Martin Kastner is the founder and principal of Crucial Detail, a small multidisciplinary practice based in Chicago. Kastner, born in the Czech Republic, trained as a blacksmith and spent some time restoring historical metalworks at a castle in Western Bohemia before moving onto natural materials design, and sculpture. He founded Crucial Detail in 1998 shortly after his arrival in the US. He is best known for his Alinea serviceware concepts, which landed him on The Future Laboratory's list of 100 most influential individuals in 21st century design. Alinea book, which he designed in collaboration with Naissance Inc., was one of the winners of Communication Arts Best Book Design in 2009 and is included in Altitude's The Best of Cover Design. His work has been featured in numerous publications running the gamut from Gourmet to Fast Company.
How did you get into your field?
Fell into it. Design sits at an intersection between conceptual art, sculpture, reproduction and the making of things in general, all of which are areas of interest to me. I trained as a blacksmith, later pursued studies in design utilizing traditional natural materials, and then some more in art exploring body-space-object relationships. Design surfaced as an area naturally bridging a lot of those aspects. Plus I get easily frustrated with experiences and objects that don't fulfill my expectations - design is a way of addressing those frustrations.
What influences you work?
Everything and everyone I encounter offer something that has an influence on my point of view. I respond to things in negative terms so the biggest influences - the ones that make me do - are frustrations: things, places, and people that rub me the wrong way.
What role does design play in your work?
It's the subject.
What is one of the biggest challenges in your field?
Watching where we're stepping while keeping our eyes on the horizon. The challenge for design is that we now live in quicksand and everything from the marketplace to manufacturing to available tools is in an increasingly more dramatic flux. The necessary attention span as well as predictability of anything is shortening while I move as slow as ever.
How do you personally view design and it’s role in our lives today?
We've crossed the point of being able to define design, and its role, in a clean-cut way as is the case with many other areas of human activity. If we think of it as applied or focused creativity transforming our interactions with the world, and the world itself, then it's critical going forward. If we think of it in terms of designed objects then not so much.
Does location play a role in your work, why?
Of course. Design is contextual, to a degree it's a response to an environment, so location plays a big part in it.
What do you see as the future of retail?
Internet. Customization. Made-to-order.
What do you see the future of local manufacturing to be?
There is the long and short view. In terms of the short view we have pretty much reached the bottom and should slowly start to see a transformation happening thanks to lower entry points into manufacturing, higher productivity, appeal of 'local', and new marketing channels. It'll be exciting when 'local' becomes the practical option. In the long term I imagine the addition of mass customization and ever larger, faster turnaround, made-to-order technologies to help re-localize some production as well.
How do you see design contributing to the economy?
Design is one of its wheels.
What advice would you give to young designers?
I consider myself to be a young designer and the advice to myself that I often don't heed is people telling me what I should do differently. Be persistent. And use checklists.
What is a favorite object you own?
Currently a #2 pencil. I went for years without using one and only recently started getting reacquainted.
Comments
Customization
Thanks for posting. Great film and interesting interview with lots of sound advice.
I'd like to pick up and expand upon the point about the future of retail involving customization because it is, as you say, a massive opportunity, but it is also one with potential pitfalls. It would be good to hear some views.
Most readers will be familiar with parametric modeling and rapid prototyping technologies that might enable us to customize objects in the future, and obviously there are different models of how this might occur (in the home, at the factory, locally). But the desire to enable customization is sometimes based upon suppositions that are not tested, and on philosophies that at first appear democratic but could instead lead to relativism and mediocrity. For example, there is a pervasive notion among some designers that "everyone wants to be us" - that given the chance, the public will want to take over the design process - and designers should help them do this. The issue is bound up with the idea that "everyone is a designer". A subject I've blogged about previously and one which diminishes the talent of the designer as an expert form-giver and by association diminishes the cultural relevance of the results of that ever-so-hated act "styling". Attempts I have seen to delegate creative control over an object's form too often restrict freedom by offering offer too narrow a set of options. We are no longer "designing", simply choosing from preconceived variants.
I'm completely in favor of opening up access to technology to the majority - in the way desk-top-publishing did for graphics and the home sewing machine did for fashion - but I hope we can do it for the right reasons, and in the right way.
Re: Customization
Interesting point Tim, thanks for sharing! I can see the argument that the very nature of democratizing something opens up the realities of mediocrity. But truth be told, mediocrity was always there... perhaps just publicized differently. I believe I know exactly what you're talking about... perhaps an interesting case study and parallel field would be photography. The speed in which these "tools of the trade" have evolved is amazing. Not to mention people treating their smartphones as digital cameras.
A clear point has to be made... it's not about the expense (high or low) of the tools, it's about the thought/time/energy behind the work. I see this happening in web design as well, as Adobe pushes it's weird no-coding wed design MUSE experiment. This is probably the biggest failure in the making; coding/programming will always be the building blocks of the web. Anything else is like playing with someone else's Legos, sooner or later you'll desperately need a simple solution that just wasn't considered. My personal opinion: having the tools does not make you a designer. I can't help but see this intense focus on rapid prototyping as a silly fad. Does having a Canon printer make you an author? No. So get back to work!