Ladies and gentlemen, may we present thedesign economy. It is the crossroads where pros-perity and technology meet culture and market-ing. These days efficient manufacturing and in-tense competition have made “commodity chic”not just affordable but also mandatory. Ameri-cans are likely to appreciate style when they seeit and demand it when they don’t, whether inboutique hotels or kitchen scrub brushes. “De-sign is being democratized,” says Karim Rashid,designer of the Oh chair by Umbra and winnerof a 1999 George Nelson award for break-through furniture design. “Our entire physi-cal landscape has improved, and thatmakes people more critical as an audi-ence.” And more willing. Says MarkDziersk, president of the Industrial Design-ers Society of America: “This is the newGolden Age of design.”

Make that platinum, because design hasbecome big Big Business. Nobody is quitesure how big, but just consider that Ameri-cans spent some $6 trillion on goods andservices last year, and roughly one-fifth ofit went into buying stuff for their homes.The stunning success of the colorful (read:No more beige!) iMac, for instance, notonly helped save Apple but has also in-spired a raft of whimsically styled, low-costpersonal computers from firms like Dell,Gateway and Compaq. The New Beetlerescued Volkswagen’s image two years agoand became a catalyst for change in the autobusiness. Carmakers are finally putting apremium on how their products look be-cause they know that otherwise we won’tbuy them anymore.

So it is with makers of just about everything.“When industries are competing at equal priceand functionality, design is the only differentialthat matters,” says Dziersk, echoing the credofirst spouted in the ’30s by Raymond Loewy,father of industrial design. Loewy was the manwho gave America the Lucky Strike pack andthe sleek Greyhound bus, and when he added aflourish to the Coldspot refrigerator, to make itlook just a little more streamlined than its 1934competitors, Sears’ sales skyrocketed.

D E S I G N

Loewy used to say that the most beautifulcurve was a rising sales graph, and that notionhas driven design since he was in shorts. Gooddesign married commerce during the Great De-pression, and Loewy’s career took off then be-cause he made products irresistible at a timewhen nobody really wanted to pay for anything.In the ’50s, Charles and Ray Eames led a cohortof Californians who used postwar manufactur-ing capacity to create sleek, efficient domesticenvirons. In the ’60s, however, industrial design

seemed to lose its way and end up in the mire ofan American consumer sensibility that simplywanted more products for less money, fromwhich it began to emerge only in the ’90s.

Now, instead of one Raymond Loewy, the de-sign world is humming with an eclectic mix ofimpresarios and entrepreneurs intent on earn-

ing a living from making the beautiful things inyour life. There are big corporate players, likeSony and Ford and Philips, the European elec-tronics consortium. There are architects and de-signers-iconoclasts like Philippe Starck andyoung upstarts like Jasper Morrison or MarcNew-son. Or businessmen like DavidNeeleman, whose no-frills but chic airline,JetBlue, began flying last month. And of coursethere’s Martha Stewart, who has parlayed hersense of style into a multidimensional billion-

dollar role as America’s spokesperson fortaste. Martha’s line of home furnishingshelped wipe the red ink off the bottom lineof the discount department chain K Mart.

If anyone believes in America’s newappetite for design it is Terence Conran,Britain’s style impresario. Twenty yearsago, Conran launched a Stateside chain ofcatchy furniture stores in his name, but hejumped ship early in the ’90s. Now he’sback, determined to catch the new wave.In December he opened a 22,500-sq.-ft.store in Manhattan. Like its counterpartsin London, Paris and Tokyo, the TerenceCon-ran Shop is a design bazaar, with ev-erything from $17 digital watches to$3,550 violet-colored lounges. “I neverquite understood why design didn’t takeoff in America before,” says Conran, whois cautiously optimistic this time around.“There really is a wind of change here now.America is about technology, being proudof achieving so much and confident abouthaving a culture that reflects that.”

Americans’ appetite for design is flour-ishing at least partly because America is. Thehousing-construction boom has reached historicproportions, and people need to fill those newhomes with stuff that defines who they are. Itused to confer status to have an expensive de-signer couch; now it’s important to have some-tiling that’s personal, whether it’s from the fleamarket or B&B Italia. Like the Mosquito Table,which looks like an aircraft wing. Or the Conrad(not Conran) chair, made from something calledBora Bora bark. “In this boom economy, peoplehave a craving to express their individuality,”

BANAL AND BEAUTIFUL A flat foldingironing board of zinc and steel: $385

TIME, MARCH 20, 2000

Nothing underscores the technological revo-lution better than plastics, long viewed as cheapand ugly. Not since the early-20th century popu-larity of Bakelite has plastic been so loved.Polypropylene, for instance, the plastic that hasbeen around since the ’50s, can be molded sosmooth it is almost sensuous, and it takes dyeslike silk. German design firms Authentics andKoziol have made much hay out of plastic’s newpizazz. Koziol’s spaghetti forks with a smileyface, ice-cream scoops with eyes and the “Tim”dish brush with legs are some of more than 300“cutensils,” as they’re known, that flew offshelves of American stores last year.

“I had no doubt these would sell in Chicago,New York and Boston,” says Elliott Zivin, presi-dent of Koziol’s U.S. distributor, Majestic. “Butthey’re selling like crazy in Bogalusa, La., and westTexas.” So much so that Zivin is bringing in 100more plastic “blobjects”—another nickname—thisyear. Shopping for household items is no longerdutiful; it’s part of a person’s articulation of his orher personal style. Everything is an accessory. Itcould be coincidence that manufacturers started tothink more about making household products funnot long after men started shouldering some of theburden around the home. It could be.

Corporate demand for these new design strat-egies is surging. Fitch’s Bill Faust says his de-sign shop got so many big corporate clients thathe went back to school to pick up an M.B.A.“Designers are being invited to the table moreand given a voice in making business decisions,”says Faust. “I wanted to give the executives moreof a reason to consider a design than “We thinkthis is cool.’” Well, cool could be enough. GeneralMills is re-examining cereal boxes, Kodak hasditched the black-box camera, Swingline hasstreamlined its standard stapler. Any companywithout in-house talent is reaching for a hot de-sign consultant. “Manufacturers recognize thatconsumers are looking for more than functionalbenefits,” says Barry Shepard, co-founder of SHRPerceptual Management, the design consultancythat helped conceive the Volkswagen Beetle. “Aproduct that matters needs to say something aboutthe person who owns it.”

And it doesn’t have to say it for long. Buyinga cool toothbrush is a way of ex-pressing yourpersonality without making a huge commitmentother than to dental hygiene. Your sense of stylechanges, you buy a new toothbrush. Starck wasone of the first to sense this with his translucentBrancusi-esque dollop of a toothbrush forFluocaril in 1989. Now pharmaceutical compa-nies have released a plethora of toothbrushes—ridged, twisted, tapered, with bands, dots and

swirls. The same philosophy applies to dozens ofproducts we used to regard as banal—garbagecans, toilet brushes and cheese graters. They’recute, they’re cheap and they’re disposable.

Cheap is O.K. by Starck, whose cheerfulwhimsy with juicers, bottle openers and hotelrooms did much to spark America’s current flingwith design. He says he wants good design to be acommodity—but without being wasteful. He pointsout that every time he designs a chair, it’s less ex-pensive than the one he designed before. “I wantevery body to have the best products for the priceof any bulls in the grocery store,” he says.

Inevitably, not all the design efforts out therereflect the sensibility of an artist, and even manythat do are downright, well, dysfunctional, like theLexon radio on the cover of this magazine, whichdespite appearances is not waterproof. “Function-

ality has become more dimensional,” says SusanYelavich, assistant director of the Cooper-HewittNational Design Museum, which last week openedits first National Design Triennial. “Function nowembraces psychology and emotion.” Or, as KarimRashicl puts it, “The more time we spend in frontof computer screens, the more the look of our cof-fee cup takes on added importance.”

The question now is whether the designeconomy can be sustained or whether, whenAmerica’s wave of prosperity recedes, we’ll alledge back to plain-vanilla functionality. If he werearound, Raymond Ix)ewy would remind us that hegot his start during the Great Depression, so per-haps the real design revolution is still to come. Ifso, Constant Nieuwenhuys is looking more pro-phetic than ever. — With reporting by Julie Rawe/New York and Sheila Gribben/Chlcago

TIME, MARCH 20, 2000