The Layman's Almanac

William Katavolos

Co-director for the Center for Experimental Structures at Pratt institute, William Katavolos' furniture is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre. His 1961 manifesto, Organics, became the basis for chemical architecture.

At Pratt Institute in Brooklyn New York.

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LA: Do you think Design has changed from when you first came into the field?

WK: Well, Design hasn't changed. Design is Design. Industrial designers use Design differently than architects do. But the problem is that Design is not taught anymore. What is taught? The disciplines that have grown out of it. So, yes, industrial design has changed, but not the undercurrents of Design. It's true of architecture. The technology has been very slow to hit industrial designers. The architects were forced to do it. Primarily because the local, the place where we work has changed.

If you want to do creative work today, you have to go to China. You have to go to Dubai, to Abu Dhabi. There is nothing going on in America. Yes, General Motors has reawakened, they're looking for fresh ideas. But when you look at what General Motors is producing today, right now, are the exact cars that I had in my portfolio when I graduated from Pratt. We took all the crap, all the chrome, all the junk off of cars way back then, for ourselves. This was not what we did for General Motors (then). Actually it's taken 60 years for our ideas to be put on the market. Even though we made a living designing that Cadillac and all the rest of the junk. We had to, the only way to make a buck. But it takes 60 years. If you want to come up with a wild idea, you better count on 50 years before the world warms up to it.

It takes a long time. So, the worst your work is, the faster you make a buck. That's it. And that's true of all the graduates. The hotshots that draw and all that, but they never get beyond that. I've never seen a student recently thinking. I've yet to see a student thinking. They don't have any time to think. They've been appendaged to these knowledge boxes. They are informationally obese, and they're intellectually anorexic. You can quote me on that. I'm old enough to run away from the little old ladies with umbrellas.

LA: I think you hit the nail right on the head. It seems like Design education is a lot about finding process and by trying on other people's processes or how they work. What is your process and whom have you been influenced by?

WK: Well I've stayed away from a computer, although all my students can translate my work on a computer very well, very quickly. But I'm afraid that if I were doing it myself, my work would change. It would become, I would get intellectually styling more. I would move faster. The way I look at it now, the amount of mistakes--you shouldn't say mistakes - if you're a good designer, you have epiphanies every couple of weeks. You have to walk away from an epiphany, and then find it again on a higher level, on a higher level, on a higher level.

Now no one's going to pay for this. They're satisfied with the first epiphany. I'm not and most of the people like me, are not. So we keep at it and as we do it, we get further and further away from the market. To a point where you can't step in and immediately solve their problems anymore. Because you want to see the whole thing, you want to see what it is you're really doing here. They're not going to pay for this anymore. In fact, they never did pay for it.

The world is still a pretty simple place. There are very few Charles Eames around. Charlie was working on ideas all the time. All the time. And he had a good sidekick, not only his wife (Ray) but his sidekick in the shop, the studio. And he was constantly having one breakthrough after another, all the time. Charlie doesn't exist anymore. There's nobody out there like him at the moment. I see no evidence of that kind of work being done anywhere. Knoll is not, Herman Miller is not, the Chinese are not doing it. No one can spend the amount of time that's needed to do it right. So if you want to get involved in Design, be prepared for a long journey. It's not going to happen overnight, unless you luck out with an idea.

Now this chair [pats chair] David Rowland designed this chair. David worked on this chair for 10 years. And David worked on modifying this chair all his life. He died last year. But he had spent 40 years on this chair. Now that's the other extreme. David was not Charles Eames but that's how long it takes to do something that is everywhere. And this is a knockoff of David's chair, this is not the original, this is a knockoff.

LA: Going back to Asia and Design, can you elaborate a little more on how Asia is affecting Design in the United States?

WK: One of the things about Asia is the building codes are much more lenient. If something fails in China, they usually dig a hole and bury it. There's no lawyers in China. You can't do that in America. You can't fail in this country. It's not popular. Over there, I was doing work in Japan. If something didn't work, we moved on to the next phase. No recriminations, nobody said "oh my God, I paid you." No. What's the next step, what's the next step? That doesn't happen in this country. You will be in litigation for the rest of your life if something happens. If this thing snaps and somebody breaks their back, you'll... not in China, here. That's why you can't really do new things. Now, China has had a long history of adapting ideas from other parts of the world. But now they're creating their own. Now they're... We've had a love affair with Indonesia and China for years at Pratt. The graduate school when the man who ran it, 50 years ago, he went on a trip to Bangkok, to Indonesia, and he brought students from there back to Pratt. The undergraduate school. So we were light years ahead of any other school in the country. We've had those students now for...

...they're all there, all of the best designers were all Pratt people. But that was 40, 50 years ago. We've kept up with it, but not the way we did then. That was original. I've forgotten his name, he was a marvelous man. He just said "Why don't we go China, Why don't we go to Japan, why don't we bring in...what [are we doing with] American kids for? So he broke out and brought in an awful lot of students. And it was fun working with them. Because they had a sensitivity that American students didn't have. And there was a willingness to work, a willingness to work as hard as you wanted them to work. Now you can't do that with American kids. There are limits to the allowable time that they're paying for. It costs a fortune to go to school. And they want their money's worth. And that's a dangerous assumption, because probably the best students at Pratt as it turns out are the ones who are not good students. They were in the shop fooling around. Those are the people who probably made it. That's how Industrial Design started in this country.

When I first came to Pratt, Donald Dohner was running the school. And he invented Industrial Design as we know it. He brought in companies like Formica or Mikada. And he started telling them what kind of colors would solve... Alexander Kostellow got involved with at that level and found out, My God, this industry is interested in what we know, it's honest. And the money flowed in. General Motors found out about what we were doing here. We became very popular with GM because we knew how to draw. And we knew through Rowena (Reed) and Kostellow and people like that. We knew how to draw well. We understood form. We understood form without function. But the minute General Motors had a function for us, our form shifted perfectly.

So that's how we started out in this school. That's why GM was so popular in the old days. But Alexander moved out to all the industries where we got into creative problem solving. And that's where we were good because we could draw at the speed of dictation. All you had to do was come up with an idea and we could draw it. And we could show you what to do with those ideas. We were computers. We were really computers. Now, today, a computer can do this, but it doesn't do it as well. A computer is still is not as good as we are at that time. Pratt has been a hold up. Essentially you have the same curriculum as you had 60 years ago. I figured it works. But other schools, Carnegie, went over to computers 40 years ago. The're light years ahead of Pratt when it comes to that. So there's no reason for Pratt to try to catch up. They're way beyond us. But they have never had the form experience that we had. So that's our great strength. That form can be applied to almost any good function. And that's what a new industrial designer is.

They want to take a group of ideas and form them, in a word, kinecity. In the dictionary, a difficult word. Kinecity means to assemble ideas in an elegant manner. That's what we do. That's kinecity. Certainly Eames was a kinecit individual. And that's what I spent my life doing. If it isn't beautiful, I'm not interested in it. You do it. I don't want to do it.

LA: Going back to education, can you elaborate a little bit more on the eduated students now. If you see anything that's different than when you were in school, especially coming out Pratt?

WK: I have to go back to the fact that you people know too much already. You have been hit with too much information. If you wander around Pratt and look in on the offices, you'll usually see a woman on one of these damn boxes. She won't make eye contact with you, while you're talking she's diddling (typing on the table in front of him) and you go in another office and everyone's diddling. And that's what you have to do today, to stay in the network, to know what's going on.

My feeling is, if you drop out of the network long enough to come up with ideas, you've got to try to find somebody who knows how to do this stuff. But don't do this all the time. Because you're inundated with facts. You simply know too much. You haven't been thinking. You don't think when you do this, it's impossible. It's a great buffet and it's a feast. But I'm for stepping away from those things. Holding an idea in your head and do not draw. Don't sketch it. Hold it in your head long enough. Now Frank Lloyd Wright used to do this all the time. Wright was a maverick, he was one of the great drafters of all time. He could draw anything. But Wright refused to draw anything until it was fully born in his own brain. Falling Water was never sketched. Until the final drawing was done, which took about an hour and a half. None of his students ever saw any sketches, there never were any. He held it in his brain until it became a reality. That's why it was done so quickly, and why it was done so holistically, so well, so perfectly. If he had sketched it, it would have looked like the first sketch. No matter how many sketches you go through, it would have would up looking like the first sketch. Wright was aware of that. There were no first sketches in Wright's life. He thought about it, thought about it, thought about it. He was a three-dimensional thinker. He understood life in three dimensions. And that, I'm afraid, you're not allowed to do anymore.

It's difficult to find time to think today. Because people think that you're wasting time. You're not green, you're not sustainable. It looks like you're wasting time. But you're not wasting time, you're creating time. Most people think that unless you're recycling your ideas, you're not being green. I don't recycle ideas, I just let them lay around until they're useful again. They become compost for the next level of creativity. So I'm not big on greenness.

I think Japan's going to go through a very interesting period. I think a new architecture is going to grow out of this catastrophe. They're going to arrive at the tea house again in a new way. In a perpetual way, rather than a temporary or permanent manner. They're going to realize that you can be wiped out at any moment. And it's going to affect the way they build. They're going to build much more organically.

After the Osaka earthquake, the architecture in Osaka changed. They began to realize that nature was still around.

LA: Each person's life is a journey to rediscover one or two things that opened up their minds and their hearts. What would those things be for you that brought you to Design?

WK: Frederick Kiesler, who was my teacher, said that everybody had one idea and they worked on it all their lives. It's very true. My idea came at about 1948, right after the War. I'd been thinking about it during the War. I began to become involved with what organic Design could be. You know, Kiesler's Endless House, that's a form of organicism that is different. In fact, we had a lecture together at the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Craft, which was right next to it, and Kiesler was talking about the Endless House, and I was talking about the organic house, and finally I said, "Frederick, when are you going to put the liver and the lungs and the kidneys and the heart in your house?" And he got mad, and he said "Don't you ever talk to me like that. I hate that butcher shop, organics. In fact, I'll do the egg, you do the chicken." So I have been working on the chicken all my life and I have no interest in the egg. But the Endless House was the great egg. And that's where my ideas grow from - Paul Nelson, the Suspended House, and Kiesler's, organic house. And that's the idea I've been working on all my life. When I was 24, I worked out a 10-year plan, a 50-year plan, and a 100-year plan. I'm working on the 100-year plan right now. You have to. Eva Zeisel was this way. Eva had one idea, she worked on it all her life, she had one plan, another plan, another plan. That's always Eva. She doesn't waste time with ideas that didn't work.

LA: How does sustainability play into your process or how do you think sustainability will change Design?

WK: I think slowly but surely, what will grow out of Haiti, what will grow out of the part of Japan that has been destroyed, and any place where there's poverty. I think that a new, I'm not going to call it an architecture, but a sustainable, and much more important than sustainability is sustenance. If you're not creating your own food, your own fuel, if you're not creating everything that you need, I don't think that you're going to survive. You won't prevail. I think that architecture must produce a profit. Your architecture should be your occupation. If you're living in a house, that house should be growing food, it should be growing a fuel through algae and a number of different ways. I think what is going to happen shortly, is a new land-grab. At one point in America, one of the presidents simply opened up the country. And he said, "Get out there, 20 acres and a mule, want to work?" Alright, now if you're going out in the wilderness with an axe, you're going to cut down trees. And you're going to realize that a log cabin is a well worked-out idea. It's been worked on by many, many minds over hundreds of years. You're going build a log cabin, then with the wood that's left over, you're going to heat the house. Then once you pull the roots out from the trees you've cut, you're going to begin to farm. And you're going to begin to flower, and if you stay there long enough, other people will gather with you and you will have an American town, but you will have done it from nothing. Only your intelligence, and your diligence, and your skill. Now, today the same thing is true. I think America, even though it's gathered in cities, almost all of America is within a few miles of water… most of America.

I think that slowly, we're going to--because of what's happening in technology--we're going to move out where nobody is, because we can go everywhere now, with these little boxes. Very short reality, it's good enough for me. I've been involved in that kind of stuff for years. Creating problem solving where we tried to. I worked with RCA years ago, trying to create an office in which people could be beamed in, from Star Trek kind of nonsense. But John Vassos was my mentor there, and he was one of the first great industrial designers. And we did it in a rudimentary way. We beamed in people through an office in RCA. And it was a lot of fun. I would be drawing what these people were talking about in Chicago. I would be drawing on a board that they would see in Chicago. Now today, this is easy, everybody could.

Those days, nobody could do it. Only RCA could do it and it cost a lot of money. So all that's happened now. There's no reason to go anywhere. I have no interest in just talking on the phone with these people. I want to see them, I want to be able to draw and talk with them. And stay in touch with them and think about their ideas. Now that's the new reality. If you could do that, then I could be in the middle of the Sahara Desert, it doesn't make any difference. And even though my wife was from Rome, she was born in Rome, I've been to Rome 22 times. It's no better going to Rome 22 times, than watching one of these travel programs from a helicopter where you fly over southern Italy. It looks better from the airplane than going. So there's no reason to go to Rome. Don't go. Don't go to Japan. It's not necessary. Get a fly-by of Tokyo. Don't go. 50 years ago, you had to. Now, there's no reason to go. There's no reason to go to Europe, if you can do it with one of the knowledge boxes.

LA: It seems like every generation is defined by an idea or philosophy. Where do you think today's generation lies?

WK: That is not only a good question, it's a dangerous question. Because this generation is almost going to be labeled the unnecessary generation. There's no reason to even be here. I don't know what you're doing. The world went bankrupt before you got here. So I don't know what this generation is going to for a living. Now that wasn't true of my generation. We went through the big war, and we got our G.I. bill, and we got involved with the world when it was waking up and everything had to be done. You tell me, anything you think has to be done today? I don't know of anything that has to be done today. You're in a very dangerous world, you really are. I think you're going to have to invent your own future. This is one of the most dangerous generations that I've seen in my lifetime.

I mean the 60's were a waste of time, but it wasn't dangerous. The 70's weren't bad, the 80's weren't bad. Up until George Bush, between the two Bushes, they managed to almost destroy the world. The bankruptcy is world-wide now, it's not only in America. I mean Japan, 30 years ago was going to buy America. China was going to, you've seen the ads, 2030, China's going to own us. That's not really going to happen. But they'd like to think that's going to happen. We don't know where the next idea is going to come from in the world. It may not come from China, primarily because, well, it's hard to say. China, for the last 4000 years had an unbroken picture. They were fantastic many times. They're beginning to become fantastic again. But we'll have to find out how deep that idea is, and how much time they have before the people awaken and want to get a decent wage and want to join a union, and want to get paid for what they do. Right now, China doesn't pay for anything, so they can do almost anything. But 10 years from now, it's like Japan. Japan can't do anything anymore, because everybody wants their money. Everybody wants to be paid. But that wasn't true 40 years ago in Japan, everybody worked for nothing. They built a great country but they had never been paid for it. And they're very mad. People my age in Japan are still very mad that they built this place and they been shoved aside. They had been put in the poorer areas, shoved to the Philippines, which is not too bad, because you can play golf in the Philippines. You can't play golf in Japan, it's too expensive.

So I don't know, I'm not going to be optimistic, because it's entirely up to you to invent your future. The tools of invention are all around you, if you want to use them. But be careful what you wish for; you may get it. The great strength of Pratt in one place is the fact that it's never changed. The weakness of Pratt is that it never changed. Be careful of what you're breaching at the moment. Is it time to change? I've got my doubts. Something's that been working for 60 or 70 years, I'm not so sure that it won't work for another 60 years. If it can only work for 20 years, I would say ok, dump it and do what's next. But this is not what's next. Pratt is not what's next. Pratt started it in this country, along with Carnegie and the Chicago School of the Arts. But Pratt has never changed. They had all changed. Pratt is the still only place where the same thing is still taught. And I would be very careful about changing that at the moment. I would be delighted though, if the students could work with form with a computer. If they understood parametric designing. If they knew how to do a product parametrically. But I'm afraid Carnegie already knows how to do that much better than you'll ever be able to do it. So I don't know if you should jump ship at the moment. But your future is in doubt, it is in doubt.

LA: That's actually one thing that we've written about... it's a really exciting time for this generation, but it's also terribly scary, just as you said, because it's not really written and it's all in everybody's hands.

WK: Yeah, and we don't know where we're going and we've also discussed with many people that other generations have passed a movement. For the last ten years or so, as a generation, we don't have a specific aesthetic or specific moment to move towards. Or a definition.

Well, it's a difficult time for you. What you need is a great war. I don't think we can afford to have the third World War. The second World War was necessary. I don't think we can afford financially to have the next World War. What's happening in the Middle East now, things like this only happen every 500 years. If I were your age, I would leave Pratt and go to Alexandria and Egypt now and shack up in Egypt with somebody, wander around in Libya. I might even join the Libyan rebels in fighting Gaddafi. I've got nothing against Gaddafi, he's an interesting man, he's a pain in the ass, but he's an interesting man. He's like Trump in this country, he's the American Gaddafi. But I would go out where the action is right now, I would go there. And I think that's where you should be, working on the world right now. This hasn't happened in 500 years. The young people of the world want to say something. They want to get involved, they want to get rid of the old-timers. And I think it's wonderful.

Europe is not doing it. Europe is steady state, I see no reason to go to Europe. I would go to Libya, I would go to Tunisia. Or go to Algeria, that's where it's going to happen next. The French know how to do it right. It will be very extreme. But that's going to spread throughout the world. That's actually where you should be right now. If you were a Hemingway, if you were even a Paul Nelson, that's where you would be, where the action is. There's no action in Europe. The action in China is just… China now is General Motors on steroids. It's America on steroids from the 50's and 60's. Japan was never on American steroids. Japan, when they invented that Just-in-time concept, it worked beautifully. But when it failed, it failed dramatically. And it's failed: 6 reactors, American reactors, Mach 1, Mach 2, all put on an earthquake fault that is subjected to tsunamis every now and then. It's insanity.

Atomic energy is the only thing that America has spent any money researching. We invented the Atomic bomb, which cost trillions of dollars, we built reactors all over, we built these submarines. We know more about Atomic energy than anybody alive. And yet, we're afraid to build reactors all over the country. If Obama had any brains at all, he would now go to the American public and say, "Look, we have researched Atomic energy, and now that we've seen what's happened in Japan, that only one person has been hurt, we now know that it's safe to put reactors in every military camp in America immediately. And stop using coal forever. Stop using oil forever. If he had courage, that's what he would do. And that's what we should do. Because that's the only thing we know anything about. Now, the opposite's going to happen. People without knowledge are going to demand that we go through windmills. You could fill America with windmills and you still couldn't produce enough electricity to keep us going for more than a month. Solar panels are getting better, but the pollution it produces, solar panels, is incredible. And we're running out of some of those materials already. Atomic energy is the only thing that works. We know it works, because we spent at least 20 trillion dollars inventing it. So we ought to go ahead with it, get it over with. And then the world will come back to normal. But I'm afraid that that's not going to happen. We're going to go back to coal, the resistance to the windmills are already building up. The damn things are very noisy, pollution-it's visual pollution. You don't want to live near the damn things. At night, they make a lot of noise. So the companies actually come and they pay you money not to complain. It's not the way the world is going to go. The Dutch needed windmills, but they needed them for irrigation, and they used them for grinding wheat. But we're not. We're just putting these big things up that are all produced in Europe, we're not making a buck on them. We're putting them up all over the place. The only place that makes any sense is along the East Coast, where nobody lives. All along the shoreline, where you're close enough to a grid, so you can get your money's worth out of the electricity. It makes no sense. In Texas now, even Pickens is beginning to wonder if it's a good idea, and he put millions into it.

No, Atomic energy is the way to go. But you have to design these things carefully. You have to design them in a way that people can believe in them. They've got to be temples rather than factories. They've got to be at a place where you can trust. The Japanese never did trust them. The people who put them up said them that they were trustworthy. Now any American engineer would have told you "What the hell are you people doing? Are you crazy?" This would belike putting reactors along the California fault line and just waiting for something to go wrong. No, every military base in America has been picked for a reason. They're very strategically placed around America. Put them right in the middle of them, and you won't have a security problem. And tie the network together, and it would work beautifully. But I don't think Obama has the guts to do it. I don't believe he's convinced himself that that's the way to go.

That's an industrial design problem. The industrial designers did not design e mile island. They were designed by engineers. A good industrial designer... you have to realize, that these are really serious things. Industrial design is not a profession. It is a discipline. A profession is that you have a license and you can be sued. The only reason that industrial design is not a profession is that they're afraid of being sued. Therefore, they'll always remain a discipline, because somebody else will be sued, not them. When I with IDSA, I tried year, after year, after year to get this to become a profession. I went down to Washington, my bosses and I, a lot of people fought for it. And when we put it to the membership, they all said "No, we don't want to be a profession." And the reason was "We don't want to be sued for what we do. We prefer to be free." Architects are not industrial designers. They can be sued. Therefore, architects have to think in the box. You have to. Their life depends on it. That's why you don't see any innovation. Occasionally, you'll see someone like Zaha Hadid because she's exactly what engineers love. She is a person with wonderful ideas that doesn't know what to do with them. And they know what to do with them. Even if the idea is unstructural, they know how to make it structural. It's a little like the Barcelona chair. That's probably the worst piece of engineering that's ever been designed. It's a double cantilever, it's nonsense. No matter what you do, you can't make it strong enough. So what Knoll has done, is they've reinforced the joints, they've made it bigger, and bigger and bigger, they've gone to stronger and stronger metals. It's an insane chair. But it just happens to be the most beautiful chair in the world. And that's why it sold. And so, we buy them, and every five years, we have to pull the legs up and make sure they align. That's why you don't see Barcelonas in a line anymore. They're all in different stages. Now don't tell Karen (Stone) that, she'll have a fit. It's the most beautiful chair available, but it's an insane piece of engineering.

Zaha is the Barcelona chair. Her work is exquisite. But it's insane engineering. Gehry is more like Xandy Calder. Gehry just has the knack for putting junk together that looks good in the end. When they build it, it looks terrific. Del Vago is just beautiful. But only Gehry could have done it. He has no followers. Nobody else could do it. Nobody does mobiles anymore, because no one can copy Calder. No one can copy Gehry, he's an original. He had guts enough to do it. If Dubai had failed, his career would have been over. That was a couple of millions and millions of dollars worth of titanium. That stuff you won't reuse on experimental airplanes, you don't do it with architects. If that had failed, he would have been history. It didn't fail, it turned out to be extremely beautiful and it has rebuilt the economy of Dubai. It's so important a building. And Zaha's the same way. But the average architect doesn't do this. They don't have the guts that they have. I mean, this woman has guts. She's absolutely without fear. But the students who are graduating are not without fear.

LA: You had mentioned how important it is to go to where the action is. How important is conflict within your process, within Design, within driving things forward?

WK: What is the conflict? The military is responsible for just about everything you use. I don't know, do you know of a single innovation that you are involved with that the military didn't invent for you? The thing is, we can't count on the military to keep doing this, because there is no Third World War. So the shift over has go to be, what is this new entity, that is like the military, that is not based on war? That's where the next generation of innovation is going to come from. And what is the next emergency? Well, you know that poverty is an emergency, you know that energy is an emergency. Now the military is not concerned about poverty, there are no poor soldiers. They're never concerned about energy except as a weaponry. We don't need weapons. But we need what weapons were designed for, to do a job.


That's the next great period in industrial design. But do you know what it is? Do you know what this entity is, that is not the military, but is equal to the military? And that is funded like the military. And yet is involved with the kind of problems that I just brought up? The green problem is fading already. Sustainability is beginning to become a dull word, because it's been used so often by so many. But the idea behind it has never been more needed than it is at this moment. But who do we try it on? Who are the emergencies that we have to rush to help? And who is going to be that army of people that rush in to bring about the equivalent of what peace would mean? Peace would mean prosperity to these people. But how do you get a school interested in, how do you get anybody interested in designing for the poor? Architects have never had a poor client. The architects designed for the rich. Hassan Fathy is the only architect I've ever known that designed for the poor. He was in Egypt, he got quite a ways, but he didn't get very far. What are you doing for the poor? The world's poor are doubling as we speak.

In fact, your parents may wind up being poor when they get the bill for your education. What are you doing for them? But you have to be on the scale of the military. Can't be a Raymond Lowey, can't be General Motors. It's got to be an initiative that Obama should have focused on instead of his hope for a brand. He should have used his capital to build on what Kennedy, build on the Peace Corps, and on poverty problems, like Jimmy Carter, he should have only done this only. He should have helped the world a lot earlier. It's too late to help at the moment. We can't even help ourselves. We've gone broke. It's not all over though. This country has a long way to go. But it does need a change of that magnitude for your future to be fulfilled. You're not dreaming of the military, that's not your answer unless you're broke and maybe have no place to go. I'm talking about a new initiative that Kennedy talked about but never did much about, he didn't have much time to do it anyway. Johnson carried it further than anybody carried. He was sincere, this man was as great as Lincoln. He was sincere about helping. He did more for social programs than any president since. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about this entity that we can pour money into for good reasons.

The automobile is not a good reason. It was a good reason, when Eisenhower was president, it was a good reason. And he built highways to nowheres all over the country for a good reason, General Motors wanted it. But that period's over. If oil goes up to 8 to 10 dollars a barrel, you're going to stay at home an awful lot. You don't have to go anywhere anyway. You really don't. You have the tools to stay right where you are, and the people that succeed at Pratt are the people who know how to manipulate these knowledge boxes without getting off the chair. Occasionally you have to go visit to primarily get out of the place, but those are the people who succeed at Pratt, in many places. But you have to do your homework. You have to know more about something than anybody else.

If you want some advice, become an authority on something that nobody else is as good as you. You have to become the authority on something that's original. Don't waste your time on what they already know. In 5 years, you'll probably make a living out of it. In 20 years or 50 years, you'll probably become famous for it. Don't jump all over the lot. Find a need and fill it. And become the most knowledgeable person about that need that there exists. Become the authority on that need, whatever it is. Doesn't make any difference what it is. My needs are all over poverty... I like Haiti. The Haitian people among us, they've never had a chance. No one has ever designed for them. And this is true, all those kids that are rebelling now, in Egypt and Tunisia. The problem is, what are they going to do with the revolution? Where are they going to get a job, where is that living going to come from? They can't keep fighting much longer. Once they have that freedom, what are they going to do with it? You better start worrying about that, because if they can't find jobs, if they can't create a decent way of life, then they're going to fall back on what we officially call "terrorism." There's no other outlet. Who's going to pay them? But let's not let that happen. Those people have got to be encouraged to buy into the 21st century, or at least buy into the 20th century. How can you help as an industrial designer? How can you help people help themselves? That should be your vision.