Starck-raving mad: au revoir Philippe

When someone decides that they wish to be referred to by a name that is effectively unpronounceable, it should be clear to all and sundry that this person has lost their mind and should no longer be taken seriously. At the very least, they’ve forgotten what a name is actually for, and decided that the “cool” factor is more important than the function.

So it was when Prince Rogers Nelson, a guitarist from Minneapolis who had already dropped two of his names, decided to call himself a sort of squiggly thing. A squiggly thing which, it should be noted, he refused to tell anyone how to pronounce. When you make your living by people being able to phone radio stations and request the latest song by you, or go into record stores and ask for the latest CD by you, or enhance your reputation by talking endlessly about the things you do, it’s handy if they can say your name. Clearly, squiggle guy had lost his mind.

So too, Philippe Starck — or, should I say, S+arck. That second symbol is not the letter T, it is a mathematical operator denoting addition. By no known convention is it pronounced as if it were the letter T. The most renowned designer of recent times, thus, insists on being called “S plus arck”.

No wonder he’s retiring.

The funky spelling of his name is but one of many instances where S+arck favours form over function. One of his more famous creations is a citrus juicer that looks kind of like the vessel in which Marvin the Martian kidnapped Bugs Bunny and which is completely and utterly useless for juicing citrus.

Some years ago Microsoft — a company not renowned for its groundbreaking industrial design heritage — hired S+arck to design a mouse.

Remember, if you will, that back in the early days of personal computing there was something of a philosophical divide between command-line interfaces typified by Microsoft’s DOS and graphical interfaces typified by Apple’s Macintosh. The key tool at the edge of this divide was the mouse.

DOS lost, graphical interfaces won, but Microsoft cleverly succeeded anyway by foisting its version of the graphical interface onto the market faster than Apple could move its one. So a Microsoft mouse is a highly symbolic object, as well as its importance to functionality.

S+arck, perhaps recognising this, made his Microsoft mouse possibly the worst bit of computer hardware ever devised. For one thing, Microsoft wanted a wireless device, but S+arck wanted it to have a blue light on it and that would drain too much battery power — so it got a wire. Form wins over function.

Another thing, it was a very strange sort of oblong shape, and perfectly symmetrical. This means of course that it is just as easy to use left-handed as right-handed. “Just as easy” is another way of saying “just as hard”. Neither my left hand nor my right hand is symmetrical, and I kind of appreciate a mouse that takes this into account and, for instance, gives my thumb something to do. It’s what separates us from the lower-order primates you know.

Of course, your hands may well be symmetrical. If so, then I commend the S+arck mouse to you. And perhaps a good doctor.

Then there was the packaging. Oh, the packaging.

If there was a way into this box, I could not find it. At least on Microsoft’s current weird plastic boxes for Windows Vista and Office, there’s a little sticker explaining how you open them (word to the wise — if you have to read the manual before you can open the box, your product might be getting a little too complicated).

No such assistance for the S+arck mouse.

After puzzling over it trying to find a seam or a flap or a sliding panel for maybe half an hour, I resorted to brute force. Then scissors. By the end of it, the box was in pieces on the ground, and I was bleeding from multiple cuts received on its jagged edges. I’m not making this up — the S+arck mouse caused me to shed blood.

And then, once I had the fiend out of its plastic prison, it was near unusable. I bandaged my hand and went back to a less pretty but infinitely more functional mouse. I only had one good finger left with which to gesture in the direction of Philippe S+arck. I’ll let you guess which one.

Late in March, S+arck announced he is retiring. Not taking on any new jobs, he’s going to spend the next two years finishing current contracts, then no more. He’s going to sit back and enjoy the fruits of his labours.

And try to figure out how to get the juice from them.