Redesigns For Living: Joe Doucet Reimagines Headphones, Whiskey And More

By David A. Keeps

JOE DOUCET IS A LIVING BLUEPRINT FOR THE 21ST-century designer. He has produced brand identities for BMW, packaging for Procter & Gamble and concept appliances for Whirlpool and Braun. A fixture of the Brooklyn design scene, Doucet exhibits his work around the world and, in 2010, curated a one-night show of designer-personalized Munny toys at the Ace Hotel New York that drew thousands, including midcentury modernist Vlad imir Kagan. In addition to creating a summer 2014 collection for the flash-sale site Fab, the 43-year-old Houston native has also launched Whyte Label, a high-end line of home furnishings made to order through his Manhattan-based Joe Doucet Studio (joedoucet.com), and created AMU, the first mobile phone game that takes place on the screen and in the world around us. Now, Doucet would like to tweak the way you think about his profession.

"Design is not just engineering and styling, but a way of approaching problems," declares the multidisciplinarian who rarely begins at the drawing board. "I start by writing a sentence or two about the objective, what the product should make people think or feel or do."

He has applied this method to everything from consumer electronics and fashion to wine chillers inspired by wind patterns and cold fronts. In the age of branding and microniches, Doucet casts himself as a polyglot, fluent in the languages of art, product design and marketing. "Design is a form of communication that uses aesthetics--form, color and typography--to help craft the message of the object," he says. "Some objects need to be reassuring, and others need to be reinvented."

Doucet, who holds more than 50 patents for his inventions, is particularly adept at reimagining everyday objects--fusing conceptual art impulses with a sleek functionality and a playful sense of humor. Inspired by a box of letters his grandmother showed him, he developed the BlackBox, a printer for text messages that allows "you to reconstruct a relationship on cash register receipt paper." The designer's One Sense noise-canceling headphones employ what he calls "nature's warning signals, big jagged spikes and the color red" in an eye shield suitable for the love child of Star Trek's Geordi La Forge and Lady Gaga. And the hip-hop oligarchy gave props to Fetish, Doucet's Brancusi-esque 24-karat-gold-plated ashtray that sells for $3,300. "That really bounced around Twitter ," he says with a laugh.

Though he descends from the tradition of 20th-century ?industrial designers, including Walter Dorwin Teague (chief designer for Kodak and Texaco) and Raymond Loewy (creator of the Lucky Strike logo and the Studebaker Avanti design), Doucet grapples with contemporary consumerism. "I want to make products that are smarter and have less impact on the environment," says the designer, who has envisioned Airate, a handsome vertical wind ?turbine for urban spaces. "I don't want to follow the path of planned obsolescence, where you put a new color and techy finish on products instead of making real improvements." His dream project: redesigning the horrors of airline coach class to upgrade the experience without increasing the cost.

On weekend trips with his wife and two kids to their 1730s Dutch Colonial house in upstate New York, Doucet--who mounted a 2012 exhibition of experimental timekeeping devices--often ponders the future of design. "I was working on a stainless steel bar stool, and with rapid prototyping and on-demand manufacturing, I was able to have it made in one day," he recalls. "Fairly soon, when you need a new silverware set, you will be able to download a pattern and print it out. Right now, the output of designers is things; soon it will be intellectual property." For the cerebral Doucet, such a change would merely be a welcome challenge. "Some of my best work has been about tackling intractable problems rather than expressing myself creatively," he says. "Design is my hobby, my livelihood and my life. It's something that I am."

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