"Squeeze Sconce," "Meow Chair," "Skateboard," and "Tuffet Stool" are some of the names for furniture and accessories designed by Lisa Krohn's firm Krab Design. These titles conjure the whimsical mood of Krohn's work, but also belie its formalist roots. Krohn studied...
[more]"Squeeze Sconce," "Meow Chair," "Skateboard," and "Tuffet Stool" are some of the names for furniture and accessories designed by Lisa Krohn's firm Krab Design. These titles conjure the whimsical mood of Krohn's work, but also belie its formalist roots.
Krohn studied Industrial Design at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan after attending Brown University. Her early work comes out of Cranbrook's "design-as-metaphor" school of thought. Cranbrook promoted an interdisciplinary approach to design, teaching that philosophy, social theory, and cultural studies provide a necessary framework for exploring the "new ecology of advanced artifacts that will become a sociological record of time." And Krohn's award-winning "Phonebook" (1986) serves as an excellent example of her alma mater's concepts. This object was designed as a prototype telephone/answering machine and has become something of an icon of the Postmodern design era.
The object's stiff plastic casing is fashioned to form a book that holds pages. The function of the "Phonebook" changes as the user turns its pages -- it shifts from acting as a simple phone, to retrieving and playing messages, to scanning and faxing. The contraption's "receiver" is visually recognizable by its form, which mimics that of a standard phone. This gesture towards familiarity makes the Phonebook user-friendly despite its myriad possibilities. Appearance is a direct guide to function in all of its features.
Krohn again broke new ground with her "Cyberdesk," which premiered in 1988 and provided a revolutionary look at connectivity. The "desk" is no desk at all, in fact. It is a "pliable high-tech garment," which wraps itself around the neck of the wearer like some fantastically sensual jellyfish. Its luminous body and appendages gracefully envelop the head of the user, with one "arm" extending up to become an earpiece and another swooping down to provide a delicately hanging view screen. The Cyberdesk's other interactive parts include a four-key keyboard, a microphone, and a small track ball.
If Krohn's early designs are on the conceptual side, her later works fall at the opposite end of the spectrum and are, in fact, very corporeal. Her "Arc" lamps, constructed of Lycra fabric stretched over steel frames, poise delicately against a wall. They resemble rail-thin ballerinas stretching their limbs in preparation for performance. Yet the lamps are so suggestive of motion that we are satisfied seeing them stationary.
Krohn's work to date has often elicited the word "nomadic." Her mode of design seems to be traveling in an almost reverse evolutionary cycle. While her "wrist computer" and "manual fax" embraced new technology, her later works, including the "Arc" lamp and "Tuffet Stool," are biomorphic and almost archaic. Clearly, Krohn's comfort with formalism and her broad, interdisciplinary perspective give her a large field to harvest. Given the amazing technological advances since the 1980s, it will be interesting to see which direction she moves in as she blends her concern for the body and its flexibility with the exigencies of high-tech machines.
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