Half Egyptian, half English, raised in Canada, Karim now lives and works in New York/USA. Designing for an impressive array of clients from Umbra to Prada, Miyake to Method, Karim is radically changing the aesthetics of product design and the very nature of the consumer culture.
Inspiration: “I am interested in rethinking the banal, changing our commodity landscape and proposing new objects for new behaviors for diverse markets. I hate the word “Taste”. I believe that design is extremely consequential to our daily lives. Where we impact physical, physiological and sociological behavior, by setting up conditions of human experience. I give birth to a multitude of things, both material and immaterial. These things can shape our lives.”
Approach: “I believe my work is the study of alternatives and possibilities. Commodity that interfaces society and imbues beauty in the banal. I am an ‘artist of real issues’; everyday life mediates between industry and the user; between self-expression and desire, between production technologies and human social behavior.
Products and furniture must deal with our emotional ground therefore increasing the popular imagination and experience. Industrial Design is a creative act, a political act, and a physical act. A socially interactive and responsible process that is greater than the physical form itself; its result is manifested in aesthetic forms. I think the most important element is that I attempt to design objects and products that create a sense of well being, the energy of our time informs a heightened experience, increases pleasure, and that has some nuance of originality or innovation.”
Vision: “I am interested in democratizing design; I am interested in getting the public to be in the moment (not the past). I am trying to do away with class, elitism, mass, and conventions. I am trying to eradicate high art and low art – I see one seamless world with no racial or economic differences. Diversity, variance, multiplicity, and change are part of the whole of constructs. Design shapes our personal and commercial environments and has great significance to culture, to our evanescent public memory.”
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