Steven Skov Holt (September 24, 1957 – August 13, 2015) was an American design writer, curator, educator and industrial designer.Rafkin, Louise. "Lives of beauty, grace and shadows: Mara Holt Skov and Steven Skov Holt," San Francisco Chronicle, November 30, 2008. Retrieved April 24, 2023.Gross, Jamie. "Smooth Operators," Surface, April 2005, p. 94.Yee, Roger. "Kissed by a Frog," Contract Design, June 1996, p. 36–9. He is known for an interdisciplinary practice that posited the ascension of design as the most significant late-20th- and 21st-century form of public art, and more specifically, elaborated its shift toward forms that were more fluid, biomorphic, hybridized, emotional and culturally literate.Muschamp, Herbert. "Ideazapoppin': Images Fly at Cooper-Hewitt," The New York Times, March 10, 2000. Retrieved April 24, 2023.Patton, Phil. "Liquid Solids," Esquire, March 2000, p. 70. Retrieved April 24, 2023.Lamb, Gregory M. "The 'blobject' comes of age," The Christian Science Monitor, June 17, 2005.Klausner, Amos. "Blobjects & Beyond—The New Fluidity in Design," Core77, March 2005.
Holt's curatorial projects appeared at museums including the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Jose Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Craft (Portland).Hales, Linda. "Forms That Put The Fun Back in Function," Washington Post, March 11, 2000. p. C01. Retrieved April 24, 2023.Moore, Booth. "Walking Hot Rods," Los Angeles Times, July 27, 2000. Retrieved April 24, 2023.Austin, April. "Co-opting consumerism," The Christian Science Monitor, September 19, 2008. He contributed essays, articles and columns to books and magazines such as ARTnews, ID and Metropolis,Holt, Steven Skov and Mara Holt Skov. "Please Don't Be Seated," ARTnews, December 2008, p. 108–13.California College of the Arts. Steven Skov Holt, Faculty. Retrieved April 25, 2023.McDonough, Michael and Steven Holt. "Fallacy in Wonderland," Metropolis, September 1987. as well as commentary on design trends to The New York Times,Kleinfield, N.R. "Industrial Design Comes of Age," The New York Times, March 10, 1985. Retrieved April 24, 2023.Sorkin, Andrew Ross. "What Goes On? Why You Still Can't Buy A Flaming Pink Computer?" The New York Times, July 17, 1995. Retrieved April 24, 2023. Los Angeles Times,Mayer, Barbara. "Little Future for Housewares, Appliances," Los Angeles Times, July 27, 1990. Retrieved April 24, 2023.Keeps, David A. "Shape of things to come," Los Angeles Times, January 4, 2007. Retrieved April 24, 2023. Esquire,Patton, Phil. "Blobjects," Esquire, December 1, 1993, p. 48. Retrieved April 24, 2023. and NPR, among others.National Public Radio. "New Age of Design," Talk of the Nation, March 20, 2000. Retrieved April 24, 2023. Holt co-wrote two books, Blobjects & Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design (2005) and Manufractured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects (2008), with his wife, art and design historian Mara Holt Skov.Wu, Suzanne. "Blobjects and Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design," Wired, July 2005. Retrieved April 25, 2023.Sarfar, Zahid. "Books, competitions, notes from afar," San Francisco Chronicle, November 26, 2008. Retrieved April 24, 2023. He was a professor for more than two decades in the product design and industrial design departments at the Parsons School of Design and California College of the Arts, respectively.Read, Mimi. "It's the Table's Turn," New York Newsday, December 31, 1988, p. 21. He died in San Francisco on August 13, 2015.Hartford Courant. Steven Holt, 1957–2015, September 6, 2015. Retrieved April 25, 2023.
Life and career Steven Hamilton Holt was born in 1957 in Hartford, Connecticut and grew up in Canton, CT.Kronholz, June. "The Edgar Lanpher Effect," The Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2007. After high school, he worked as a busboy and attended Boston Architectural College before enrolling at Brown University after receiving financial aid.San Francisco Focus. "Young, Gifted and Living in the Bay Area: Steven Skov Holt," July 1996, p. 14. An avid cyclist at the time, Holt lost his kidney function for unknown reasons in 1979 while at Brown and took a year off to undergo dialysis treatments. After receiving a kidney transplant and recovering, he graduated with a BA in cognitive science in 1982; the experience would compel him to fulfill goals at an accelerated pace throughout his life.Hamilton, Joan O'C. "Thrown a Curve," Stanford, July–August 2005, p. 14. Retrieved April 24, 2023. Holt remained in good health until the transplanted kidney began to lose function in 1997 after an illness. For the remainder of his life, he experienced many health challenges typical of long-term transplant recipients and would undergo regular and extensive medical treatments.
After Brown, Holt took part in a fellowship at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum before beginning work at the industrial design magazine, ID, becoming editor in 1983, a position he held until 1986. From 1986 to 1989, Holt was on the faculty at Parsons School of Design and co-founded the school's product design program. During this time, he was also a partner at the industrial design firm Zebra Design, Inc.Brown, Patricia Leigh. "Time Made To Order," The New York Times, January 11, 1990. Retrieved April 24, 2023.Bartolucci, Marina and Joseph Griffiths. "Thinking Small," Metropolis, April 1990.
In 1990, Holt moved to the Bay Area to enroll in the graduate program in product design at Stanford University, where he produced a thesis project on sneaker design and earned an MFA in 1992.California College of the Arts. "In Memoriam: Steven Skov Holt," Glance, Fall 2015, p. 46. After Stanford, he worked at the global design consultancy frogdesign from 1992 to 2000, serving in capacities including "visionary," strategist, vice-president of creative culture and general manager.Louie, Elaine. "Will a New Frogdesigner Make Frankfurt Chirp?" The New York Times, February 27, 1997. Retrieved April 24, 2023. During this time he met and married Mara Skov, and they had a son, Larson.
Holt began teaching at California College of the Arts in 1995, chairing its industrial design program between then and 2004; he was named a distinguished professor in 2003. In 2002, he received the Career Award in Education from the Industrial Designers Society of America. Despite increasingly serious health issues due to the failure of his transplanted kidney, Holt continued to teach and write until his death in 2015.
Writing and public commentary Between 1986 and 1996, Holt was a columnist for the magazines AXIS, Graphis, Industreel ontwerpen and Metropolitan Home.Holt, Steven. "Prototype: Olympus 0-Product," Metropolitan Home, November 1989, p. 47.frogdesign/Steven Holt. "I.E. Holes," Graphis, March–April 1994, p. 28–9. He wrote reviews, articles and features for Architectural Record, ARTnews, ID Innovation and Metropolis, among others, on designers and product design firms,Holt, Steven. "Leapfrogging to Fame," Metropolis, September 1986. conceptual design projects, contemplative biology,Holt, Steven Skov. "The Formlessness of Form and Contemplative Biology Innovation, Spring 1988, p. 43–7. and a flexible, eccentric postmodern design philosophy he called "Post-Credible," among many topics.Holt, Steven. "Chaos, Clarity, Post-Credibility and the New International Style," Innovation, Summer 1988, p. 4–7. His feature for ARTnews, "The Art of Design," posited design as the new frontier of artistic activity merging technology and aesthetics and was the magazine's first cover story about design.Holt, Steven. "The Art of Design,", ARTnews, April 1990. Holt's output also included wide-ranging catalogue and book essays on contemporary visual culture.Holt, Steven. "Model Revolutionary," Dan Friedman: Radical Modernism, Yale University Press, 1994.Holt, Steven Skov. "Ten Thoughts on Two People in One Studio," in Curious Boym: Design Works, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002. Retrieved April 24, 2023.
Holt and Skov's books Blobjects & Beyond (2005) and Manufractured (2008) were written to accompany exhibitions they curated. "Blobject" (blobby + object) was a term and concept Holt developed in the late 1980s to describe a trend of rounded and melting designed objects (e.g., automobiles, house and office wares) that represented a decisive turn from the hard edges of conventional modernism. Blobjects & Beyond analyzes these fluid, curved, often biomorphic forms, which the authors characterized as a "new futurism" embodying "possibility, hope and optimism." Identifying roots in movements such as Surrealism, mid-century American organic design and 1960s psychedelia, the book traces the flowering of blobjects to a convergence of the organic, technological and aesthetic, made possible by advances in computer-aided design, plastics and manufacturing. In a Wired review, Suzanne Wu wrote, "Blobjects avoids art book snobbishness by focusing its ivory tower analysis on the sensual side of everyday products ... [Holt and Skov] make a compelling case for curvaceous design as a manifestation of our desires."
Manufractured explored an emerging approach in art that involved the sampling and appropriation of new and scavenged consumer products to create new works.Museum of Contemporary Craft. "About the Exhibition," Manuf®actured. Retrieved April 24, 2023. Holt and Skov coined the term to describe processes—often painstaking handcrafting techniques of cutting, stacking, tying, folding, stitching or molding—that alter or fragment (physically and contextually) banal, mass-produced goods, transforming them into artworks.Sanders, Beverly. "The Handmade/Industrial Question: Reviewing 'Manufractured,'"] American Craft, December 15, 2008. Retrieved April 24, 2023. San Francisco Chronicle writer Zahid Sardar called the book "perhaps the first great defense of craft" in the design world.
With reference to his roles as a design professional, curator, writer and educator, Holt often provided commentary to journalists about past, present and future design trends, among them: the miniaturization and personalization of office technologies and home products; preferences in materials;Brown, Patricia Leigh. "A Great Fake Lives On In Kitchens and History," The New York Times, November 14, 1991. Retrieved April 24, 2023.Patton, Phil. "In Metal's Clothing," The New York Times, February 4, 1999. Retrieved April 24, 2023. personal computer, sneaker, bicycle, automobile and other industrial design;Lohr, Steve. "Finally, Taking Computer Design Out of the Model T Age," The New York Times, July 18, 1996. Retrieved April 24, 2023.Brown, Patricia Leigh. "Once-Lowly Sneaker Is Pedestrian No More," The New York Times, May 28, 1992. Retrieved April 24, 2023.Jay, Hilary. "Going in Style," Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, April 8, 1999.Patton, Phil. "The Tale of the Porsche 911," Architectural Digest, January 2005. the effects of digital technology on designed objects; and design education.Riley, Laura. "Metropolis Education Survey," Metropolis, September 1995.
Curatorial projects Like his writing, Holt's curatorial projects highlighted rising trends in design, visual culture and consumer taste. "Pride of Place Setting" (1987) was an exhibition of freely mixed tableware that celebrated a recent turn by well-known architects, artists and designers to tabletop design as a vehicle for personal expression and experimentation.Brown, Patricia Leigh. "Table Tops At Parsons," The New York Times, December 3, 1987. Retrieved April 24, 2023.Rose, Judy. "Dining by Design," Detroit Free Press, January 21, 1988, p. 19. Holt described the emergence of style and fashion in everyday objects as "design democracy in action."