A shimmery, asymmetrical water bottle. A bright, bulgy toothbrush. A watch whose crystal seems to puddle on its wristband. A pugnacious, lime-colored British coupe. A line of shampoos in plastic bottles that evoke a woman’s breast.
What do these objects have in common? The curved, fluid, emotional, Rorschach-test aspect of these items makes them “blobjects,” says Steven Skov Holt, MFA ’92, one of industrial design’s leading educators. Holt, 48, says blobjects represent not only a peek into the popular zeitgeist, but a trend in product design that has become more common thanks to advances in technology. Holt and his wife, Mara Holt Skov, have assembled these products and several dozen more in an exuberant exhibit they co-curated. Blobjects & Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design runs through mid-July at the San Jose Museum of Art.
Blobjects, Holt says, have a comforting, hopeful, athletic, intelligent, global appeal that is appearing in more and more products, and those products are as apt to be found at mainstream stores like Target as in a hip SoHo gallery. Blobjects “offer new possibilities for finding delight, beauty and meaning in our overwhelming yet interdependent lives,” he says.
If anyone is qualified to speak about hope in the face of overwhelming challenges, it’s Holt.
As an undergraduate at Brown University in the late 1970s, Holt was not only the picture of health, but an avid athlete and cyclist whose pals teased him about his “thunder thighs.” In 1979 at age 20, however, his life took a dramatic turn: for reasons doctors never unearthed, Holt’s kidneys failed. He received a transplant. After five months in the hospital, he battled back to health and finished a degree in cognitive science.
Soon after, in 1982, Holt answered an ad for a low-level job at Manhattan-based ID Magazine, the bible of industrial design. Within a year, the intense Holt was editor of the magazine that spotted and helped shape trends, and it was a time when all sorts of new high-tech products were appearing on the landscape.
In 1990, Holt, who had long expected that he would go to graduate school, headed west to Stanford. He enrolled in the MFA program and interacted closely with Stanford’s burgeoning product design program, an interdisciplinary approach to designing products with roots in both art and engineering. Holt explains, “I was not a prototypical design student and I was thrilled by the things that Stanford allowed me to connect to,” from poets to painters to prototype builders. After Stanford, he immediately joined frogdesign, a legendary industrial design firm based in Silicon Valley that’s run by German design renegade Hartmutt Esslinger. Esslinger is passionate that products should have forms reflecting their emotional impact—often a blobby path. Holt worked on futuristic concepts and design strategies for a slew of big clients including IBM and Hasbro. “Of all the people I’ve met in America over the last 30 years, Steve is really one of the visionaries,” says Esslinger, who employed Holt as his vice president of strategy for nearly a decade. “He sees design and art and pop culture as integrated.”
After frogdesign, Holt took on his current job as distinguished professor of industrial design at California College of the Arts, and he has served as guest curator on several major design exhibits.
Even as his reputation as a thinker and design educator grew, however, the toll of years and years of antirejection medication was catching up with him. His eyesight weakened. His bones became brittle. His immune system deteriorated. Yet while his body was under siege, his heart was taking wing: In 1995, a friend from frogdesign introduced Holt to Skov, who had worked in the fashion and the art worlds. They were married soon after. Within a couple of years, they would have a son, Larson, now 8.
After a life-threatening infection in 1997, Holt’s transplanted kidney began to fail. Holt subsequently has battled two kinds of cancer, dozens of bone fractures, and other complications. He receives frequent dialysis and is again on a very long list of those waiting for transplants. The notion that his life hangs in a fragile balance is a constant in their family, yet both Holt and Skov—so animated and passionate about design—are similarly thoughtful and optimistic about the future. When Holt jokes about spending his life focused on how things look, even as his own exterior cracks, Skov, 44, and as healthy-looking as Holt is battered, gently grabs his hands. “You’re beautiful on the inside,” she says, as he flashes a big smile.
“There is a real affinity between blobjects and me,” Holt notes. “The quintessential blob form—the kidney—has played such a big role in my life. I have found that other similar rounded shapes (for example, beach rocks, beach glass and beach ceramics) have stuck with me as well. I have come to the conclusion that blobjects are the closest, most compelling man-made artifact to these natural forms—they possess the same, almost ineffable qualities of beach rocks.”
The language of industrial design can be jarring and mysterious to the uninitiated. Most of us rarely think of toothbrushes as athletic and optimistic, for example. But the blobject show and a companion book, Blobjects and Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design (Chronicle Books), written by Holt and Skov, go a long way toward illuminating the emotions and messages that designs convey: why an iPod confers coolness or a motorcycle seems to growl even before the engine kicks into gear. When he was editor of ID Magazine in the late 1980s, Holt coined the term “blobject” in response to the curves he saw appearing in more and more home furnishings and cars, such as the fluid lines on the Ford Taurus.
It’s not that industrial designers had ignored curves prior to the 1980s. In their book, Holt and Skov note that blobs have oozed in and out of design favor as well as our cultural consciousness for decades. The 1930s and 1940s gave us bulgy, curved outlines in cars such as the Lincoln Zephyr and airplanes such as the Douglas DC-3. In the 1940s, Al Capp’s Li’l Abner cartoon introduced the Shmoo, a blobby creature who changed to satisfy human desires, and legendary furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames experimented with fiberglass to create blobby chairs. Kidney-shaped pools dotted backyards across the land, and what could be blobbier than the original VW Beetle?
In the late 1980s, however, blobjects seemed to reach a tipping point. A far-flung group of designers from Canada, Europe and Australia began working with mostly hand-crafted blobjects as diverse as lava lamps and chairs. At the time, industrial designers typically would sketch their visions for mass-produced products, and mechanical engineers then would take over the process and impose more traditional engineering and tooling specs on the objects. Straight lines and right angles are simpler and often cheaper to engineer.
That changed in the early 1990s, when designers figured out ways to use design software to turn early concepts and sketches into precise instructions for the actual tooling and production of curves and bulges. Especially in a new generation of strong, flexible plastics, computer-assisted design paved the way for blobby products such as the Nike Triax watch, Oral-B toothbrushes, creative packaging forms, and all sorts of curved electronic products, from remote controls to music players.
For the exhibit, Holt and Skov chose products that span a huge range of forms and functions. Take frogdesign’s walkie-talkies for Disney. They’re identical to others on the inside, but frog put them in a colorful, rounded, slim case a child can easily hold. Products from international design superstar Karim Rashid range from a curvy carpet to sculpted dish-soap packaging almost too elegant to hold such a mundane substance. The modest duty of supplying dental floss becomes whimsy in the hands of Italian designer Stefano Pirovano. For the Italian product company Alessi, Priovano created a blobby little plastic man no bigger than an apricot, called “Otto,” whose arm unspools the floss.
As individual items, blobjects may seem cute or toy-like, but more broadly, they represent the way “designers are now applying principles of fine art to everyday objects, from salt and pepper shakers to chandeliers,” notes Susan Landauer, who commissioned the exhibit in her role as Katie and Drew Gibson chief curator at the San Jose Museum of Art.
The blobject show was so compelling to visitors that the museum had to post extra security people and lots of “DO NOT TOUCH” signs. “That’s when design works,” notes Yves Behar, founder of the San Francisco design firm fuseproject and a longtime colleague of Holt’s. “When people can’t keep their hands off it.”
Holt believes consumers love blobby forms partly because they reflect the “supersized, near-effortless consumption” of the new American dream. They visually represent how our culture and products and even our identities “are constantly changing, morphing and intertwining toward a new kind of fluidity.” His own attraction remains more complex: “Blobjects are an evolutionarily successful form. Just looking at the 20th century, the blob form shows up in movements as diverse as art nouveau, surrealism, 1950s modernism and 1960s psychedelia. It just keeps cropping up. Like blobjects, I guess I’d like to think that I am a survivor, able to roll with the punches and whatever comes along.”
JOAN O’C. HAMILTON, ’83, is a frequent contributor to Stanford.
