Tucker Viemeister
Industrial Designer
Called the “Most industrious designer”, Tucker Viemeister thrives on collaboration and working in all scales of 3D and 2D in exhibits, architecture, graphics, new media, branding and strategy. He is most famous for OXO Good Grips kitchen tools that conceived “universal design” designed at Smart Design, the company he helped found in 1979. He also founded the Lab (digital explorations on an architectural scale like the Cosmopolitan casino and an installation at the Venice Biennale) and Studio Red at Rockwell Group, and was EVP of Razorfish (physical design), Director, Special Projects with Ralph Appelbaum Associates and Thinc, is now designing the Shanghai planetarium with Xenerio.
The first collaboration with Henry was the Daily Café, followed by Dockers and Levi’s shop-in-shop retail fixture projects. The Beginning With Children library in the then depressed Williamsburg neighborhood bloomed into 65 L!braries with the Robin Hood Foundation. Coincidentally they both worked at Rockwell on JetBlue’s Terminal 5 (not the nightclub) and launching a new retail brand for the Gap.
He is vice president of the Architectural League, a Fellow of the Industrial Design Society of America, was dubbed “Industrial Design’s ElderWunderkind” (“America’s Hottest 40” ID ’95) and “Guru”(BusinessWeek ’97) when he founded frogdesign’s New York office. Then “scruffy brand-meister” (Architect’s Newspaper ‘06), a “Living Design Innovator” (New York Magazine ‘07), “whiz-kid” (eater.com ‘09), “Star of Design“ (D&D ‘11), one of 125 PrattIcons (’12), called “industrial demigod” (New York Magazine (3/20/14), and voted one of 50 most notable members of IDSA ever (’16)! Teaches at Parsons, work is in MoMA, holds 32 US utility patents and his father, Read Viemeister named him after the car he helped design.