GoKawiil(Photo © Katerina Kamprani — The Uncomfortable)
Note: This post is not paywalled. Enjoy! — Paul
As you all know, I’m a big fan of good design. But I recently learned of a project devoted to bad design, and I can’t get enough of it.
Welcome to The Uncomfortable, the brilliantly named brainchild of a Greek architect named Katerina Kamprani, who specializes in designing “deliberately inconvenient everyday objects.” My favorite is a fork with a chain handle (shown above), but almost all of her creations are clever, funny, and thought-provoking. Sometimes you have to see examples of bad design to make you appreciate how much we take for granted about good design.
(Photos © Katerina Kamprani — The Uncomfortable)
Although I didn’t learn about The Uncomfortable until about a month ago (a reference to it showed up in my Facebook feed, a rare instance of the algorithm enhancing my life), Kamprani began the project back in 2011 and has gotten a fair amount of attention for it in Europe, where she’s had over a dozen museum and gallery exhibitions. The impetus for this success, oddly enough, was a series of failures: Prior to launching The Uncomfortable, Kamprani had dropped out of a master’s program and been fired from a job at an ad agency. She wanted to do something that involved humor but was finding architecture, which she’d studied as an undergrad, to be too stuffy and serious.
“Then I thought, what if objects were actually designed for a bad user experience, instead of a good one?” she recalled in a 2018 TED talk. “That was my ‘eureka’ moment. I finally found something smart and funny that has no responsibility to be practical. That was the core idea: to not be practical.” As she later said in a video interview with the website Culture Trip, “Basically, the project is a rebellious act. Whatever I learned in design school, I went and did exactly the opposite.”
The Uncomfortable has its own website, where you can see dozens of the farcically impractical objects Kamprani has designed. Some exist only as 3D renderings (most of them strikingly realistic), while others have been brought to life as real-world prototypes. Because they’re all based on familiar forms — a fork, a wine glass, a watering can — they feel oddly subversive, as if Kamprani had mischievously scrambled their DNA to create a world of mutant products. Many of them, despite their functional deficits, are undeniably beautiful, providing a good reminder that aesthetics and utility don’t always align.
Kamprani calls this a “waterfall teapot,” because of the wide spout. (Photo © Katerina Kamprani — The Uncomfortable)
I wanted to interview Kamprani, but I figured she was probably tired of repeatedly talking about The Uncomfortable’s origins (having done a jillion interviews about Uni Watch over the years, I can relate), so I tried to come up with questions about how she and the project have evolved over the course of 15 years. Here’s a transcript of a video conversation we recently had, edited for length and clarity:
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