As Detroit celebrates its 300th birthday this year, visitors will find a city springing back after decades of decline. Take a drive (this is the Motor City, after all) to see pockets of life among downtown’s abandoned skyscrapers, including three recently opened casinos, the restaurants and bakeries of Greektown, and the Tigers’s new baseball stadium. Stroll through Eastern Market and pick up a bag of pistachios at Germack Pistachio Co. or a slice of pate at R. Hirt, Jr. Co. Wander into the Renaissance Center for a look at General Motors’s new world headquarters. Or hop onto the People Mover for a quick loop around downtown and a fine view of the Detroit River. Once you’ve toured the city, consider venturing into Detroit’s leafy suburbs, especially Bloomfield Hills, home of Cranbrook one of the country’s best-designed educational campuses.

THREE MUST-SEES

Detroit Institute of Arts

Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry frescoes are among the highlights of this Beaux-Arts building in the city’s cultural center. (Rivera created the works in 1932, after weeks spent touring Ford’s Rouge plant.) Another notable feature is the Kresge Court, where each of four walls resembles a distinct European facade and skylights produce the atmosphere of a continental garden. Among the museum’s most famous artworks are Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold, Bruegel’s Wedding Dance, and Rembrandt’s Visitation. 5200 Woodward Ave.; [313] 833-7900; Wed.–Fri. 11 a.m.-4 p.m., Sat.–Sun. 11 a.m.-5 p.m., first Fri. of the month 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

Orchestra Hall

Designed by C. Howard Crane, this elegant home of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra was built in 1919 in just 4 months and 23 days. The orchestra moved out in the ’40s, and the building became a jazz club where Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington performed, but by 1960 it had fallen into disrepair. The decayed building required 19 years of painstaking renovations before reopening in 1989 with the DSO back in place. Note in particular the ornamental moldings and ceiling frescoes. 3711 Wood ward Ave., [313] 576-5111, concerts every weekend.

Comerica Park

In addition to America’s favorite pastime, diversions at the new Tigers ballpark (inaugurated last April) include larger-than-life statues of hall-of-famers such as Hank Greenberg and Ty Cobb, a tiger carousel, a baseball Ferris wheel, and a fountain that sends up water streams during the home team’s big plays. The entire lower deck is a walking museum of the Tigers and Detroit, with displays of historical artifacts from 1900 through 2000. 2100 Woodward Ave., [313] 962-4000, tours during baseball season.

ALSO WORTH A LOOK

Guardian Building

Nicknamed the Cathedral of Finance when it opened in 1929, this Wirt C. Rowland–designed building, is the epitome of Art Deco style and one of Detroit’s greatest landmarks. Stroll inside its lobby and gaze at the vaulted tilework ceiling. Visitors may also peek into what was once the main banking room, with its Aztec-style design, painted ceilings, and a mural of Michigan on the south wall. 500 Griswold Ave., [313] 965-2430, lobby open weekdays 8 a.m.–5 p.m..

Detroit People Mover Stations

Hop on the People Mover to get a bird’s-eye view Detroit–and to see art featured in each of the 13 stations scattered throughout downtown. The elevated trains stop every three to five minutes; a round trip takes just a quarter of an hour and the fare is just 50 cents. [313] 224-2160 for a list of stations; Mon.–Thurs. 7 a.m.–11 p.m., Fri. 7 a.m.–midnight, Sat. 7 a.m.–midnight, Sun. noon–8 p.m.

Cranbrook Educational Community

Newspaper publisher George Gough Booth and his wife, Ellen Scripps Booth, spent 30 years in the early 20th century developing Cranbrook Educational Community in Bloomfield Hills, 35–40 minutes northwest of Detroit by car. The masterwork of chief architect Eliel Saarinen, the campus comprises Cranbrook’s Academy of Art, Art Museum, Institute of Science, and elementary and high schools. Recent constructions include a national AIA award–winning natatorium designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Other highlights: Cranbrook House, built in 1908 as the Booth’s residence, is the oldest surviving manor home in metropolitan Detroit. Designed by Albert Kahn, the house is furnished with many original pieces, including tapestries and fine and decorative art collections influenced by Booth’s loyalty to the Arts and Crafts movement. Surrounding the mansion are 40 acres of landscaped gardens with fountains, terraces, and sculpture. (380 Lone Pine Rd.; [248] 645-3147; tours June 15–Oct. 30, Thurs. 11 a.m. and 1:15 p.m. , Sun. 3 p.m.) \ Saarinen House was Eliel Saarinen’s family home and his studio from the time he built it, in 1930, until his death in 1950. The house retains its dazzling Art Deco and Finnish-inspired furnishings, and textiles woven by Saarinen’s wife, Loja. (39221 Woodward Ave.; [2483 645-3361; tours May--Oct., Tues--Sun. 1 p.m., also Sat, and Sun. 3 p.m.) \ Designed by Oscar Murray, Christ Church Cranbrook has one of the most lavishly ornamented ecclesiastical interiors in North America. While its woodcarvings, stained glass, and mosaics are contemporary with the 1920S construction of the Episcopal church, primarily English gothic in style, many of the objects are centuries-old treasures found by the Booths in their travels. (470 Church Rd., [248] 644-5210; weekdays 9 a.m.–5 p.m. unless services are underway).

WHERE TO STAY

Located in Detroit’s New Center neighborhood, former home of General Motors’s world headquarters, the Hotel St. Regis, which has just become a Holiday Inn, once catered to the GM crowd. Now that GM has moved downtown, the Holiday Inn’s 224 rooms are open to other corporate travelers and tourists. Renovated last year, the hotel has all-new furniture and is convenient to many of the city’s attractions (3071 W. Grand Blvd., [313] 873-3000, doubles from $125). \ For an upscale experience, the Ritz-Carlton, Dearborn, has the ambience of a turn-of-the century English manor house, with marble, crystal chandeliers, custom fabrics and china, and works by European artists from the 18th through early 20th centuries (300 Town Center Dr., [313] 441-2000, singles from $295). \ After exploring the boutiques and galleries of suburban Birmingham, visit the 150-room Townsend Hotel, which offers four-poster beds, marble baths, and Aveda amenities. High tea is served in the lobby Tuesday through Saturday (100 Townsend, [248] 642 -7900, doubles from $295).

WHERETO EAT

For a corned-beef sandwich, check out Eph McNally’s in Corktown, Detroit’s oldest neighborhood (1300 Porter St., [313] 963-8833). The deli seats 27 and is known for its quirky displays of metal lunch boxes and board games from the 1960s and ’70s. \ For more lavish dining and a wonderful view of the Detroit River and skyline, chow down at the Rattlesnake Club (300 River Place Dr., [313] 567-4400). Housed in an old pharmaceutical factory, the restaurant is known for freshwater lake perch sauteed with lemon caper sauce, rack of Michigan lamb with yellow corn polenta, and white chocolate ravioli dessert. The who’s who of Detroit can be spotted at Intermezzo (1435 Randolph, [313] 961-0707). Located in the Harmonie Park neighborhood, Intermezzo serves Italian dishes with American flair in a Soho-style atmosphere. Try the lamb chops, beef tenderloin, or broiled salmon.

STOCKING UP

The shops of downtown’s Broadway-Randolph district are the place to find cutting-edge designer clothes. Check out Serman’s collection of men’s suits in shades of lime, tangerine, cherry red, or royal blue, with shoes to match (1238 Randolph St., [313] 964-1335). \ For a uniquely Detroit shopping experience, head to Pewabic Pottery (10125 E. Jefferson, [313] 822-0954). Operating out of a Tudor-revival residence since 1907, Pewabic is one of only three Arts and Crafts-era potteries still open nationwide; you can watch the artists at work before buying their wares. \ Browse through the Detroit Antiques Mall (828W. Fisher Freeway, [313] 963-5252), located in a converted buggy factory, where visitors can find architectural items such as glass and brass doorknobs or light fixtures from the 1880s to the 1920s.

Henrik Fisker is drawing a car in chalk. With quick sweeps so familiar he could probably do them in his sleep, he sketches the new BMW Z8 sports car on a black sheet tacked to a wall, showing how the shape compares to the classic 508 of the late 1950s (Elvis owned one). Fisker, the Z8’s chief designer, is Danish. BMW, of course, is German. But we’re in the offices of Designworks/USA, in Newbury Park, California, much closer to the L.A. Freeway than to the Autobahn.

Designworks, an industrial design studio where Fisker is president and CEO, began in a Malibu garage in 1972. Its founder, Chuck Pelly, a legendary car designer whose credits include the sporty Scarab, staffed the company with his most talented students from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena–the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of the auto world. In 1995, BMW, one ofDesignworks’s clients and eventually a part owner, bought the company outright to be a satellite design studio. Designworks had a big hand in developing BMW’s X5 sports activity vehicle and new 3-Series, but from the start, its purpose has been cross-pollination. Here, according to Pelly’s plan, automotive technologies and materials find applications in non-driveable goods like computers for Compaq, phones for Nokia, and desk accessories for Haworth. The goal, says BMW’s design chief, Chris Bangle, is shaping “anything that moves your body and your heart.”

Product design requires space to create and view models, but it also demands tight security. Over the years, the collegial openness that helped Designworks invent products for such varied companies as John Deere and Thermador came into increasing conflict with its parent’s security needs. On the one hand, designers profited from a free exchange of ideas–everyone from the clay modelers to the front desk receptionist critiqued projects. “On the other hand, BMW had some real secrets and kept needing to carve out more space for the closed-off clay studio,” Bangle explains. The conflict couldn’t be resolved without a major office expansion. Last year, Gensler’s Santa Monica office began one that will soon nearly double Designwork’s 38,000 square feet and tidy up the place, which Bangle admits is informal, if not scruffy.

According to project principal Gene Watanabe, the original structure–a classic 1970S California tilt-up–”was the most nondescript little white concrete building you’ve every seen.” Gensler’s job was to increase and protect the space without distorting the building’s proportions. Though most of the addition expands the automotive clay studio, the firm’s other task was to prevent the non-automotive departments from feeling neglected. All in all, the specs were a challenge. “They told us they needed lots of security and then in the next breath said they wanted lots of light and air,” Watanabe says. “But what the building really wanted to be was a bunker.”

To integrate the old and new portions, Gensler introduced a 305-foot-long exterior wall punctuated by a glass entrance topped with a thin, winglike marquee. Only a tiny notch suggests the juncture of the two parts. (Bangle, for whom the new facade resembles a ship sailing across the site, refers to the shape as a “knifing prow.”) Nicknamed “the flank,” the wall is punctuated by a long strip of clerestory windows that soften the idea of a division between workers who have access to company secrets and those who don’t. Here and elsewhere on the perimeter, windows vary in size and capacity depending on the activities of the spaces they look onto–transmitting less light to the computer labs, more to the lobby. The section bordering the clay studio at the back is made of Kalwall. At night, onlookers see mysterious silhouettes projected from the active studio’s yellow light, while the space itself remains alluringly inaccessible.

Inside the clay studio, the gems of future auto shows begin life as earthen lumps. Despite the use of scanners and other high-tech tools to transfer three-dimensional shapes to and from computers, modeling is a hands-on, sculptural process. The enlarged space makes room for expensive raised metal plates on which the models will be measured and examined from all angles. Auto-design-group offices, currently shoved away in halls, will be ranged in this part of the addition along a catwalk like mezzanine that emphasizes the involvement of all workers with the clay studio below.

A stroll through Design works reveals diverse products in the making: ski goggles for Scott/USA, ergonomic interface graphics for Sanyo/Fisher. But beginning with the entrance–the company’s public face–Bangle wanted to make clear that Design works is not a high-tech startup, but an avant-garde, global design firm. Moved to a front-and-center position in the renovated facility, the entrance leads to an exhibit area whose focus is an outdoor turntable showing off new products in natural light. When a sensitive prototype is on display, a veil will be drawn around the turntable to thwart prying eyes (especially those of competitors buzzing the site in helicopters). At other times, all Designworks employees will be able to take pride in the company’s innovations.

Bangle’s interest in privacy embraces more than security. It was his idea to provide a tower-like room poking out of the roof that he calls “the tree house.” He conceived it as a raw space, temporarily decorated by its inhabitants, where designers could solve knotty problems by fleeing upward to “lofty” thoughts. Bangle’s prototype was a house he knew as a child that an eccentric had built on top of a stone column left by erosion in the Wisconsin Dells, but he also had the work of a more classical architect, Jefferson’s office at Monticello, in mind.

As executed by Gensler, the tower offers a simple space with a whiteboard for doodling. Bangle, meanwhile, has moved on to other ideas: he dreams of building a virtual, digital studio–a Voodoo studio, in Bangle-speak–that would somehow let designers work anywhere inspiration strikes.

Though Bangle’s ideas are lofty, his feet are on the ground. Sometimes his whole body is. When presented with Gensler’s model of the expanded Designworks, he lowered himself on his hands and knees and carefully studied it from all angles. He loved that the wood was left natural, so the emphasis was on form and perspective, just as in the model for, say, a BMW. Watanabe was amazed. “I never had anybody look at a model for the same things I do,” he says.

IT SEEMS IRONIC that any alum of the high-profile Rockwell Group would crave anonymity. But Nancy Mah and Scott Kester, co-principals of Nancy Mah Design in New York, say they want to be invisible. The partners share a fantasy of creating two restaurants side by side so different in mood and concept that nobody could ever trace them back to the same studio. “We’ve found it important not to have a signature style,” says Mah, defying an accepted formula for successful restaurant design.

In fact, the year-old firm indulges in color, pattern, and fantasy–classic Rockwell obsessions. Among its projects: a walnut-paneled bakery in Nagoya, Japan, that feels like an Hermes boutique; two Manhattan sushi restaurants where both food and decor are splashed with hot Latin color; and a soon-to-be-completed downtown New York club based on a tiki bar theme. Can the apple fall far from the tree? Or has what Mah calls “the wow factor” of restaurant design taken over the whole forest?

Mah, 37, and Kester, 40, met at the Rockwell Group early in 1999 where they worked together on Ruby Foo’s, a pan-Asian restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Kester had been there a year and Mah for two when they left to open their own studio; they received the commission for the second Ruby Foo’s shortly after. (David Rockwell declined to comment for this article.) Though the partners don’t see a family resemblance among their current projects, the self-trained Mah, who, while at Rockwell, helped complete Michael Jordan’s The Steak House in Grand Central Station and Nobu in Las Vegas, believes she inherited a taste for sumptuousness and whimsical coloration while employed at the powerhouse. “I’m definitely a bolder designer now,” she says.

“Being as theatrical as possible and creating a big first impression are both important lessons…for some kinds of spaces,” Mah believes. But she and Kester want to create interiors that deliver beyond the threshold. They take pride in turning the most undesirable table in the house into what Kester calls “the fat-guy table.” By building a wall around the service station at the upscale Manhattan nightclub Lotus, for example, and elevating the back booth on a platform, they transformed what is essentially a social Siberia at this style-conscious club into a shrine-like alcove. And at a time when theme-park excess is at a premium, the partners note that diners relate strongly to details like the textured underside of a table “since people’s hands tend naturally to fall there,” says (ester.

Such subtleties have practical roots. Mah worked as a restaurant hostess, waitress, bartender, and manager before trying her hand, in 1989, at designing Poiret, a small bistro in Manhattan. Her years of observing the choreography of waiters and diners informed subsequent design commissions for New York’s Bryant Park Grill and Lutece. She learned that the job “wasn’t all about what the space looked like, but more importantly about making it flow so that customers would feel wonderful as they walked in,” she says.

Kester, a Harvard architecture graduate who began designing eateries for the Niemetz Design Group in Boston, agrees with Mah that human interactions offer the most compelling part of restaurant design–”focusing on the whole flow of how people face each other or hang out at the bar or just get their coats,” he says.

Neither Mah nor Kester looks to other interiors for inspiration; in fact, their favorite restaurants are “owner-designed,” which is to say, not designed at all. A neighborhood Japanese restaurant that changes its flowers three times a day strikes exactly the right note of intimacy for them. And though their commissions are highly art directed, the partners try to match the same spirit of spontaneous accommodation. For the Miami nightclub Rumi, for instance, they tempered the room’s challenging dimensions–17 feet wide with 35-foot ceilings–by introducing six-foot-high banquettes. Under the designers’ own lighting system, the seating areas feel like little rooms. “People want to be part of the action,” explains Mah, “but rarely do they want to be the center of it.”

Mah and Kester’s designs are eye-catching–and yes, they can border on spectacle–but for clients, the real beauty is in turning every table into a Cinderella story. “If you can get an extra seat in,” Mah says matter-of-factly, “that’s another $40,000 to $50,000 a year.” Psychology class is over. Economics class has begun.

Ann Landers says you should never blow your own horn. But I do, I do. I like to brag that I’m one of the few writers who has written for both the academic journal New German Critique and the not-so-academic Playgirl. Not to mention The Nation and Total TV. I like to write for different venues and different audiences–and economically it’s a necessity. No doubt because I wear many hats, I’ve been fascinated by “multilingual” designers of graphics or Web sites who are now turning to interior and environmental design. It’s a truism that the professional journey is not always linear, and that the odd twists along the way culminate in a collection ofunusual skill; call them the riches of weirdness. They are particularly evident in designers now applying digital technology to interiors.

These riches were on lush display last fall at the annual American Center for Design’s “Living Surfaces” conference in Chicago. Speakers there showed digitalized interiors: walls turned into media feeds (Lisa Strausfeld of information Art) and ceiling-to-floor-water-falls of computer-generated letters (David Small of Small Design). Others showed mobile environments like portable, convergent, and interactive media centers (Tim Parsey ofMotorola). What struck me was that the creator soft these environments and technologies–give ortake a few industrial designers–had each started their careers in a different place from where they currently stood.

Why were digital-technology designers turning to environmental design, whether for interiors of homes and offices or for creating an environment around a user on the move? Was this quick changing practice economically driven? Were the tech-skilled designers simply fleeing the investment-drained Web? Was it mass personal eccentricity–a kind of creative restlessness? Did they, like me, enjoy working with different groups of people in different venues?

I talked with Lisa Strausfeld, who’d spoken at the ACD conference about the prototype media wall she’s designing for the revamped Penn Station. (Penn Station’s redesign is the work of SOM; the interior graphics are being done by Pentagram.) Strausfeld was trained as an architect but graduated in the early ’90s recession when architectural jobs were few, and she found herself redesigning computer circuitry for Motorola. From there she went to N IT’s Visible Language Workshop and developed software for financial displays. She then began working on an interactive site for Quokka Sports. At Quokka she was drawn to digitalized display technology and the possibility of combining her architectural interests with digital ones. In 2000 she founded Information Art and was assigned work on the Penn Station project.

I expected Strausfeld to say that her departure from Quolda had been partly for economic reasons, since it happened around the start of the downturn in Web investment (spring 2000), but in fact Quokka was prospering when she left, and she was doing fine as a VP there. Although the draining of money from the Internet has no doubt been an incentive to other formerly Web-based designers who’ve change tracks, Strausfeld sees the diversification of roles as technologically driven, too. “Advances in technology have changed our understanding of experience,” she says. To her, convergence design–combining feeds from TV, phone, and the Web–has prompted attention to holistic design, with a focus on the consumer’s environment and behavior.

User-focused design has been the buzz of the last few years. But if the ACD conference was any marker, and I think it was, there’s now a feedback loop that has not only changed the level of attention designers give to user needs but also how that holistic approach reconfigures designers’ roles. Exiting is the specialist; entering is the multifaceted, tech-savvy environmental visionary.

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.