use of transparency and translucency.
Greg Lynn is an American architect, founder and owner of the Greg Lynn FORM office, a Full Professor at the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and a professor at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. He is CEO and co-founder of the Boston based robotics company Piaggio Fast Forward. He won a Golden Lion at the 2008 Venice Biennale of Architecture. In 2010 Lynn was named a fellow by United States Artists. He is a member of the board of trustees of the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Biomorphism models artistic design elements on naturally occurring patterns or shapes reminiscent of nature and living organisms. Taken to its extreme it attempts to force naturally occurring shapes onto functional devices. In his search for architectural reform the French architecte Viollet le Duc is the first to express this idea clearly : Like a botanist, Viollet le Duc analyzes details of nature in his books, subsequently making them undergo metamorphoses.
Punching is a forming process that uses a punch press to force a tool, called a punch, through the workpiece to create a hole via shearing. Punching is applicable to a wide variety of materials that come in sheet form, including sheet metal, paper, vulcanized fibre and some forms of plastic sheet. The punch often passes through the work into a die. A scrap slug from the hole is deposited into the die in the process. Depending on the material being punched this slug may be recycled and reused or discarded.
A pickguard is a piece of plastic or other material that is placed on the body of a guitar, mandolin or similar plucked string instrument. The main purpose of the pickguard is to protect the guitar's finish from being scratched by the nails of the picking hand, as it was included on guitars not played with a plectrum. The pick does not normally contact that part of the guitar when used correctly.
Business of Design Week (BODW) is an annual week-long design event organised every December by the Hong Kong Design Centre. BODW was launched in 2002. It includes a design conference, forums, seminars, exhibitions and award presentations.
Casting is a manufacturing process in which a liquid material is usually poured into a mold, which contains a hollow cavity of the desired shape, and then allowed to solidify. The solidified part is also known as a casting, which is ejected or broken out of the mold to complete the process. Casting materials are usually metals or various time setting materials that cure after mixing two or more components together; examples are epoxy, concrete, plaster and clay. Casting is most often used for making complex shapes that would be otherwise difficult or uneconomical to make by other methods. Heavy equipment like machine tool beds, ships' propellers, etc. can be cast easily in the required size, rather than fabricating by joining several small pieces. Casting is a 7,000-year-old process. The oldest surviving casting is a copper frog from 3200 BC.
Objectified is a feature-length documentary film examining the role of every day non-living objects and the people who design them, in our daily lives. The film is directed by Gary Hustwit. Objectified premièred at the South By Southwest Festival on March 14, 2009.
Mark Dziersk was an American industrial designer based in Chicago, Illinois.
The Ford 021C was a concept car first shown to the public at the October 1999 Tokyo Motor Show by Ford. It was designed by Marc Newson and built by Carrozzeria Ghia in Turin, Italy. The car's name is taken from the Pantone orange colour, said to be Newson's favorite, although it was repainted in lime green when it was brought to the Milan Furniture Fair in April 2000. Ford officials stated that 021C also stands for "21st Century." It was produced purely as a styling exercise and was not intended for production.
Biomega is a Copenhagen-based, Danish brand of designer bicycles. It was immediately known for engaging with international designers from outside the bicycle industry; including Marc Newson, Ross Lovegrove, Karim Rashid and Bjarke Ingels, often giving its products unconventional solutions. In addition to producing bikes under its own name, Biomega produced bicycles under a joint sub-brand "Urban Mobility" with Puma AG.
Umbra is a home accessories design and manufacturing company. The company has headquarters in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and satellite offices in the Netherlands, Brazil, the United States, and China. The firm sells more than 2,000 home products through over 25,000 retailers in 120 countries.
The Monobloc chair is a lightweight stackable polypropylene chair, usually white in colour, often described as the world's most common plastic chair. The name comes from mono- ("one") and bloc ("block"), meaning an object forged in a single piece.
Designer People is a television documentary series launched in 2008 directed by Ross Close. Each episode showcases one of the world's leading artists in architectural design, communication design, industrial design, interior design, and fashion, centering on the creative insight of the acclaimed designer, whose work shapes our lives and our surroundings. The series was broadcast on Ovation.
Steven Skov Holt was an American design writer, curator, educator and industrial designer. He is known for an interdisciplinary practice that posited the ascension of design as the most significant late-20th- and 21st-century form of public art, and more specifically, elaborated its shift toward forms that were more fluid, biomorphic, hybridized, emotional and culturally literate.