NEWSWEEK devotes its first design issue ever to the celebration of this fresh life-affirming spirit. Today, the best designers worry as much about the way things feel as the way they look. On the following pages, you’ll encounter not just cool new objects but a welcome optimism that’s driving both the folks who design the lamp and the folks who switch it on. Everyday tools pack such high good humor, they put the fun back in function. Cars have shapes you can actually remember. Being new is no longer enough. The best furniture honors its roots–and ours. (What was up with those chairs that were so edgy you could cut yourself on them?) Rooms are illuminated by the inevitable signs of life within. Controlled messiness, we’ve discovered at last, is far preferable to airless perfection.
Designers these days seem weary of trendiness, less inclined to clobber us with the weight of their own importance. When I was preparing for this issue, I met with David Kelley, chairman of the noted design firm IDEO. He wheeled up to our meeting on his bike, direct from his teaching gig at Stanford, and told me: “I’d much rather sit with a client and paint a vision of a design experience”–like rethinking a hospital’s emergency room–“than design a minimalist black thing to put pencils in.” And Michael Van Valkenburgh, the landscape designer renowned for his modernist projects, looked up from his lunch in New York City one day and said: “I am just not interested anymore in imposing patterns on the land. What I care about is how it feels to be there.” He went on to describe a stone wall he’s designing for Teardrop Park in lower Manhattan. “I want the rocks to weep,” he said.
Early one foggy San Francisco morning I was startled by this sign in a Design Within Reach shop: “Design is so important because chaos is so hard.” I squinted to see who said that. “Jules Feiffer.” Figures. We have seen the future, I thought, and it makes us smile.
