Design is a highly intuitive process for me. The best design objects and systems take risks-- they interpret the material world for people, giving them tools they can grasp in every sense. What I love most about design is the opportunity it gives me to start from scratch on every new project and learn as a beginner all about something new. Yet something accrues with each new challenge. That something is the equity I now know to be my vision. I strive to address all aspects of a project: how well it works, how safe it is to user and environment, whether it speaks clearly verbally/visually and how much fun it is. I am weaving together the utility of an object or system with what it means in cultural terms with the desire it elicits. If it does not please, excite and attract the user, I have not finished my job.
Most people associate design with luxury and waste, yet I feel that we can use design thinking to address our grave environmental problems. I would like to see design come to represent the opposite, while still inspire people to enjoy their everyday tasks. My commitment is to use materials and harness technologies to make the object landscape more intelligible, responsible, beautiful and fun.

volume5

Lisa Krohn

An industrial designer since my defection from art history at Brown University in 1984, I completed an MFA at Cranbrook in 1988. During this, I won Grand Prize in the Forma Finlandia competition for the Phonebook Answering Machine. After this brief brush with fortune, I went to Milan on a Fulbright to work for Mario Bellini. I now practice, teach and write in LA and anywhere else I can.

Krohn Design offers design and development of consumer goods to environmental, graphic and package design. From practical to highly theoretical and experimental, projects have included a telecommunications workstation, architectural installations, lighting, jewelry, cosmetics, universal design, leather goods, furniture, a home recycling center, packaging and a human-powered vehicle. Krohn Design objects are in the collections of several museums including the Design Museum in NYC, the SF MoMA, and the Cranbrook museum. Krab is a collection inspired by a moment when Americans started mingling formal and casual the way they mixed martinis. Krab designs appear in the permanent collections of the NY and SF MoMAs, and on numerous television and film sets. We design and produce our line along with a broad range of custom projects.