Deconstructing Product Design

Garbino Trash Can

Karim Rashid for Umbra, 1997

1. The Garbino, a play on garbage and legendary silent film actress Greta Garbo, manages to combine the typically contradictory notions of “garbage” and “glamour” into a best-selling product deemed worthy of “art” status by numerous museums. As with most of Rashid’s work, the goal was to elevate the mundane, and to do so at a price point affordable to the masses. Karim Rashid comments: “I did at least fifty renderings of receptacles. I felt that banal objects need life, they need presence, they need to make unpleasant tasks more pleasant. I immediately thought about a more sensual object than we’ve had before, one that is seductively round, wider at the top than at the bottom so that it seems ...