You probably have a Karim Rashid in your home, and you may not even know it. The industrial designer has 3,000 designs in production — including the Umbra “Oh Chair,” the Bobble Water Bottle, and the “Garbo” trash can — many featuring his signature rounded edges, cast in colorful plastics. “Design is about being very observant of behaviors,” Rashid explains, “the way we do things — and you can see solutions very easily.”

Born in Egypt, Rashid found his calling as a designer early. As a child, “I was very quiet and quite introverted,” Rashid remembers. “I would hide under the bed and draw for six hours straight, and I would draw little utopias of worlds I wanted to live in.” When his family immigrated to Canada, Rashid won his first design competition on the boat — a drawing contest with the ship’s other children. “I drew luggage, because I was fascinated with this idea that we took our entire home and put it in a few crates.”

(Originally aired: May 20, 2011)

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Rashid's "Oh Chair," designed for Umbra.