Music Welcome to Archetypes. I'm Lee Woodruff and I'm here with Harry Allen who is an industrial and interior designer. Did I get that right? You did. Well you brought some of your objects today so why don't we love to hear you talk about them and how you came across them what they are, how that evolution worked? Sure. I'm a little bit of a chameleon. I'm not like the stylist who has one style and then someone comes to me and I stamp my aesthetic on their product. I try to look at everything very individually and every project is like a new set of opportunities, a new set of nightmares. So I approach everyone very individual so you'll see that each project is very different. Really? I mean you've really gone all across the board as we're about to see. This is a project that I did for Johnson & Johnson. I have a very good friend who became the art director and this was one of the first projects that came across as desk. It was to redesign the first aid kit which has an industrial designer is like a gold mine. It's an icon. You have all that information you're headed from when you were a kid and cut your finger or whatever. And so we didn't do much to it. It's really just a clam shell. We wanted to have an iconic shape and then also having it stand up on end saves a lot of space in your cabinet. You don't have to stack things on top of it. But for that kind of design work is he just saying this is what I need and you think space saving. You think icon on the front. When you're designing you're thinking about how things are being made. You're thinking about who's going to be buying it. You're thinking about the brand itself. You're thinking about what you consider good design. So there's all these different forces going on and that answer is in the middle somewhere. And this satisfied a lot of the criteria was the way it was made was right on. It sort of gave this new message for them. This sort of streamlined modern message. I love it. Thank you. What else you got? Well I brought another piece of packaging. This is a project that I did for Mark Jacobs. This is a fragrance bottle. It's his last men's fragrance to launch. It's a couple years old now. All I knew about this was who Mark Jacobs was. They gave me like an 80-page brief fund. Who he was and what he did and his work. And I knew the name Bang. And it needed to sort of encapsulate all of that. So I went and I was just working in my studio and I thought what bang? What can be bang? And I started working with metal and I had this rectangular hammer. And I just took a piece of metal and I went bang. And then I took that piece of metal. We fed it into the computer. And we used that exact... I mean that's the exact geometry. That's bang right there. And then we used the back of it for the back of it. So it sort of pushes out... I love it. ...like to the fact that it sort of looked somewhere between a Frank Gary building and a piece of bent metal that you would find on the street. And it's a pretty object in the end and it sort of invites people to go, what's that? You know? It's another project where I did a lot of work for them. And of all of it it was just sort of... It told the story in the purest way. How did you get into this field in the first place? My father was an engineer and my mother was an art teacher. So like that... every day I see that confluence in my life between the two of them sort of coming together and what I do. Sometimes I think design is not approachable for the rest of us. It's a scary thing. It's a high touch thing and maybe we're not that creative. What would you say to the pedestrian about design? What they need to know about design? You know, I just feel like there's nothing in life that is very interesting unless you engage in it. It's like the art world. It's scary until you engage in it and you learn about it. But it's like any subject is sort of scary until you learn about it. And there's not a lot of design education in the United States. So it sort of is this other world. I mean you go to Japan. People know my name in Japan. I'm actually a player in Japan in the design world. But here in the United States, you know, no one would know who I was. You're up there much more design conscious. So... but I think that's education and I think it's about educating yourself. What advice do you have for somebody who's got that creative sort of archetype inside of them and wants to take it and make it a place where they can have a living, do something useful? What would you tell someone coming up today? You know, it's all about perseverance and you just got to figure out how to keep going. You know, and you got to figure out how to keep making things. You can't just keep making things and putting them in the closet. Like there has to be, if you were a designer, there has to be an end result to it. The other thing is it's really easy to be a creative person. It's really easy to like have the idea. But actually seeing that idea to completion or finding the client or finding the money or finding all the components that make it become real, that's the hard part. You know, it's a lot like birth. Making the baby is the easy part. It's raising it and educating it and feeding it for the 18 years. You need to like make it come out as a fully formed human. Same thing with design. The idea is easy but making it happen is hard. And design in America, you sort of said the Europeans and the Japanese are way ahead of us. But where do you see us going with design in this country? I can't really tell you where. I think it's actually going, but I can tell you where I would love for it to go. Less better things. Viewer better things. I find that there's just so much junk being sold. If you can buy, you can go to the big box stores and you can just fill up your waste. Your waste can. Your push-past. Just like more stuff and it's cheap and it comes from China. It's just like, oh my god. Would you ever work for a big box client? Yeah. I have done work for Target. But it was good design for one of their licensees. The flip side of the big box thing is that's the industrial design fantasy. Is you make, you give one object a good idea or a good form or you put thought into that object. And then you can mass produce that object and give it to many, many people. And that was sort of, you know, that was the 20th century idea of what industrial design was. It was good design for the masses. And so, you know, I did this lamp for IKEA. You know, there's IKEA's all over the world. There was probably one of those being sold, you know, every hour of every day all over the world. And I didn't get a lot of money for that. But I did it because I knew that it would fulfill that fantasy of sort of this mass distribution. So, that's attractive also. I mean, I can, you know, espoused ills of, you know, big box stores. But, you know, at the end of the day, a client's a client's. And there's great things about that too. If you could, as a designer, you could affect that world. You'd be doing everyone a service too. You could maybe make it a little bit better. You could make it last a little bit longer. You could make it something that, you know, people want to live with for a longer period of time. Well, Harry, thank you for being with us today. And thank you for watching archetypes.