Steven Skov Holt

Steven Skov Holt (September 24, 1957 – August 13, 2015) was an American design writer, curator, educator and industrial designer. 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.

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). He contributed essays, articles and columns to books and magazines such as ARTnews, ID and Metropolis, as well as commentary on design trends to The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, and NPR, among others. 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. 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.

Life and career Steven Hamilton Holt was born in 1957 in Hartford, Connecticut and grew up in Canton, CT. After high school, he worked as a busboy and attended Boston Architectural College before enrolling at Brown University after receiving financial aid. 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.

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. He wrote reviews, articles and features for Architectural Record, ARTnews, ID Innovation and Metropolis, among others, on designers and product design firms, conceptual design projects, and a flexible, eccentric postmodern design philosophy he called "Post-Credible," among many topics. 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's output also included wide-ranging catalogue and book essays on contemporary visual culture.

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. 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. San Francisco Chronicle writer Zahid Sardar called the book "perhaps the first great defense of craft" in the design world. personal computer, sneaker, bicycle, automobile and other industrial design; the effects of digital technology on designed objects;

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. Holt described the emergence of style and fashion in everyday objects as "design democracy in action." The exhibition marked a boundary-blurring, digital-era design shift away from "the ubiquitous 'black box' of minimalism" New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp wrote, "The triennial is an explosion: an attack on the walls between individual design disciplines and the barriers that separate design from everything else. ... [Its] organizers create a credible mythology for design today: protean, expansive, filled with deep reserves of historical meaning, an art that leaves no area of consciousness unexplored."

Holt co-curated two exhibitions with Mara Holt Skov, "Blobjects & Beyond" (San Jose Museum of Art, 2005) and "Manufractured" (Museum of Contemporary Craft, 2008).

Books Blobjects & Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2005. Written with Mara Holt Skov. Manufractured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2008. Written with Mara Holt Skov.