Style with a twist of technology

Imagine an athletic shoe with a radar unit in the toe; a video camera in the heel so you can broadcast your wanderings on the Internet in real time; and a unit in the ankle to massage you as you walk. Karim Rashid calls it the "Smoo" -- or smart shoe -- and it's just one of many futuristic ideas he proposed and discussed in an hour-long lecture yesterday afternoon. The talk, attended by an audience of more than 50 students and community members, was part of the Penn Humanities Forum Lief Lecture Series on Style. Rashid, born in Egypt, raised in Canada and educated in Italy, is very much a product of and a force in the modern era of globalization and blending of influences and tasks. He said he aims to produce work that is "of the moment." "If it's pivotal at the moment, even momentarily, we tend to realize the value of that work later," he said. Rashid said he believes in "democratic design," which he explained as a design for everyone that is extremely inexpensive and accessible. One of his ideas involves "organomics," the marriage of the organic and ergonomics -- a blending of low tech and high tech, furniture and technology. Thus, he designed one room with an interior landscape that is "seamless and soft," with shifting softness and hardness. He envisions a Web site where a customer can specify his needs and wants for the room, and the program will design it and ship the room, ready-made. Rashid even adds a social twist to his designs. He proposed a scheme for a Giorgio Armani store with very little clothing on display. Instead, the store would hire models in the area to sell the clothes -- and display them. The store would be arranged around a runway, down which the models would strut, wearing a new outfit every hour, turning shopping into an event. Furthermore, the walls would be arrayed with digital projections of the models in their various outfits and, occasionally, just the clothes themselves. Jessica Magnitsky, a student at the University of the Arts who specializes in industrial design, said she is disturbed by "how much [Rashid] relies on the technology." She was referring to another of Rashid's ideas in which a machine does the designing itself. It is what he calls "hands off" -- completely machine-produced. Today, he said, "craft is really a middle-class leisure activity." However, Rashid may be ahead of his time. Armani seemed to think so when it rejected his plans for their store as "way beyond their clothing."