From designing furniture to architecture, Philippe Starck has created so many different things throughout his career. After watching the video, “The Habits of a Creative Genius“, Starck just seems like a someone who is passionate about his work and loves to create. He doesn’t consider himself a genius like everyone says. A few points that I thought were interesting was when he talked about living like a monk and disconnecting from the world helps your creativity. He also places a lot of emphasis on love, which can be seen in his website as well where he says, “Love is an endangered species” and “In my architectural work I create scenarios with the vocation of creating more confident, more beautiful and more in love.”
Another thing that I found interesting is that he says he designs for people, which he emphasized in another video I watched called “Design for All“, but some of his creations seem impractical. I think first one that comes to mind is Hot Bertaa, which was pretty controversial in the design and functionality. In the video below, Mr. Waite demonstrate how it works. It seems pretty difficult to use and there’s a quite a high chance of getting burned when using it if you don’t handle it properly. I do think the two way pour is a cool design, but again the steam can burn you.
In the video, Mr. Waite also says Hot Bertaa is quite expensive, which I feel like goes against what Philippe Starck believes in. Starck says “democratic design”, that is creating something to help people instead of for their own self glory and making products available for everyone. But with Hot Bertaa it harms people and it’s not easy to buy because of the price. Then again, this product was created in 1989, so perhaps his “design thinking” has evolved since then.
Another controversial design of his is the lemon squeezer. Like Hot Bertaa, it is criticized for its functionality since some people complained that it creates a mess. The design kind of looks like some sort of virus, but from a short clip I watched it doesn’t seem too messy. I guess it depends on the person using the product. Going back to the Industrial Design reading, the product should be easy to understand for people or else it becomes frustrating to use. So it’s interesting to see how Starck plays around with designs of everyday products like a kettle and lemon squeezer and turns it into something that looks so simple, but is also quite complex to understand.
I feel like when you first search Philippe Starck, all you get is his controversial works like Hot Bertaa and the lemon squeezer, which were both created about 30 years ago. After looking through his website, you can see that he still retains key aspects of his signature style in some designs, but others might look a little more like what we’re used to seeing. For instance, the chairs and some other furniture look like what we would expect a chair to look like. But then when you look at the boat or the exterior architectural designs, it looks quite bizarre.
There are so many other designs that Starck has in his website that are super interesting: the Tramway Bordeaux, the Axiom space (making space travel look luxury), the lights, hotels, Target collaboration, and so much more. Overall, he is a designer who creates for the purpose of others and because he loves what he does.