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Call him The Karim. He is, in every sense, larger than life: Well over six feet tall and, at the age of 47, sticking to a wardrobe of white and fluorescent pink, Karim Rashid looks the part of a design icon. Trained in industrial design at Carleton University and in Italy, Rashid had a quiet early career before his sophisticated work made him a star in the 1990s. Curvaceous, contemporary and colourful, his products have been hugely influential. (You probably own some of his creations for Umbra, if not for Prada.) Now, he's creating everything from logos to airplane and hotel interiors - along with DJing a few gigs a year, including a gala at Toronto's Design Exchange last weekend.

Your upcoming retrospective is called From 15 Minutes into the Future. Why?

I think that designers should be highly perceptive to social lives, social behaviours. So I think we should always be looking 15 minutes ahead of what we perceive now. And when you do a design project, being perceptive isn't just human and social behaviours; it's also the technology, the production methods ... the most prescient factors of the time we live in.

So what are the defining ideas of the current moment?

I have a theory that the digital age is so highly personalizable and so highly experiential that the physical world has fallen behind. We have much more room to be self-expressive, be creative, be better informed, be more knowledgeable. ... So the physical world has to catch up.

Is that an aesthetic question?

Aesthetic is a good word, because the root of aesthetics is feeling, so yes. ... If you look at high-tech objects, they've become more and more banal, but what's in them has affordances to be flexible and versatile forever. They say that a professional who knows Photoshop can only really use about 7 per cent of what the program's really capable of - which is kind of amazing.

But just look at how these products are packaged. In the physical world, we end up with these characterless objects full of old semantics, old ideas of what technology is, all black and silver.

I think these things could be as engaging and pleasurable as the technology [inside them] is. ... Right now, we still see cameras as if we're looking through a viewfinder. Film used to go through sideways; now we have no film. We hang onto these old archetypes.

You've been very vocal about the idea that designers have the ability to change the world. What are some of the new opportunities available to you today?

If you look back 10, 20 or 40 years, designers were there to add style at the end of the project, to make it more saleable. But now, in fact, the industrial designer has input from the start. You're not just here to make a sale; you're here to make a change.

I'll give you a banal example. I was asked to do graphics - really - for credit cards. But I came back to them with credit cards that had four stripes, two on each side, so it didn't matter which way you used the card - it always worked.

Those are the kind of things I think where you can really make a shift. We've gotten used to using things in a certain paradigm, and - it's like the click wheel on the iPod - the whole way of using an interface changes.

Then there's Dixie Cup - a Canadian invention. We wouldn't have fast food without it. And fast food led to this kind of disposable age. So it's amazing how one little item, one little object, can change things.

And where do you see change coming?

Customization ... in the car industry, the driver's seat could be robotically custom-designed. So you'd enter your dimensions on the Internet, and when you get your new car, the seat would be built just for you.

And when you push your button on your digital printer, you have 1.68 million colours ... the way a car is painted today is with 160 tiny little sprays, so they could easily just push a button and spray any colour you want for your car. All these things are so feasible today.

You've written that "now design is not about solving problems, but about a rigorous beautification of our built environments." In what sense do you believe the world's problems have been solved?

Well, we've solved low-income housing. We've solved a comfortable chair. We've solved an efficient car. We just don't have it on the road. The hydrogen car has been around for 10 years; someone's just got to bring it to market.

The only technology to have a huge impact in the last 15 years was CNC - computer-controlled machinery - so everything's done more robotically, but it's the same tube bending. We've solved a lot of that stuff. And look at the chair: We've solved the problem of making a comfortable chair. It's not about solving seating any more. It's about something else.

Is there a point at which experimenting with form and colour - and driving toward the new - stops paying off?

Possibly. I think it transcends into something else, at least for me. ... I'm trying to find new languages that are relevant to the way in which we live now.

What's hard for me to comprehend now is this: We buy a pair of running shoes that have phenomenal technology and a lot of sophisticated new materials, we buy a car - hopefully - so we're getting the highest performance. There's a need for the most prescient goods we can have. But all of a sudden when we come to domestic spaces, we regress like crazy. It's weird in general how people will be so traditional, and yet they have a videophone and they're Skype-ing. It's a bit of a paradox.

I just think that at this point, if you're 13, 14, and you're brought up with the digital age, there's an expectation that the physical world will be the same. I don't think a teenager now could care less about a baroque interior or a fake Belle-Époque interior; it's not the way they want to live.

And when you get your first apartment and go buy some furniture, you're not going to buy that furniture, because you're brought up in a casual age. It would be like regressing and saying, 'I'm going to start wearing top hats and ties.' That's over.

Karim Rashid speaks at the

Ontario College of Art & Design on Nov. 9. His From 15 Minutes into the Future exhibition runs at OCAD from Nov. 9 until Jan. 20