So many trade shows, so many products–but what do designers really want?

Like juvenile delinquents, product designers are always looking for trouble. In their very quest to right the errors of objects or ride roughshod over traditional materials and forms, they sometimes remind me of a posse of rowdy cowboys. This was certainly the case at the international furniture fair in Milan last month, an annual tribute to design hooliganism (see next month’s issue for a full report). There you could find Fabio Novembre’s table prototype for Cappellini, with more than a hundred lengths of bright red rope dangling below a glass top. You could find Dutch textile designer Claudy Jongstra’s swaths of purple felt overlaid with huge, feathery floral patterns that looked like tie-dye, and a wickedly funny lamp for Flos that Jongstra’s countryman, Marcel Wanders, set in an old-fashioned candle holder and wired to turn on and off when you blow on the bulb. There were also a number of misconceived projects by junior cowpokes ripping off the homely-artifact-turned-sculptural approach of lighting maver ick Ingo Maurer (the worst was a chandelier of water-filled condoms), or putting out so much curvy, chartreuse-colored plastic that Interiors’s contributing photographer, Jimmy Cohrssen, noted, “It looks like Wallpaper threw up in here.”

There was great fun, and some genuine moments of brilliance. But at Milan and for that matter every other trade show, how well are interior designers being served? For every pavilion or convention hall filled with products, there seem to be an equal volume of unfulfilled desires–wish lists for items that vary with the nuances of every project or lie dormant waiting for technology to catch up with our needs. To test this hunch, and bring other viewpoints to our annual issue devoted to office design, we invited a couple dozen leading designers to tell us what workplace products they would like to see that have never appeared before on the market.

Space constraints prevent me from reporting all the suggestions, but they overwhelmingly concerned problems of flexibility. Robert Hills, a principal at Einhorn Yaffee Prescott in New York, proposed systems panels with easily adjustable public-to-private screening so that individual workstations can be quickly converted to work groups while the occupants are seated. Hills also suggested connectors that would allow any system to be altered from go degree to 45- or 30-degree formats, and four-to-eight-person plug-and-play conference tables “for those ubiquitous ‘huddle’ spaces where transformers and connectors usually end up on the floor and the wires over the edge.” Meanwhile, Joan Blumenfeld, of Swanke Hayden Connell Architects in Manhattan, longs for an “extension cord” for power feeds that would be legal in New York City, so she can specify compatible desking systems, such as Knoll’s Propeller, for local clients. Jaime Velez of SOM in Chicago is looking for a collapsible movable workstation to accommodate part-time help in perimeter overflow space. Rand Elliott of Elliott + Associates Architects in Oklahoma City suggests integral cordless lighting “in the desk and not on it” powered by cellular waves. Todd DeGarmo, of Studios Architecture in New York, pleads for “something to truly deal with acoustics in an open plan,” which would make the scheme more acceptable to private-office diehards, such as lawyers. And Randy Brown, head of an eponymous firm in Omaha, Nebraska, volunteered the idea of an “‘everything desk’ on hydraulics that c hanges size, shape, angle, and material surface depending on my needs. A desk to sit at, stand at, to draw on, with a tilt-top to draft on, meet with clients, hold my computer printer and scanner, light table, model-building area–even sleep on!”

Only one designer–Jurgen Riehm of 1100 Architect in New York–took a sustainability tack, suggesting “any new green product, like a photovoltaic day-light fixture.” Two designers mentioned items that would be compatible with new technology: Arthur B. Johnson, of Johnson + Hill in Dallas, wants a device that will allow him to plug his PDA into his computer and work on it from the keyboard, while David Meckley, of RMW Architecture and Interiors in San Francisco, seeks workstations “that are truly designed for flat-screen monitors and laptop docking stations.” Meckley’s other idea, “an ergonomic task chair that can sense mood and adjust automatically,” speaks to a desire for products that bear a more personal relationship to users. It was echoed by Shashi Caan, of SOM in New York, who proposed “a holistic work environment that senses my approach when I enter the building and positions itself to conform with my particular fit and preferences–temperature, lighting, a comfortable chair ready at my personal seat height. The space would waft freesia freshness with soft occasional background sounds of nature.”

Product people, are you listening? I know you keep tabs on interior designers’ needs and may have already made great strides in fulfilling the ones mentioned here, but there’s never too much dialogue and no end of trouble. So saddle up, cowboys.

The blobject reflects the shapelessness of the invisible, intangible world of zeroes and ones. It’s a hunk of ether you can hold in your hand.

Remember ectoplasm? It was the luminous goop that supposedly oozed from the ears and mouths of trance-channeling mediums back in the heyday of spiritualism (roughly, 1880-1920). Skeptics dismissed it as cheesecloth coated with glow-in-the-dark paint, but to spiritualists it was proof positive of an afterworld.

The “blobject” is the ectoplasm of our age–a manifestation of our turn-of-the-century fantasies and anxieties. Blobjects began popping up in the ’90s, their fluid contours, jellyfish shells, and Gummi Bear colors a striking departure from the tech-noir minimalism of the ’80s. They’re the signature products of our moment–the Hector Guimard Metro entrances of our iMac epoque.

The Apple iMac, introduced in 1999, has become the quintessential blobject and source of the design DNA for countless clones. Now the consumer landscape is crawling with sinuous, squishy-looking products. The sleek, ergonomic Oral-B tooth brush is a blobject. So is the Cybiko PDA, with its rippling, grippable shape, and Microsoft’s IntelliMouse Explorer, whose undulating silver carapace and trailing cord give it the look of a bulletproof trilobite. The Balladeuse, a portable light designed by the Tokyo-based Ixilab, is a blobject par excellence: a fluorescent bulb immersed in an oozy polyurethane gel and sealed in a PVC bladder, it’s designed to be hung or slung just about anywhere. “They’re fluid, they crawl, they work their way through the chaos,” the company’s website rhapsodizes, making a lamp sound like something that should be skulking around a hydrothermal vent.

The blob aesthetic has oozed into interior design: the writhing fiberglass walls of the Ost/Kuttner Apartment, designed by Kolatan/Mac Donald Studio and celebrated last year in “Design Culture Now,” an exhibition at the CooperHewitt Museum, are like something out of a David Cronenberg film. There’s blobby architecture, too: the bizarre, invertebrate structures dreamed up by Asymptote in New York and Greg Lynn FORM in Los Angeles offer glimpses of a biotech aesthetic in the birthing.

One way to get a grip on the blob aesthetic is to think of it as information age ectoplasm. An attempt to square spiritual yearnings with scientific skepticism, ectoplasm was a metaphysical oxymoron: the immaterial materialized. The blobject reflects the shapelessness of the invisible, intangible world of zeroes and ones that our work, our economy, and even our social lives seem to be disappearing into. It’s a hunk of ether you can hold in your hand.

While they make information concrete, blobjects also sing a song of speed –of the head-whipping acceleration of a world synchronized with the inhuman pace of digital technology. Next to blobjects, the gleaming, streamlined commodities of the ’30s appear to be standing still. The stereotypical blobject looks like a Raymond Loewy pencil sharpener that has engaged warp drive.

To be sure, the organic aesthetic that defines the obscure objects of consumerist desire isn’t a pure product of postmodern whimsy or information-age anxiety. It’s equally the result of a revolution in synthetic materials. Weird new chemical resins, artificial foams, and plastics like TechnoGel, the semiliquid polyurethane that imparts a butt-hugging squelchiness to Werner Aisslinger’s Soft chaise longue for Zanotta, for instance, are inspiring products that look as if they were vat-grown in some Blade Runner biotech lab.

As important are computer-enabled breakthroughs in manufacturing processes. The five-axis, computer-controlled milling machine has automated the creation of irregular shapes that until only recently would have required costly handcrafting. Then, too, software has radically transformed design itself, allowing designers to stretch, squash, fold, and fuse 3-D models. Consumer goods now look born rather than made.

Architecture has been shaken to its foundations by the digital revolution. “Before computers, you’d start designing using shapes of cubes,” Greg Lynn recently told The New York Times. “Now, I can start with something like a handkerchief.” Oran embryo. Lynn has created some stunning digital models of the Embryological House he’d like to build, a mutant dwelling with gills for windows and a sphincterlike front door that irises open and closed. Using cutting-edge manufacturing techniques, the builder would be able to “bulge and gastrulate” the floor, in Lynn’s words, to form furniture. All this bulging and gastrulating would give the house’s interior a decidedly fleshy feel, somewhere between intrauterine and intestinal. “You should feel as if you’re living in an animal,” says Lynn, who actually cites the 1958 movie The Blob as an inspiration for his work.

In the science-fiction classic, the all-consuming ooze of the title is a textbook Freudian terror, bubbling up out of the collective id of Perma-Prest’ 50s culture to slime everything in its path. Likewise, today’s blobjects symbolize the return of the repressed–in this case, nature, in all its chaotic unpredictability and gooey physicality.

Nature was always there, of course, lurking in the shadows of the sunny, scientific rationalism ushered in by the Enlightenment. The industrial aesthetic of the late 19th century was paralleled by the erotic frenzies of Art Nouveau, both of which reached their dizzy heights in Gaudi’s orgies of architectural omamentation. In the Machine Age ’30s and ’40s, biomorphic artist/designers like Isamu Noguchi and proto-blob architects like Frederick Kiesler rejected the hard-edged geometry of the skyscraper for the pulsing outlines of the amoeba. Now the biomorphic aesthetic is back, in all its polymorphous perversity, just in time for the biotech century. In our brave new world, the blobject’s mixed metaphor is fast becoming reality. The surreal conjunction of technology and biology, mechanism and organism is made literal in the SynerGraft heart valve, composed of engineered tissue, and the remote-controlled “RoboRoach,” created by implanting electrodes in the brain of a cockroach. Today, a monkey with a jellyfish gene; tomorrow, baboon-to-human transplants and micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) that live inside the body.

Whither then? Bioengineered fleshtech like the skin-crawlingly creepy virtual-reality game pods in the Cronenberg movie eXistenZ? Don’t laugh. Walking through a subway station in midtown Manhattan recently, I passed a billboard for the high-tech venture-capital and consulting firm Accenture. “Computers that run on bacteria,” the tagline predicted. “Now things get interesting.” It sounds like a threat. Or a promise. Or both.

Mark Dery is a cultural critic whose articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Red Herring. His latest book is The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic).

Here are some additional production tips for using colored paper:

Batch color may vary slightly among the mill’s production runs. If it’s important for you to match paper colors exactly from one press run to the next, you might have to buy enough paper for your entire campaign and store it until you’re ready to use it all.

Readability may suffer on colored paper. Make sure your type contrasts against the background of the paper well enough to be legible.

The pigments in colored paper can fade with exposure to light. This is especially true for orange and fluorescent dyes. If your designs require a significant shelf life, ask your supplier about the stability of the paper dyes.

Flecks of color can interfere with detail in fine-screened halftones and in thin serifs of type, so it’s best not to use color-flecked paper for these designs. Also be aware that you can’t control where the flecks appear. Results can sometimes be embarrassing (as when a blotch shows up on a model’s nose), depending on the nature of the design.

If you hate the way transparent inks look on your colored paper, try using opaque inks. They’re thicker than transparent inks and may require a different printing process (flexography, screen printing or waterless printing, for example).

You can prime the colored paper ahead of time. This is done by laying down a coat of opaque white ink, letting it dry, then overprinting with transparent inks. This technique is expensive, because it involves two passes through the press. It also requires the printer to achieve pinpoint registration, but the effect can look spectacular.

Go for special effects. Embossing, thermography, foil-stamping and varnishing on colored paper can all work without conventional printing.

Many of these papers require strict humidity control. If your printer can’t maintain the proper relative humidity, then ask the mill to deliver the paper early so it can be acclimatized to the pressroom conditions before the job is scheduled to print. 1300

Availability of some colored papers can be a hassle, especially for certain sizes of cut sheets or web rolls. Either buy your paper well ahead of time, or write a clause into your purchase contract that guarantees delivery in time for printing. And then order ahead of time anyway. Even with the best intentions in the world, mills cannot keep up with demand for some of these papers. In addition, many mills make these special stocks only at certain times of the year. When they run out, they’re out. And you’re out of luck.

None of these colored papers are appropriate for projects that require productcolor matching-the paper color itself is too overwhelming. But they’re spectacular for designs that involve unexpected techniques, such as embossing, debossing, thermography, opaque printing and varnishing.

When designing with these colorful papers, it’s very tempting to use the paper color itself in lieu of paying for a second color on press. Resist the temptation. Designing with colored paper is a far more subtle process than simply slapping one-color ink on a colored background and calling the job done.

Rather, you should think of paper color as a pure design element in its own right, almost as though you were painting with the paper itself. Just as you mix oil paints on a palette to create new colors, so can you apply inks to colored paper to create new effects. The paper color works with the ink to bend light in new ways. Here’s why:

Paper is more than a substrate for your creativity. It actually reflects light back to the eye. When you lay transparent ink over paper, light passes through the ink layers, hits the paper and bounces back to your eye, allowing you to see color. White paper reflects the entire visual spectrum of white light. Colored paper, however, absorbs some of the wavelengths of light, depriving the ink films of the full spectrum. As a result, the ink colors laid on top of colored paper are skewed. For example,

yellow paper absorbs blue light, rendering process-color skin tones much warmer. A blue sky printed on a yellow sheet appears green; neutral grays look yellow. In the same way, match ink colors printed on colored paper become skewed, too. If you print a royal purple on yellow paper, for example, the purple comes out brown.

This doesn’t mean that you should avoid printing custom inks or four-color process on colored paper. It does mean that you should check ahead of time to see exactly how your designs will appear. For custom inks, ask your printer to do an ink drawdown with your match color. The printer will smear a swash of ink onto your specified paper, and you’ll be able to preview the results before the job goes to press.

However, ink drawdowns are not effective with four-color process inks, because you can’t really see how the process inks will trap on the colored paper. Ask your printer to run a few sheets of your spec’ed paper at the end of a press run on another job. This will cost you a modest sum, but it’ll give you a fair representation of how the job will print.

For maximum impact, the current crop of shiny papers attracts the eye as relentlessly as a lure attracts bass. One of the most stunning papers on the market today is Appleton Papers Currency line, an aqueous-coated metallic paper that really looks metallic. Because these papers are metallized in the manufacturing process, the bronzes, golds, silvers and opalescents really do shine. Best of all, you can print on them with both transparent and opaque inks, creating effects both subtle and bold.

Even glitzier are pearlescent papers by the Curious Paper Collection. Like Currency, these sheets can be printed with offset ink. The effect is shiny but subdued, perfect for elegant designs that scream quality-in the most discreet way, of course.

For the glitziest papers of all, check out holographic papers from Proma Technologies. These sheets also can be overprinted with commercial inks, so you can cover up the holograms completely, leave them totally bare, or use transparent inks combined with the holographic refractions to create distinctive effects.

All these lines of shiny paper are interactive, in the sense that they literally demand to be picked up and turned from side to side so viewers can see different colors and effects. They’re especially effective for packaging or any other handheld designs such as greeting cards, business cards and brochures.

Can your print project be interactive? It can when you spec a colored paper that catches the eye and invites the touch. Here’s how to get the most out of these special stocks.

As graphics professionals, we would do well to acknowledge a truism that the marketing experts at mass-retailers have known for years: People buy with their eyes. And nothing appeals to the visual sense more than color.

So it’s good news for us that paper mills are introducing new colored sheets that will make even the most jaded reader linger over your project. Many of these new colors tie into national trends in fashion and home decorating.

One of the hottest of these trends is related to people’s yearning for a return to the home. (Whether it’s the chicken or the egg that’s at fault, the desire for a renewal of the home seems to happen whenever Republicans come into the White House.)

In any case, mills are focusing on using earth-tone pigments in their pulps, especially for uncoated papers. Strathmore, for example, makes a slateblue paper that manages to appear warm and accessible, even though it’s on the cold side of the palette. GeorgiaPacific’s brick browns and rich beiges evoke the coziness of the hearth.

Some of these colors are softened even further with an applied texture. Neenah Paper’s Columns line, for example, is manufactured with alternating concave and convex ridges running vertically through the sheet. One especially effective color in this line is a black that literally feels soft to the touch and is also easy on the eyes.

On the other end of the scale, bright color still sells, too, just as it did during the last Republican reign, almost two decades ago. (Remember Nancy Reagan Red?) Tapping into this trend is Wausau Papers’ Astrobrights line, a collection of fluorescent papers so bright that they almost make a reader reach for sunglasses.

Sometimes, to attract attention, it’s more effective to whisper than to shout. For this reason, many mills are offering more muted colors. Green Field Paper Co., for example, makes organic-cotton sheets from naturally colored cotton. Coyote Brown and Sage Green have no color additives-their hues come from the cotton bolls themselves.

Another way that mills add muted color is with flecks of material in the paper pulp itself. Green Field’s Junk Mail, for example, gets its flecks from ground-up pieces of that stuff that usually ends up in your trash at home. Neptune by Le Desktop gets its speckles from seaweed harvested from the weedchoked canals of Venice. Golf Paper, also by Le Desktop, derives its flecks from grass clippings collected from golf courses.