Karten Design is a Los Angeles-based industrial design consultancy that assists companies in multiple stages of product development, from customer research and concept generation through product engineering and production. SKD works in the fields of consumer electronics, medical instrumentation, housewares, business products, toys, sporting equipment and transportation design.
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Founded by Stuart Karten in 1984, the firm now has a staff of 25 design researchers, industrial designers, and mechanical engineers. In 2008, Karten Design was one of five industrial design firms profiled in Fast Company's Masters of Design series.[1] In 2009, Stuart Karten began writing for Fast Company's website as an expert design blogger.[2] The firm celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2009 with the launch of an online retrospective that highlighted past work and notable company events.[3]
Karten Design has worked with industry leaders such as Samsung, Hitachi, Kawasaki, and Cardinal Health, and designed inaugural product lines for several start-up companies, including Jabra and Cardiac Science. Recognizable designs including the Zon hearing aid, which won the 2008 People's Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. Other notable projects include:
Since 1984, Karten Design has received national and international design awards, including the Spark Award, Good Design Award,[9] iF product design award,[10]Red Dot design award, Appliance Design Excellence in Design Awards, CES Innovations Award, and the International Design Excellence Award.
The firm’s proprietary design research process, ModeMapping, which uses a unique form of information design to organize, communicate and analyze research findings, received an IDEA Award in 2006.[11] Stuart Karten has presented ModeMapping at the Rhode Island School of Design Center for Design and Business in 2006, the IIT Institute of Design Design Research Conference in 2007,[12] and the A+D Museum's Design Process and Innovation Symposium in 2008.
Karten Design has received much recognition in the field of medical design. Its Clarion Speech Processor for Advanced Bionics – part of a cochlear implant for patients with severe hearing damage – received a Medical Design Excellence Award in 1998.[13] In 2004, Stuart Karten was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the Medical Device Industry by MD&DI Magazine.[14]
The firm was recognized by the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in 2008 as the recipient of the prestigious People's Design Award, presented for excellence in the design of the Zon hearing aid for Starkey.[15] The award was presented to Stuart Karten at the Cooper-Hewitt's 9th annual National Design Awards gala in New York on October 23, 2008 by Padma Lakshmi, host of Bravo's Top Chef.[16]
In 2009, Fast Company published an online feature on the evolution and design of hearing aids. The article focused on the SKD's longtime partnership with Starkey, and the development of the S Series.[17]
The Museum of Modern Art featured one of Karten Design's conceptual art projects, Epidermits, as part of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition in 2008. The epidermit was described as an interactive pet of the future "spawned from a skin-and-hair-cell culture grown from a human cheek swab."[18] It was subsequently posted on Wired.com as "The Scariest Toy Concept Ever."[19]
In 2009, Karten Design released Kurrency, a conceptual line of chandeliers constructed entirely from bills of different denominations and currencies. The chandeliers also project words such as "Greed" and "Safety Net" on the surface below. Karten was quoted in the press release as saying, “In today’s economy, there is perhaps nothing so beautiful as cold hard cash.”[20]