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" Philippe Starck is world famous as a designer. But his role as a creator of provocative objects sometimes overshadows his more significant contributions: More than any other figure in the field, he has changed the way we live. Virtually every issue we&amp;#039;ve published in the last 25 years has had an object in it designed by Starck, so it seemed appropriate to interview him about the shape of things to come. 1. You are arguably the most famous product designer in the world and have created many memorable objects. What are your personal favorites? The next ones. I don&amp;#039;t like anything that I&amp;#039;ve done. That&amp;#039;s why I continue to do it. I&amp;#039;m talentless, cynical, lazy and venal. Every object I&amp;#039;ve designed tells me how weak and lazy I am. 2. You&amp;#039;ve designed just about everything from yachts to toothbrushes.What is left? What do you want to accomplish in the coming years? Because I am lazy, weak, venal and cynical, I&amp;#039;ll try to make something more interesting. I&amp;#039;d be ashamed to make something useless. I try to find tools to help friends have a better life, to decide how to exist. 3. There has been a virtual explosion in the United States of residential complexes designed by &amp;quot;name&amp;quot; architects and designers. You started the trend with your company Yoo. Now everyone from John Pawson to Giorgio Armani has joined the game. Do you see even further growth? Signature residential projects are not so stupid. It looks a little bit like showing off\u2014a little trendy\u2014but when you are facing the biggest expense of your life, you need a clue, you need help. You sleep in a Starck hotel room and appreciate what he&amp;#039;s done, so you think, Why not work with Starck? At Yoo, we work now with Jade Jagger. She is very different from me. To help people, only one designer is not enough, because people are so different. We will have a complete panel of designers for people to choose from. There is a need for lots of different styles. Signature design is for a better life. So, yes, it will last. Maybe it won&amp;#039;t be eternal, but for sure it will exist in the future. 4. What in general does the future hold for housing? What do you think our houses will look like, and what will be the biggest change in the way we live? We shall have tribal communities, cultural communities like the Middle Ages, and every castle will be the castle of a different tribe. In the next ten years, all functional objects will disappear: There will be no more things like curtains or chairs. These will be replaced by immaterial services. So our houses will only be filled with sentimental things: You&amp;#039;ll just have a painting by your daughter or a chair your son made in school. We won&amp;#039;t need objects. That&amp;#039;s why design has no future. Fewer houses will be created for the architecture, for the money. Click here to see the slideshow.  5. What new materials and technologies interest you the most right now? I am focused on ecology and cost. The only technology and materials that interest me are the ones that bring the best to everybody, things like hydrogen cells. I&amp;#039;m very interested in GE&amp;#039;s EcoImagination and any work with water. 6. Last year you launched a consultancy to help Asian companies market their designs, saying that Western companies were facades with just a name and a logo. You claimed the know-how and production are in Asia. What is happening with this project? I did start a company called the Key, based in Hong Kong, and it&amp;#039;s a success. All the projects we are working on are secret, but things are working very well. It&amp;#039;s about justice. It&amp;#039;s not right that everything we buy in the West is made in Asia. Why don&amp;#039;t we buy directly from Asia? I&amp;#039;m like Don Quixote. I try to fight when I see something that&amp;#039;s not right. I try to have products at the right price. The difference between the cost and what we pay is called slavery. We all know it, but we forget it. We must stop buying things that are cheap. When we buy cheap, we buy the sweat and blood of people. 7. You speak about the need for environmental sensitivity. You have the power to demand that the manufacturers you work with play by environmentally responsible rules. Are you using it? We always check on those we work with. Now there are strict environmental laws. If you follow the law, it&amp;#039;s OK. As for the plastic I design for Kartell, it&amp;#039;s high quality; it won&amp;#039;t break in six months. You can keep it for 20 years, and it is easy to recycle. The worst offense is overconsuming. We need to buy less and keep it a long time. 8. It&amp;#039;s been said that you have a talent for self-promotion. Do you think this talent is a necessary one for a designer working today? Only journalists say this. But you have a good memory. Have I ever called you? I have never called any journalist. I never do self-promotion. I live far from everythingin the country. I am not in press conferences. But, yes, designers do need to promote themselves. A lot survive by self-promotion that is better than their work. But I really don&amp;#039;t care. Journalists are the ones doing the promoting. 9. You have always been a very vocal proponent of democratic design, but your major foray into that in the United States\u2014your collection for Target\u2014met with mixed success. Why? Do you have any more mass-market projects ready for Americans? Target wasn&amp;#039;t bad, but it wasn&amp;#039;t fantastic. The real problem was that they never trusted the collection or put it on the shelf. We had thousands of calls from people asking for the product. But more mass-market work is coming. We are working on a big line of products in China with the biggest U.S. company and doing clothes in Africa with Puma. I always work at two ranges of the market. It&amp;#039;s my Robin Hood strategy: I use rich people like an advance research lab. 10. You have been extremely helpful to young designers and often feature their work in your interiors projects. Who are the up-and-coming people we should know? Thank you, but today I don&amp;#039;t know the very new people. I never read design magazines. The ones I do know like Marcel Wanders, whose work I love, are already known and don&amp;#039;t need me. But the new generation looks good, better than this one. And I hope it&amp;#039;s more political. Click here to see the slideshow. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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