Tucker Viemeister

Tucker L. Viemeister (born August 14, 1948) is an American industrial designer who is currently Chief of the Lab at the Rockwell Group. Tucker helped found many important design businesses: frogdesign NY, Razorfish, Smart Design, and Springtime USA. He helped design the influential and award-winning Oxo "Good Grips" kitchen tools. He holds 32 US utility patents.

Vice President of the Architectural League of New York, Viemeister is also a Fellow of the Industrial Designers Society of America. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and the Staatliches Museum, Berlin, Germany. His numerous awards include 11 selections in the Annual Design Review of ID Magazine, and the first Presidential Design Award in 1984.

Early life and education

Born in Yellow Springs, Ohio as the oldest of four children, Tucker Viemeister was named for a car his father was designing at the time. Read Viemeister (1923–1993) was an industrial designer, FIDSA, and founded Vie Design Studios with Budd Steinhilber. His mother Beverly Lipsett Viemeister (1927–2005) made many contributions to the Yellow Springs community before completing her degree in secondary education at Antioch College in 1965 and earning her master's in social work in 1968. After that she worked in social services. They had four children: Tucker, Kris, Heidi and Roslyn.

With his brother Kris, Tucker opened a jewelry shop called "Ohio Silver". They designed, crafted and sold fine jewelry, stained glass, leather work, and anything else they could make. He went to the Antioch School and Yellow Springs High School. He studied for two years at Shimer College, including a year in Oxford, England.

Viemeister graduated from Pratt Institute in 1974 with a Bachelor's degree in Industrial Design (BID). He helped his classmate Ted Muehling start his jewelry career.

Career

In 1979, Viemeister began working with Davin Stowell, and six years later they founded Smart Design, Inc. Their most successful products are the award-winning Oxo "Good Grips" universal kitchen tools, the advanced technology Serengeti sunglasses and their packages and catalogs, Black & Decker's best-selling Metropolitan toaster, the ergonomic/psychonomic Home Phones for Cicena, the breakthrough Tea Brewer for Cuisinart, and wacky Joe Boxer watches with Nick Graham for Timex. Their emphasis has been on comfortable, practical, fun stuff.

In 1997, Hartmut Esslinger asked him to open a "frogdesign" studio in New York City. "Genius Watch" in BusinessWeek said: "Two of the most famous and mercurial figures in the product-design world are linking up." From 1999 to 2001, Viemeister carried a new dimension to the digital giant, Razorfish. As Executive Vice President, Research & Development, he built the physical industrial design capabilities and helped direct Razorfish on a global level. He created internal programs like "Flying Fish," "School of Fish" and "science projects." In 2001, Tucker became President of Springtime-USA. He opened the American branch of the Dutch design firm, Springtime, a global strategic consultancy for clients such as Heineken, Nike, Toyota, and PTTPost (the Dutch postal service).

Viemeister has been working with architect David Rockwell since 2001. They founded the multi-disciplinary collaborative "Studio Red", dedicated to innovation for Coca-Cola. Tucker is now Lab Chief, heading research and development at the Rockwell Group. The Lab encompasses digital interaction design, the material and image library, modeling and prototyping resources. the Lab focus is to explore the human relationship with technology, and its effect on experience. This activity includes: science and technology consultation, in-house design and creation of interactive environments / objects, and maintaining networks of technology solution providers.

The designer was called “Guru” by BusinessWeek (8/97), a “scruffy brand-meister” by the Architect’s Newspaper (2/06), and "Industrial Design’s Elder Wunderkind" when ID included him in America's hottest 40. In 2007 New York magazine recognized him as a “Living Design Innovator”

Marriage and family

He married Sarah Verdone (1965–2010), a freelance writer and blogger who worked for ID magazine. They had two daughters together, Josephine and Louisa, and lived in New York. Verdone died in March 2010.

Together with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), her family and associates established a new annual literary award in her name. It was awarded for the first time in May 2011 to the writer Emily Rubin, for her work, including her debut novel Stalina (2011).

Academic and civic activities

Viemeister serves as chair of the Rowena Kostellow Fund [5], on the board of The Architectural League of New York [6], was Chair of the Cooper Hewitt Museum's Professional Designers Advisory Committee and a Director of The American Center for Design (1996–2000), and a Fellow of The Industrial Designers Society of America [7].

He has taught at Yale, Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, California Institute of the Arts, the University of Cincinnati, and École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle, one of the grandes écoles of France. He is on the faculty of New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

Designs

• National Mall wayfinding system (with Wyman and Cannan)
• OXO Good Grips kitchen tools (with Smart Design)
• Serengeti sunglasses for Corning (with Smart Design)
• Joe Boxer watches for Timex (with Smart Design)
• Black & Decker Metropolitan toaster (with Smart Design)
• Pool Chair (with Steve Holt and Lisa Krohn)
• Phonebook telephone answering machine (with Lisa Krohn)
• Coke Cruiser (with Springtime and Rockwell Group)
• Red Lounge (for Coca-Cola with Rockwell Group)
• Sheraton Hotel Lobby (with Rockwell Group)
• Hall of Fragments (Venice Architecture Biennale with the Rockwell Group Lab)
• Jet Blue Terminal 5 "Market Place" (Rockwell Group)
• Cosmopolitan Casino Chandelier Bar and West Lobby (Rockwell Group)
• Jamie Oliver Food Revolution truck (Rockwell Group and TED prize)

Books

Work featured in the following:

• Gail Greet Hannah, Elements of Design: Rowena Reed Kostellow and the Structure of Visual Relationships, Princeton Architectural Press, NYC
• Product Design 6, an industrial design compendium, published by PBC International

External links

• http://lab.rockwellgroup.com/
• http://blog.helen-marie.com/index.php/2009/04/hm-a-list-episode-1-tucker-viemeister/
• http://www.fastcompany.com/tag/tucker-viemeister
• http://www.scribd.com/doc/3325063/Beautility-Tucker-Viemeister
• http://shannonsouth.com/pratt/pages/viemeister_tucker.html
• http://www.core77.com/blogsquad/idsa/midwest_conference/mp3_tucker_viemeister_245.asp
• http://www.idsa.org/absolutenm/templates/?z=28&a=1781
• http://itp.tisch.nyu.edu/object/ViemeisterT.html
• http://www.rockwellgroup.com/