Colani me up

I can’t stop thinking about that documentary about the designer Luigi Colani I saw on Youtube the other day. “I built aircraft out of shark corpses, and they flew perfectly!” What a guy. He designed some weird shit, too.

Back in the 90s, there were Colani PCs available in German supermarkets, with weird handles and curvaceous lines on the front panel. I think the Turbo button was included as well, but I’m not sure if that wasn’t on different models.

The Turbo-button allowed you to increase the Mhz of the CPU, or, to put it differently, unthrottle the speed of the CPU. Cool stuff. But, back to Colani.

He built lots of stuff with organic lines everywhere, like it was built as a mold to fit the human body. Or someone’s body. Maybe alien? Who knows. If you hold a photo camera in your hand today and it snuggly fits your grip, thank Colani for it. If you watch that video by Design Theory linked above, he talks about a revolutionary Canon model released back in the 80s.

Colani talks about how no one liked him, and apparently the establishment forbade students to attend his exhibitions. It’s quite the contrast to the austere Bauhaus-ian look championed by Dieter Rams et al. I’ve written about Rams before, check my blog for stuff on him. He’s pretty cool and influential for Apple’s school of design.

I also remember an interview Colani did back in the 90s, with a Swastika flag displayed prominently in his office. He talked about how you need to be a total fascist if you want to be a good designer, that the collaborative approach doesn’t work. I think about that every now and then, as there are few examples of famous design collab projects. Or maybe we just venerate the ego more than the collective effort. That could be as well.