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A design approach: context is key: designer and teacher Scott Klinker believes that the best way to design objects is to create the context before you design them. And possibly what will result is something else entirely.

Article Excerpt
Scott Klinker has an assignment from a client. He is to design furniture for a company that, as he puts it, "wants to own the idea of live-work." Meaning that they want to have furniture that melds one's home life with one's vocational life. So, one might imagine, that Klinker, Designerin-Residence at the renowned Crankbrook Academy of Art (first president and the man who set the course for this institution: Eliel Saarinen, the father of Eero), would simply spend a whole lot of time looking at offices and home interiors and determining what would be an appropriate melding of the two.

Instead, Klinker goes further. Much further. He puts Google Earth on a computer monitor. "This is Detroit," he says, then zooms in. "This is the Ren Cen." And he moves the mouse so the view goes to a nearby vacant site on the Detroit River. "What does Detroit need the most?" he rhetorically asks, then answers, "Happy, productive people." Again, a question: "How do we attract these people here? That's a big equation, but part of it is architecture. So I created this for myself, a narrative. I'm calling it the 'Knowledge Cottage Guild.'" And he shifts the image on the screen from the vacant...

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