Seven Questions for Jerome Caruso, Industrial Designer

Jerome Caruso could be considered the king of kitchens. In the mid-1980s, he was approached by the Sub-Zero company to help refresh the look of its refrigerators.

At the time, the young designer was better known for designing digital watches for Motorola. But when Caruso turned his hand to the humble refrigerator, he transformed Sub-Zero into an icon for high-end kitchens. Business Week wrote that his sleek, designer refrigerators were “not unlike having a Ferrari in your driveway.”

In 1998, Caruso designed the Reaction chair for Herman Miller, which won Best of NeoCon Gold. Then he tackled “the Mount Everest of fun.”

Always concerned with ergonomics, Caruso “envisioned hundreds of tiny ‘cells’—each one consisting of a pad with spring-like loops that would both support and respond to different anatomical areas.” The result was the Celle chair with a patented Cellular Suspension system that mimics the buoyancy of water.

Now with nearly 100 patents, Caruso continues to peer into the future of product design. But let’s hear it from him.

Here are 7 questions for Jerome Caruso.
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A Conversation with Yves Béhar, Ayse Birsel,
Burkhard Schmitz, Bibi Seck, and Carola Zwick

There’s a changing of the guard going on at Herman Miller when it comes to design. We are working with the new convenant partners to guide design at Herman Miller for the next couple of decades. Don Goeman, Herman Miller’s executive vice president of research, design and development, interviews five design partners.
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Progressive Creativity: Significant and Responsible
Change in Industrial Design

John F. Kennedy once said, “When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.”

Crisis as opportunity is a red thread that ran through a presentation designer Jerome Caruso gave to faculty and design students at a national conference at Northwestern University in April of this year. The theme for the conference was the role of design in a disruptive economy. It’s a timely topic in an era of new frugality, environmental consciousness, and an emphasis on getting more value from material things.
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