#branko lukic

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Branko Lukic / Nonobject / Self Initiated / Project Air / VR Headset / Concept / 2017

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Athenian Table (2010), Branko Lukic, from the book Nonobject

“Too short? Sit on a telephone book. Too tall? Slouch. Too handicapped? Too bad.” The Athenian table is reconfigurable to accommodate multiple abilities and heights. Nonobject focuses on designing products with “What if” prompts. This allows Lukic to explore the speculative realm while working still under many existing conventions of product design. This produces absurd, sensitive, and beautiful projects.

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I'm an unabashed fan of Branko Lukic's work at his small Palo Alto firm, Nonobject. The former Frog and IDEO designer captures lyricism and poetry in his design concepts, many of which are featured in his book, which I reviewed last year for Core77. Last night, Lukic ran through some of his concepts at an event at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Along with bold ideas for the reinvention of everything from tableware to the motorcycle, he briefly showed the Tarati (shown), a new type of mobile phone. To dial, a user literally reaches through the product's form, thus making the act of connection literal as well as digital. I wondered how the magic of these provocations plays out in a corporate context, where clients are arguably more concerned with budgets and deadlines than magic and whimsy. "I'm aware that this seems conceptual, but we are deeply in the trenches of design," insisted Lukic, whose client list includes the likes of Sony, Samsung, Ford and Nike. "Bringing meaning and purpose to objects is the focus of my studio."

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the role of aesthetics is not to make things beautiful. it is to awaken the senses.

Branko Lukic