Karim Rashid: Lord of Creation

What is Karim Rashid on? Whatever it is, I want some. The "greatest living designer in all the Americas" has created a dizzying number of products, as well as more prototypes than you can shake a stick at. That would be a plastic stick, of course, because the prolific Rashid is the poet of plastic, the prophet of polypropylene, although he sees himself as a philosopher and an artist who happens to be a designer.

This unshakeable self-belief has led to accusations of pretentiousness from some quarters, while the design dynamo himself has created a hostage to fortune by writing a sumptuously produced monograph manifesto ambitiously entitled I Want to Change the World - and he means it. If Rashid could change the world, you would have to throw out everything you own every five years. "Every object would have to be perfectly cyclical so as not to collect waste," he explains. "Generations would not be able to pass down anything in its original form. The idea of antiquity would be a simulation."

So it's out with the Wedgwood plates and the Chippendale chairs then? "I loathe antiques," says Rashid, whose latest book, Karim Rashid: Evolution, has just been published. In it he surveys his products and projects, which number several thousand. The book features luscious colour images of his designs for everything from soap dispens