Renowned aircraft, furniture and clothing designer Marc Newson thinks wearable technology is undoubtedly the future, but doesn’t expect Google Glass will be a part of it.
“What Google have done thus far, I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing. It looks pretty stupid,” Newson told Dezeen in a recent interview.
The designer compared Google’s increasingly contested tech to another recent and legendary domestic device failure.
“It’s a little bit like that wonderful invention called the Segway. It’s such a fantastic piece of technology but you just look like a complete dick when you drive around on it,” Newson said. “That’s where the bridge to the world of fashion really doesn’t, or didn’t, work. That’s precisely the moment when I think the fashion world laughs at the world of industrial design, justifiably.”
Newson is one of very few designers that has successfully spanned and combined both industrial products and aesthetic fashion in his admirable career, and thinks endeavors like Google’s to combine the two have been, for the most part, poorly executed.
“Frankly speaking, the design industry is really pathetic in terms of how it approaches manufacturing and how it brings things to market,” Newson said. He then went on to explain how industrial design could benefit from fashion’s aesthetic and efficiency, while fashion could benefit from manufacturing’s materials and processing methods.
“I do feel there’s an enormous territory that they both share, that they should both embrace, but I agree that there is this real trepidation on both sides to broach that ground,” Newson said.