Ep. 118: Industrial Designer Tom Dixon
Industrial designer Tom Dixon discovered the transformative power of clay at a young age. Later, after dropping out of art college, he toured with his band and when a motorcycle accident ended his bass playing career, he taught himself to weld. Now his eponymous global design brand specializes in furniture, lighting, accessories and interiors. After 30+ years as a designer, he still fancies himself a rebel, thriving in chaos and experimentation.
Read the full transcript here.
Amy Devers: Hello! This episode is brought to you as part of WantedDesign Manhattan Online, a conversation series presented with Design Milk and Clever. Each day, from May 11th to the 22nd, 2020, we’ll feature design dialogues including new episodes of Clever and engaging live conversations with very special guests. To view the schedule and register for events, head to wanteddesignnyc.com/online.
Tom Dixon: Having those businesses without even really thinking about it, just doing it with your friends and doing it part for fun, part for profit, really gave me the confidence to just get on and use my creativity to do my own, you know, to forge my own path.
AD: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers, and this is Clever. Today I’m talking to famed British industrial designer, Tom Dixon. Tom Dixon grew up in England after spending his first four years in North Africa. He discovered guitar and ceramics in adolescence and later after dropping out of art school, he taught himself to weld and made a line of salvaged metal furniture that got him noticed. He worked with Cappellini in the late 1980sto create his now iconic S chair and since 2002 he’s been operating his eponymous design brand, designing furniture, lighting, accessories, and interiors. His work has been acquired by museums, her Majesty the Queen has appointed him an order of the British Empire and even though he’s firmly established in the international design scene, don’t call him establishment, he gets testy about that. Here’s Tom.
TD: My name is Tom Dixon and I’m from London, England and I’m a designer and an entrepreneur and I create things for a living, which is a great way to spend your life.
AD: Yes, it is and speaking of your life, let’s talk about how it got started. I understand you were born in Tunisia and then grew up in England. So what can you tell me about your formative years and what kind of kid was young Tom? What kinds of things captured your imagination?
TD: Well, I spent four years in North Africa, in Tunisia, in Egypt and in Morocco and arrived in the north of England when I was four, which was a bit of a culture shock. So I guess I was used to running around naked in the hot sun and then to come to damp and green England was really quite different. My mother is half French and half Latvian. My father is English, so I have a series of different cultures.
But because we travelled so much when I was tiny, I guess it probably did have quite a lot of influence, certainly on things like food culture, sense of humour, cultural references. And I guess a lot of creatives have travelled a lot in their infancy. I came to London when I was five and it’s been my hometown ever since.
AD: And why, for the transition from North Africa to England?
TD: My parents were just looking for work, you know.
AD: When you think about what kind of culture shock that was, how do you think manifested in terms of your world view?
TD: I don’t know, it’s easy to post-rationalize but I guess, you know, the Mediterranean, I guess Arabic culture, the desert, I remember many animals, you know, locusts, storms, camels, flying fish, you know and very little else, the Suez Canal. But you know, I think the lights and the difference in light struck me at that age. We came to the UK in a very, very cold winter with snow drifts maybe five or six feet high. And that was a real contrast in terms of climate.
AD: How did your creativity start manifesting? What kinds of things were you interested in and how were you acting that out?
TD: I don’t know, I was a very timid boy and I spent a lot of time in books until I was about, you know, about 11 or 12. I went to a really very poor school academically, which I found actually relatively easy because I’d done so much reading. But what struck me there was the art department. It was a big school, a state school and it had an amazing art department, with life drawing, with metal work, technical drawing, woodwork, ceramics.
And I think it was the ceramics department which really kind of taught me the transformational power of design on materials. So I think, you know, clay is the archetypical ugly departure point from muddy and greasy material with no shape. And then just finding shape in that and transforming it from a soft and wet material to a hard and functional material, I guess stayed with me.
AD: Did you have siblings or were you kind of left to your own devices and what kind of teenage years did you have? Were they rebellious or chaotic?
TD: I have a sister, she’s an osteopath in New Zealand, so the other side of the world. And was I rebellious? Eventually, yeah, it took a little while to come out but I was always contrarian and didn’t really want to do what other people were doing. I think I discovered guitars at about 16 and then you know, typically, like most British kids at the time, probably American kids too, you were in a band. It’s kind of what you did.
It was really through that that I found a way of monetizing creativity, I guess, and also found a way of communicating and I’ve often observed that bands are really also entrepreneurial outfits. You have to drive your own van, you have to make your own posters, you have to create your own tunes, you have to learn your own instrument. And if you’re any good, then you can start making money out of it.
AD: Yu know bands are also really a hardcore collaboration on every aspect of the business and the creativity. But not only that, you’re in vans, travelling [laughs] around, frequently sleeping in the same hotel rooms or on people’s couches -
TD: Have you been in a band then? Sounds like you’ve been in a band.
AD: [Laughs] No, I’ve been close to band members though. So I’ve witnessed it. It made a giant impression on me, what level of collaboration you have to be involved in, in order to be in a band and in order to make it work. And I’m wondering how that influenced, how that stuck with you?
TD: Well, it definitely made me want to do something on my own [laughter].
AD: A little too close.
TD: There’s nothing worse than being really stuck for that amount of time with people that are that hormonal, at that age and that smelly - I ended up doing all the driving, which really wasn’t fair, but you know, I think that there’s always multiple egos and I just, after a while of that I sort of hungered for solitude and doing something on my own. But you’re right, design is also collaborative, particularly when you’re getting things made and selling them. There’s a big collaborative element in that so granted at more a distance, less in the transit van.
AD: Yeah, it’s a little bit more procedural, so you can collaborate in stages. The band, it’s sort of all in [laughter], but there was a chapter of your life that included becoming kind of a successful London-based band and touring and opening up for some major acts and a brief chapter of art school before dropping out. Can you tell me about this stage of your life because it sounds kind of turbulent, pivotal and ultimately very expansive?
TD: Yeah it probably was turbulent, but immediately after high school I went and tried art college, which really didn’t agree with me and that was mainly because, I guess, the earlier experience when I was younger was all that I needed to try and dabble in a variety of different disciplines, you know.
AD: Yeah, you already had that experience. Art college probably wasn’t that novel.
TD: So it was, no, it was disappointing. Really, I imagined that I’d find lots and lots of people like me and I didn’t really. So that lasted maybe six months, I drove into a car on a motorcycle and broke my leg and I never went back. So I spent three months unable really to move. And after that I just went and got a variety of jobs. I was a printer and I was a colorist, or I colored in cartoons, when they were still colored by hands.
And it was that time that we, we took off as a band and yeah, we signed a record deal. We were a hot thing in London for about six months before we got signed up and that was the fun time. Had our own destiny and played to our own crowd and it was since we signed to a big megalithic corporation that we ended up as support bands for, you know, so we came to America, the first time, my first encounter with America was with Clash on Broadway.
Clash had been extremely generous in bringing over different acts every night to support them, from London. And, but that was an unpleasant experience because we were slightly disco and they were very punk and the crowd was expecting punk music, so they didn’t like that. So there was a variety of, all the bands were jazz or reggae and disco and then the Clash supporters really didn’t want any of the support acts.
So it was a disaster but it took us really to record Electric Ladyland, which is Jimi Hendrix’s studio. Recorded a first single and then get back. But you know, so I did that for a couple of years and I had another motorcycle accident and broke my arm and that was the end of my bass playing career.
AD: At that point were you sort of planning to be a musician for your career?
TD: No, honestly, I’m always in awe of people that have got a plan and there’s many people that have planned their careers and their lives and have studied to be what they are. But I had no plan and so I just went whichever way the wind blew. I knew I wanted to work. And so we’d picked up a bit of the club culture that was going on in New York at the time and we brought it back to London. And set up a couple of night clubs, which were sometimes legal, sometimes illegal and brought back this idea of entertaining people in the clubs.
And the clubs had stages and I really taught myself to weld, really as a kind of way of making stage sets and performance in these clubs. So, and the club world is a very good way of getting to know a lot of people superficially. A lot of those people end up being, I don’t know, hairdressers, fashion designers, photographers, people that need stuff [doing?], you know. So -
AD: Right.
TD: When they knew I made stuff I became the metal worker.
AD: It’s a very scrappy, creative, resourceful DIY in the punk sense kind of tribe, the club scene, the band scene and it’s very entrepreneurial in that people are sort of not following any sort of prescription and they’re just taking the resources they have at hand and making it, making it into something. And it sounds like that suited you quite well?
TD: Well, it still does really. I mean I’d rather make up my own rules and I guess that really having those businesses without even really thinking about it, just doing it with your friends and doing it part for fun, part for profit, really gave me the confidence to just get on and use my creativity to forge my own path. So that is really what I continued doing for quite a while.
AD: So, you’re teaching yourself to weld as a way to build stage sets and entertain, at what point did it sort of morph into building, welding a collection of furniture that got you some attention and put you on the map as a designer?
TD: Well, so welding is an amazing technique because it allows you to build things really quickly and with no fear. And I think if you’re a woodworker you tend to have to be more measured, more precise. You have to wait for things to happen, like gluing, you have to cut joints. You know, welding allows you to just put things together and those things can be very strong and dynamic. And if it doesn’t work, you can cut it apart and start again.
You know, as well, the streets of London were a place where you could find a lot of metal actually. There was a lot of things, a lot of houses being converted at the time and you know, metalwork being chucked out and so it was free. And so I think the only thing that I had, wasn’t really skill, you know, I can’t call myself a craftsman, it was much more, just persistence and practice.
You know I think, all too often people don’t get enough practice at making things and that was the beauty of the metal. It was like, if it didn’t work, you could reuse it. But I was very productive and I made a lot of things and I made them for fun and then people started buying them. And I just thought, well, this is extraordinary, this is like being a baker or something.
You can make something and sell it the same day and there was a freedom to that existence and an autonomy.
AD: Yes. How would you describe the transition, well, I mean, I don’t even know if it’s a transition, but it’s an evolution into a full blown designer working, I mean you did the S Chair with Cappellini. How did that come about and how were you feeling as you were growing into an established international designer?
TD: Well, I still don’t feel like an established international designer [laughter] -
AD: Well, that’s refreshing, I don’t even know what that feels like [laughs], but I assume after this long of a career -
TD: Don’t call me ‘establishment,’ that’s an insult [laughs]. London was recognized as a place that people came to see creativity. There was a strong tribal scene of goths and remnants of punks and skinheads, new romantics and the music scenes were still really strong. The club scene was strong and people came from for alternative culture. At the time you know, I really wasn’t selling a great deal to English people or British people, I was selling more to people that were based in London. People that were talent and finance or Japanese people coming over for the week or Germans that were coming to show something new in the art galleries.
So there was no real domestic market. London and UK was still in the pre steep recession at the time. So I had an international audience and Italians came knocking at the studio door, Cappellini was one of the first to break with the tradition of mainly using Italian studios to do the creative direction for their brand. And he’d been looking for new ideas and you know, London was known, you know, for alternative culture, mainly in fashion, I think, rather than furnishings.
But anyway, he came to my studio, but I think probably I met him in Milan before that. I’ve been asked to do an exhibition with Marc Newson and with, what became Corso Como, I don’t know if you know that shop, [**]?
AD: That’s making sense how all the dots connected.
TD: And he selected that chair, which I probably tried half a dozen ways of making, as something that could sit in his collection. So I licensed it to him. And so that gave me a kind of access to the Milan Furniture Fair, gave me access to an international reputation, I guess. And it was a very innovative company at the time, which people were very interested in. So that’s still in production with Cappellini now, all of those years later.
AD: Well, I just spoke to Giulio Cappellini and he related his talent for spotting long sellers, not bestsellers and I think it speaks volumes that that chair is still in production. Is that the first piece that you achieved a certain scale with? I mean from hand welding salvage furniture to going into production with the S Chair, were there a lot of pieces in between?
TD: Yeah, we’re talking probably seven or eight years in. I mean I had gone from making things myself, sometimes you know, on stage, on my own, but to having a metal workshop with 10 or 15 people making things, you know, in batches - working to commission and doing exhibitions. And so it wasn’t a one-man-show and we produced, I probably produced a hundred of those chairs in a very different form, covered with rush, basketwork. Sometimes inner tubes of tires, before Cappellini saw it and made it in the way it’s made now.
AD: Okay. You’re now, let’s say 30 plus years in to being a designer of furniture, interiors, objects, accessories, how would you characterize your overall evolution both creatively, Musically, I mean all of it, how would you describe [laughs]?
TD: You know, I had a lot of other stages as well, which included also spending 10 years at as creative director for a company called Habitat, which never really existed in the US, apart from one store. But it was owned by Ikea at the time, so you know, I’d jumped from being a self-made designer to working for one of the biggest, in fact the biggest furniture company in the world.
And so I spent 10 years there before I started my own label again. So what’s atypical about me is that I had a broader series of experiences from, you know, self-making, to working in corporations, to doing my own label, to working with the Italians. So there’s just a broader sweep of experiences there which are also very different market levels as well.
And I’m interested in all of them still. I’m interested in making things cheap and making things expensive. I’m interested in industry and I’m interested in craft and that’s what I mean about trying to not limit that. And then I’m also interested in things which aren’t design. I’m still interested in music. I’m particularly interested in food right now, with a couple of restaurants that we have and that strikes me also as something which has a degree of similarity to some of the entrepreneurial things that we were doing before.
So you know, restaurants also has this thing of making something, like producing something which I really love. It’s also got the creativity that you get in the music business as well. I’m hoping that I’ll have more and more unexpected adventures in not just design, but also other fields as well where I bring the experience of design into that mixed field as well.
AD: What I’m hearing from you are a couple of things. Between music, welding and food, there’s an immediacy to the creation that sounds like it appeals to you. There’s also, you’ve set up your brand so that you can also still experiment, that’s sometimes economically hard to do. Bu you’re making it work. It sounds like it’s probably a crucial part of keeping the joy alive, is your ability to experiment and follow your curiosity.
TD: Yeah, I mean that’s half of the point of doing it, is to be able to surprise yourself again. I mean I can’t imagine what it must be like to go into the same job, doing the same thing every day. So I purposefully set up my infrastructure to allow me to have a series of different, sometimes conflicting events going on inside it. So sometimes I’m working, I mean often I’m working much less as a designer and either more as a marketeer or a product developer or an engineer.
And all of the things that surround design as well and sometimes I even think that design is a bit of an odd word because you know, it’s a relatively recent invention, you know, where it was called before, decorative arts or something. You know, and it wasn’t seen as the thing that it is now. And it’s also become such a baggy word which encompasses so many different types of activity which could range from styling to software design.
So I find it very imprecise, as a word to describe the multitude of different things you have to do to not only think up new ideas, but also put them into production. And then find a way of communicating them and making people interested enough for them to part with their hard earned cash. So we do that and lots of things around and try and keep the whole thing alive at a time when it’s increasingly difficult to be a smaller brand. And it’s even more difficult to be in, certainly in retail and some of those ways that used to get things to market before have become harder and harder to do.
AD: You talked about food, which I think is really exciting and I want to get more into that. But before we talk about food and some of your experiments that are ongoing, you said that you like to surprise yourself. And I think one of the common pitfalls, or certainly some of the things I’ve heard from other people is that there’s a point at which, when you’re scaling your business, at which you can kind of fall into a trap where you become more of a manager than a designer.
So, the fact that you’ve set yourself up, your business up so that you can still surprise yourself and experiment is maybe not as obvious as you might think for some other people. So is there anything you can share about some of the challenges in terms of creating that space for yourself?
TD: Well, yeah, it’s difficult. I think you have to, you’re probably better off, you know, from a consistency and a financial perspective not challenging yourself constantly. I think people, you know, appreciate almost too much consistency, but you know, for just, just for creativity alone, you have to constantly put yourself into, let’s say uncomfortable situations and try and push yourself to try things that you’re not familiar with.
And I think it’s good to be expert and people come to you for your expertise but at the same time you have to find a way of injecting you know, freshness into your core capabilities. Otherwise it will go stale very quickly. Having said that, you know, the modern world demands you to be fresh and new, almost every day now. And so that’s also something which actually suits me quite well because I prefer doing new ideas than finishing off older ones.
But what we’ve managed to do is to have a few successful globally products that allow us to experiment around the edges and then also try and rethink what a designer can be if they want to self-produce. And try and think of an original way of getting things to market.
AD: Is there a piece of a project that really stretched you in terms of your personal growth or really surprised you, you surprised yourself with?
TD: I try and push slightly limits of what we do. I mean the one that interests me at the moment is the one we were talking about just a second ago, which is kind of the restaurant. So really that’s you know, partly because, it’s partly actually because I took a studio which had a commercial kitchen inside it and it seemed a shame to pull it out and throw it away.
But it was also partly because I thought once that opportunity is presented to me, that it would be a much more clever and interesting way to have a furniture showroom than having a furniture showroom. Because you know, furniture showrooms are in essence relatively static -
AD: Yeah.
TD: In the way that people buy furniture, which is, particularly large pieces, once every 20 years or maybe even once in a lifetime. It’s really not a particularly attractive retail proposition, particularly in a world which demands and requires freshness and newness all the time. So you know, the way you have a furniture or justify a furniture showroom in a city center might be having a restaurant.
So it’s a complicated business. I can’t really recommend it for anybody else, but a series of circumstances put me in a position where I could do that and rather than saying, well no, that’s not my core business or restaurants are the riskiest proposition of any business you could get involved with, it just seemed to fit because we have the furniture, we had the kitchen and we needed to bring in more people.
I wanted to give life to a set and so food does that and it does that and recreates itself every day or twice or three times a day, if you do breakfast as well. You know, and it gets a lot of people through the door if you can have a successful restaurant. But of course we do the base of the restaurant, which is what it looks like and what it would, you know, the comfort that you sit in and the table that you sit at and the, you know, the glasses that you drink from and the light that illuminates the place, are all the things that we do.
And it’s worked really well in terms of trying to demonstrate not just a design style, but how you live with the stuff.
AD: Well, that’s what I was gonna say is a furniture showroom is really just hypothetical. Like here’s the piece and you can try and imagine what it would be like to live with this, but it’s sort of unapproachable in that you’re not supposed to you know, enjoy it the way, but in a restaurant setting you really can. Like not only is the piece something that you’re trying out, but you’re actually making memories and breaking bread and bonding and forming a relationship with the pieces, even if it’s short term. But I think that right there is essentially what a long term commitment with a piece of furniture is about.
So, there’s a distinct materiality to your work that I presume comes from an intimacy with materials and I wonder if that’s changed for you over the years? I mean I don’t know if you’re still welding as much as you used to?
TD: Yeah, I mean you know, like I’ve said, I get bored very easily but I also get obsessed with a specific material or often a manufacturing or craft technique. And I tend to explore it as deep as I can possibly go for a reasonable amount of time and then move on. And then you know, toy with it again later on. So you know, the steel was definitely the thing that made me into a designer, although ceramic, mud, clay was the thing that pointed me in that direction.
At the moment it’s glass that I’ve got a lot of ideas for and you know, specifically pressed glass which is often used industrially, which I’m trying to do in different ways but have experimented with soft materials more recently, with a lot of textiles which allowed me to get a lot more comfort and a lot more color into what we’re doing.
And you know, my metallic tastes have evolved from steel to copper, to brass and now really quite a lot of aluminium and stainless steel. So you know, there’s definitely a thread running through there, which is the materials are always a departure point. And again, I quite like making the analogy with food, which is that you know, the chefs that I like are getting very good raw ingredients and they’re respecting them. They’re trying not to mess with them too much. They’re trying to get the best out of their materials. And that’s kind of what we do in the studio.
And of course we’re more intimately connected to materials because we also have to, unlike a lot of designers who haven’t set up to do their own production or their own stockholding or their own retailers, we’re very close to people that make the stuff. So we know all of the manufacturers and they’re all over the world but we’ve been to all of the factories and know the people that make our stuff.
AD: Well that’s a nice connection. Are you cooking? Are you exploring food in that way?
TD: Probably a bit more in the last restaurant than this one, which is actually really busy. So you have to make a proper heavyweight commitment to starting your shift at 3:00 in the afternoon and then going all the way through to midnight. So I’ve become slightly lazy in professional cooking. I used to do a shift a week at the restaurant which is a bit lazier and more relaxed.
This one is in a more higher volume restaurant. And of course it’s closed at the moment, but we’re hoping to reopen.
AD: Is this a time of experimentation for you, I mean in the kitchen or otherwise? I know that you know, we’re in a space in time that will forever be marked by COVID-19 and I’m wondering how you’re getting through this chapter, what your primary tools and qualities and traits are?
TD: Well, I quite like chaos and it’s a very chaotic time. I mean I do worry though, you know, about the company, about the world that we’ll emerge into, but it’s definitely a time to rethink what we’re doing and to take advantage of a bit of mind space. Although most of it is taken up with phone conferences actually. So that seems to have become the thing where I thought I’d actually be using my hands a lot more. I’ve been stuck in front of the computer screen more than I’ve ever been before in my life. It’s kind of shocking. I do think that there’s definitely going to be a readjustment and you put a lot of time and energy into thinking what shape your company can be to face up to a new future, which is evolving, changing every day. So it’s an interesting time to think about how you can survive, which is a semi-shock, that’s for sure.
AD: And how about you on a personal level, like are you handling this with, I guess more optimism because it’s an opportunity and you thrive in chaos or are you sometimes consumed with your own fears of survival for your family?
TD: Well, I mean it’s not got to that yes and you know, I think you don’t want to over-dramatize it, but I worry more about the 200 people that are in my employ and how we can possibly pay them when there’s no, you know, there’s no business being done, no goods being moved, nothing being made. So that’s, that’s the thing that worries me.
You know, I worry for the manufacturers; I worry for the dealers and distributors that we supply. So you know, I’m not taking it frivolously and it requires some pretty tough decisions just to keep believing that you can come out the other end. I think it’s affecting everybody, but at the same time I think there is also a degree of hysteria which we have to be careful not to… Or not to sink into deep depression right now.
AD: Is there a chapter of your life prior to this that you think maybe trained you?
TD: Well, I’ve lived through half a dozen crises that look like they were gonna be neverending. When I was a teenager there was only power three days a week and you weren’t allowed to have baths that were more than three inches deep and there were strikes all over the world and violence. I remember things that seemed more scary than this actually, so I don’t doubt that there’ll be a new beginning.
AD: What are the simple pleasures that are bringing you peace right now? It sounds like you thrive in chaos, so maybe peace isn’t something that ever alludes you [laughter].
TD: Nature is chaos isn’t it as well?
AD: Yeah.
TD: You’ve only got to watch an Attenborough documentary. In fact I was watching the Jane Goodall documentary last night, so there’s more television, definitely. No, I mean it’s springing in London, you’re seeing rebirth all around you. For sure the stars are brighter because there’s less pollution and the flowers are coming out, there’s more birds and the insects still seem to be struggling. There’s not so many butterflies or anything, but it’s an unusually warm and early spring.
And although there’s a lot being stuck inside, I’m fortunate to have some outdoor space and be close to a lot of greenery. You know London is one-third parks as well, so you know, and we’ve seen people with much, much more severe lockdowns. Because we have some things made in China and we have some things made in Italy, that they’ve had, both of those nations have had much more severe lockdowns than we have.
And it was probably even scarier because there was no pre-history to it. So I think that you know, in a way I’m fortunate and I see you know, signs right now of a bit of light at the end of the tunnel. I mean infection rate today has dropped hugely in the UK and they’re talking about, you know, the restrictions loosening a bit. So I think it’ll do some good to some people to have had to take time off work. But it’s going to be a disaster economically, that’s for sure.
AD: Fast forwarding to further in the future, let’s say when this is in our rear view mirror. What’s your most optimistic vision for your future?
TD: You’ve got to hope that people, that somehow other people get used to consuming a bit less and flying a bit less and realizing that there’s a link between this and the destruction of the natural world. So you know, it gives me a chance to reassess what I do and what I make and who I make it for. And so I’ll be looking at readjusting all of that. Churchill said: Never waste a good crisis.
AD: [Laughs] I think that’s solid advice and we’ll be staying tuned to see you know, what creative genius comes out of this. I wonder if there is a current project that you wanna share with our listeners that we can look forward to, either in the pipeline or that’s out right now that you want to call attention to?
TD: You know, we do, in the majority, lighting is the biggest part of our business and lighting is a kind of really exciting field to work in and has been for a few years with the whole industry being powered by amazing engineering and scientific innovation and transformers and LEDs and all the rest of it. We’ve been working recently with some good friends of ours, as in Innsbruck have a professional lighting company, track lighting mainly, which is you know, very discreet and very minimal.
Anyway, they make it all in the mountains of Innsbruck and they’ve managed to keep their factory open during the whole crisis and we’re able to launch this series of very flat and very basic LED panels within which is something we’ve been doing over the last couple of days. So what’s kind of nice is where normally our lamps are made in reasonably big quantities and then sent all the way around the world, these are made to order.
So they’re not made until somebody orders them and then they’re delivered five or six days later. So there’s an efficiency about it, it plays into my interest in engineering. It’s using some of my most recent thinking about circuit boards, which are really the things that power the modern world, you know. And I’m really keen to see if we can do a significantly different business model, but also a different way of lighting spaces technically.
We’ve been very decorative, if you like, and so it’s kind of nice to work in a field which is now much more about technical lighting and light up, how you illuminate spaces architecturally rather than decoratively. So that’s my latest and of course, it’s been really difficult this month because this month is normally the Milan Furniture Fair, which is the big, big event for us in Europe, and in fact a global event, that I’m sure you’ve been to.
But we have been unable to launch anything of the normal things that we do. So what’s quite nice is having these other projects which have been probably less visible and less obvious, being the only things that we can launch right now because they don’t depend on these quite complicated global supply chains and distribution chains, which you know, we’ve been part of for so long.
So it’s trying to rethink how we, yeah, how we make what we make and who we sell it to, which is what I was talking about earlier, includes trying to make things in a more bespoke way and more personal way, but in a very technical way as well. And what’s astonishing is that that’s not done you know, in some remote location, it’s done in the beautiful ski resorts above Innsbruck.
AD: Yes, what’s the name of this project?
TD: It’s called Code, like Morse code, so it uses two or three very simple modules which themselves are, you can adapt and specify in your own way. So it’s really about also only designing up to a point and then liberating a system to other designers to then adapt to their own needs.
AD: Yeah.
TD: A bit like a Meccano kit, or a Lego kit.
AD: Yes, lighting Legos. Well, this has been really interesting, thank you for sharing your whole trajectory and your personality with us.
TD: Well, thank you for having me.
AD: Hey, thanks for listening! For more information on Tom, read the show notes. Just click the link in the details of this episode on your podcast app, or go to Cleverpodcast.com where you can also sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe to Clever on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you would please rate and review, it really does help us out. We also love chatting with you on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, you can find us at Clever Podcast and you can find me at Amy Devers. Clever is produced by 2VDE Media with editing by Rich Stroffolino and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is proudly distributed by Design Milk.
This episode is presented as part of WantedDesign Manhattan Online Conversation Series, presented by Clever and Design Milk. Visit wanteddesignnyc.com/online to view the schedule and register for live talks.
Photo Credit: Peer Lindgreen
Clever is produced by 2VDE Media. Thanks to Rich Stroffolino for editing this episode.
Music in this episode courtesy of El Ten Eleven—hear more on Bandcamp.
Shoutout to Jenny Rask for designing the Clever logo.
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