Throughout our interview, his laid-back demeanor belied a passion for form and function and all parts in between – a passion that no doubt his clients must have noticed throughout his diverse contracts to meld aesthetic with functionality and create solutions for anything from a ketchup bottle to a heart-pump for medical institutions.

So how did Klaus become his own boss doing what he wants to do, when he wants to do it? Partly he’s just a lucky guy but he also had the right influences coupled with the drive and discipline to focus on his field.

As a young boy tinkering in his father’s wood and metal shop in the northern German town of Itzehoe, Klaus delighted in discovering how things work and how they could work better. Early design projects included wooden boats and a bicycle converted into a tandem for seemingly no better reason than to have something different from the other kids in the village. This desire to change everyday objects is an integral component of the creativity that informs Klaus’s professional projects.

His initial drive led him to university at Kiel Polytechnic where he earned a BS in industrial design, graduating best in his class. His final thesis was a patented device to view slides and negatives on a television screen – long before digital technology came into play.

His success at university led to his first job – by referral from a professor at Kiel – to work at the German design firm Interform, located in a beautiful Renaissance castle in Wolfsburg. Interform was looking for a fresh student straight from university to eventually take over the company, and Klaus was presented as the perfect candidate. After a few years, he was promoted to vice president and with the title came a bad case of cold feet. Feeling trapped and forever doomed to stay in his first job, he asked for and received six months off, during which he visited New York City. This trip decided his fate, and he moved stateside shortly afterward. He has resided in various parts of the city for over seven years developing his reputation as one of the city’s best designers working in 3D and learning a lot about his profession along the way.

Although Klaus has worked in every medium from illustrations to oil and photography, he settled on industrial design when he realized that he prefers to work in a discipline where the result of creativity will lead to a functional use. Along the way he’s won recognition in the art community with awards such as the Idea Silver (two in 1999 for two different categories), the Alias Image of the Year, the IF (95/96), the Red Dot, the Dueker Price (1993) and the CES Innovation Award (95/96/97/98).

According to Klaus, the ideal qualities for a good designer are a healthy dose of logic and fantasy. And, he adds, it doesn’t hurt to have a good understanding of what the market is like these days. However, one needs a good nose because relying too much on market research will lead to “me-too” crimes, where the artist is too heavily influenced by what else is out there and not able to generate enough fresh ideas. In fact, although he looks at everything from design magazines to streetscapes for inspiration and ideas, he cautions that one must remember there is a delicate balance between studying the field and copying the field. This, he feels, is the single biggest threat to his creativity.

And how does he avoid designing something that the audience just doesn’t get in his quest for originality? One should strive for the most advanced, yet still acceptable, he says. You can push the envelope up to the point where people don’t get it and won’t accept it. Although some high-risk projects are worth the extra explanations for the audience such as Palm Pilot, other times it’s a case of form overtaking function, reflected in the audience’s rejection.

So what are his favorite projects? Medical instruments. Strange you might think, but the explanation makes perfect sense for an industrial designer. After all, medical instruments are developed and designed with a very important purpose in mind: to save lives. One must combine reliability, technology and safety with aesthetic. An optimal design for this sort of instrument is entirely intuitive – where the doctor or nurse don’t have to think twice before employing the tool.

Designing these “useful” objects are a challenge and a source of satisfaction for Klaus… designing useless projects however lead to introspection and depression. This is when his mind starts to wander and the urge to pack it in and go eat coconuts on the beach is quite high. His most nagging doubt is how useless most of what he does is. He anguishes over meaning-of-life questions like: Does the world need another coffeemaker? Which usually gets met with: If I design a coffee maker, it will be cheaply manufactured; it will be placed next to 50 others on the shelf; it will last two years. Couple this with the never-ending complaint of designers who feel stifled by the limitations of the marketplace and you wonder how he ever makes his way out from under the covers each morning.

Despite this, he has no plans to give up anytime soon as long as there are interesting, useful things to create like medical heart pumps, heavy equipment, airplane interiors, consumer electronics, photo-optical equipment and child-resistant packages.

And after talking with him for a couple hours, you suspect that were he to banish himself to an island to eat coconuts, it wouldn’t be long before he’d have created a gizmo to climb the palm, a special tool to cut the coconut, a juicer to squeeze the pulp, and of course, the necessary glass to serve it in…