Ep. 143: Industrial Designer Edward Barber
Designer Edward Barber grew up in a small UK village running around with his brothers, making tree houses, bows and arrows, and drawing. As a teenager, he fell in love with sailing, fixing boats, and photography. He eventually landed in the architecture program at Royal College of Art where in the first week he met Jay Osgerby. The two became fast friends, collaborators and founding partners of Barber Osgerby. In the early years, with some “engineered luck” in the form of Giulio Cappellini, Edward and Jay were fast-tracked in the world of international furniture design. Since then, they’ve gone on to found Universal, an architecture and interior design studio, and Map, focused on tech and industrial design. Having designed everything from stacking chairs with a dynamic tilt aimed at improved learning in schools, to experiential sound installations... carving out his own path has worked out just fine!
Read the full transcript here.
Edward Barber: Anything that has a level of innovation I always find fascinating, and that’s really why I love design is that now every project throws different problems at you.
Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today I’m talking to Edward Barber of the renowned UK-based furniture and industrial design studio, Barber Osgerby. Edward met Jay Osgerby when they were both students in architecture at the Royal Academy of Art. They became fast friends and collaborators and even started working together professionally before they had graduated. They formalized their partnership and design studio, Barber Osgerby, directly out of school in 1996. Famed Italian creative director, Giulio Cappellini took one of their early furniture pieces to market and gave them a running start in the international design world. Since then, they’ve established themselves as consistently brilliant in both practical undertakings, like the Tip Ton stack chair for Vitra, the On & On collection for Emeco, as well as their experimental artistic endeavors like the Iris Table for Established & Sons or the experiential sound installation for Sony at the Milan furniture fair. In addition to being distinguished as Royal designers for industry in the UK, their work is held in the permanent collections of many international museums , including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and London’s Design Museum, among others. Here’s Edward.
EB: My name is Edward Barber, I live in London and I am a designer, of sorts. I say that because I cross various different, I guess, boundaries in design, from industrial design, furniture design and so on, which I’m sure we’ll get into later on. I have a studio, which I share with Jay Osgerby in the East side of London in an area called Shoreditch, which is an old warehouse area of London where all the supplies used to come in from the ships, docking not so far away on the River Thames. And we work out of a studio which was an old spring warehouse. In fact the springs were furniture, so it’s sort of come full circle, this building. One minute it was a spring for furniture and now it’s designers for furniture.
AD: I always like to take it way back to zero, to figure out how you got to be you by learning, your formative years. So, if you wouldn’t mind, would you talk to me about your childhood and what kind of kid you were, your family dynamic, all those things that fascinated you when you were young?
EB: Well, I grew up in the countryside in a small village on the outskirts of a small town, which meant I was in easy reach of countryside and the fields and the trees and the streams and so on. I had two brothers, so we were quite a gang. We used to go for bicycle rides and explore. It’s all about exploration and quite early on in my childhood, my mother passed away rather suddenly. So that obviously threw a bit of a spanner in the works, I guess, for us. And the three of us, the three boys became very close and we hung out a lot and we sort of created our own gang, I guess.
My father was somewhat, I guess distracted. He was suddenly on his own but having to provide for the family, we got through quite a few nannies. They didn’t last that long, I remember. They were kind of challenged, I think. We were quite [laughs] naughty. Yeah, I seem to remember the revolving doors of nannies coming in and out. And so I think the early years were a little unstable, so we kind of relied on each other. I think myself, I became, a little introverted in a way and I liked to spend a lot of time on my own. I was quite happy sitting drawing, making things, going for walks on my own into the countryside.
And that was something that I think progressed my creative side in a way. I think I felt very at home just doing things on my own and experimenting. My father had a workshop in the garden and it was for woodwork and metalwork. He was an avid, I would say probably more of an avid DIY-er, but he had quite a nice set of tools that his father had given him because he was an engineer, my grandfather was an engineer, and he, a mechanical engineer, he was really into, making things himself. And he taught me a lot as well, my grandfather taught me a lot about how to work metal and work wood and I was forever making sort of tree houses and bows and arrows and stuff. And so it was a very outdoorsy, I suppose, childhood, and quite creative in a low tech kind of way.
AD: Yeah and where are you in the birth order of you and your brothers?
EB: So I was number two, right in the middle.
AD: Right in the middle and how old were you when your mother passed away?
EB: Nearly five. I think when something so dramatic happens at an early age, as a child it’s amazing, you’re so resilient, you can kind of cope. Well, you think you can cope and you just keep going.
AD: Well, we’re sort of, humans are kind of amazing in the way they figure out how to survive. Do you feel like your outdoorsy, creative, sort of tinkering and exploring and experimenting alone was also, a seeking of meaning sort of -
EB: Probably, yeah, probably. I don’t know. I just always loved to make things with my hands and working in wood, is such an easy material to do something with, you know, not, you know, it’s a very difficult material to make great things out of, but it’s very easy material to make something out of. If you’ve got some nails and some glue and suddenly you can make something quite rapidly and it’s great. I think when I got a bit older we used to spend our holidays in a little house up in Wales, which is right on the coast.
And I had a sailing boat and I absolutely loved sailing. Again, mainly on my own. I used to sort of potter around all the different coves around the area and I spent a lot of time on that boat because you’re always kind of damaging it [laughs], big holes in the bottom and bang it into other bits and bobs. So I spent a bit of time, and I absolutely loved that. I loved fixing things and I really admired it… It was a very simple boat, but it was a wooden boat with a plywood shell along the outside.
And I think it was really at that point that I sort of figured out that I quite liked to do something to do with you know, there was something about this boat that I just loved. It was lightweight, I liked the frame of it, I liked the fact that it was a highly functional thing, yet was really simple inside.
AD: I can imagine that would be really kind of exciting for you because it’s a vessel as well that transports you around the water.
EB: Yeah, it was pretty handy.
EB: Anything that was a vessel as a kid, you know, a bicycle or a boat was just amazing. Just that sense of freedom.
AD: But then you also have this connection to it through having to repair it and maintain it, the sort of long term nurturing kind of connection to it.
EB: Yeah, and I think if you do do that, it’s something, I think is lacking these days, is that people don’t tend to, they don’t spend much time fixing things because nowadays you can just get rid of it and get another one. You know how people used to fix, you know, they’d darn their socks, they’d fix a hole in their jacket. People looked after things and I think you then had a real appreciation of why and how things are made and you really grow to love those things and they become a part of your life.
AD: I agree, they become a part of your life, they add meaning to your life and texture, they stock your conversations with other people, with stories. They just add a richness and I think we do a disservice to ourselves when we erase those histories by just disposing of items and getting new ones -
EB: Well, actually it was interesting. A few years back Jay and I, we did an exhibition, it was called In The Making and we chose, I think about 25 everyday objects that the public, the general public would be very familiar with. It might be a pencil or a bank note or a tennis ball, things that everyone was familiar with it and we looked into how these things were made. And we had an exhibition of all these objects in a part made state. So you’d have -
AD: Ooh!
EB: The pencils before they were cut into individual pencils or you’d have a massive sheet of bank notes before they’re cut, or we had, you know, we had a MacBook Pro, as it was just a simple block of aluminum before it was machined.
AD: Oh, wow!
EB: So the cues were there, people kind of thought, this looks familiar but it wasn’t necessarily obvious what it was. And what was fascinating about that show, so the whole point of this show was to sort of lift the lid on how things are made because we felt that people are so detached now from that. Even when I was a kid, you know, we’d buy a yard brush from a guy who made them and you’d probably go to the baker and you’d see the loaves being put into the oven. Just really simple things like that. We’re becoming more and more detached from that because you get it from the supermarket or you click online and the broom or the brush arrives at your house.
You have no idea who made it, how it was made, what it’s made from. And so this exhibition really was trying to re-engage people with that making process and it was such a, really unexpected hit with the public.
AD: Oh, I can believe it, yeah.
EB: We thought maybe it’s a bit too, you know, a bit designery, but it really wasn’t. And people used to come back with their kids and they’d say, look, this is how a marble is made and this is how a sofa is made these days. We had a sofa, not in the traditional sense, but a metal frame that had foam, injected moulded foam over the top of it. There were some high tech things, some low tech things and yeah, it was fascinating. So I think people, you know, in the past they would spend their evenings, before the advent of TV, people had hobbies. People made curtains or they built airplanes, everyone did things with their hands. And I think that’s something that’s really missing in today’s society.
AD: I agree wholeheartedly. I love the sound of that show; I would have loved it -
EB: It was supposed to come to the Cooper Hewitt, but I don’t know what happened there. It did travel quite a while, I mean travelled to quite a few locations.
AD: Maybe there’s an opportunity in the future. But I wanna get back to your childhood, in your adolescence, I don’t want to project onto you, but I can imagine at some point there’s going to be some, angst, like when your mother is taken from you so suddenly, and your father is, I’m sure, doing his best, but distracted and you’ve ganged up with your brothers and cycled through nannies [laughs], probably in a way of, I don’t know if you were rejecting them because they couldn’t possibly replace your mother. But you know, how did you navigate the adolescent years.
EB: There wasn’t like this huge rebellion and kind of craziness that happened. Again, I was still quite, I was really happy doing my own thing and focusing on… I think the thing that really changed things for me was that my father bought me a camera. He bought me this fantastic Nikon camera, 35mm camera -
I was getting into photography and he really recognized that and then bought this camera, which was really quite a surprise to me because I never thought this was gonna happen. But I got this thing and that just changed everything for me. I just spent every day photographing everything, you know, my friends, nature, buildings, and then I spent days and days in the labs processing the film and printing them and I just -
AD: Oh, for a guy like you, how exciting that would be because the camera is such a really intricate machine and then the chemistry of developing film is magic. You must have been really in your element.
EB: Yeah, yeah, it really is, it’s alchemy, you suddenly end up with this white, you start with a white sheet of paper and then you have this incredibly detailed photograph of someone’s face or a building. And it’s, yeah, I spent so much time doing that. And actually in later years I ended up thinking that maybe I would become a photographer and I worked with a fashion photographer for a year as an assistant, you know, travelled a lot around the world.
And realized that, I learned a hell of a lot about photography, but realized that it wasn’t my, well, fashion photography definitely wasn’t my calling [laughs] but photography, it still sort of lingered. I spent many, many months, over a period of years travelling in, all over the world, photographing, a lot in South East Asia actually, in Vietnam in the early 90s and Burma and Japan and taking two or three cameras with me, bags and bags of film and just photographing everything.
It was a sort of personal kind of release in a sense. I found it very, very satisfying. I remember even feeling once that I didn’t even need to see the photograph; as long as I knew I’d captured it. I remember that feeling really strongly. I thought, I’ve got that and it doesn’t matter now whether I actually turn that into a print or not. And that was a very interesting moment for me, I think, because then I realized what photography meant to me.
It was a way, through the lens of the camera, to see things in different ways. So that became quite a part of my life in my adolescent years. I was at Sixth Form College, I studied design, I studied art, I really didn’t know where I wanted to go. The fantastic thing is, in the UK, and I’m sure they have in the States; they have these courses that are called ‘foundation courses.’ You spend a year and you try probably 10 different things. You might do a bit of graphic design, then you do some textile, screen printing, photography, welding, and you try all these different things.
You just get a momentary glimpse into those different worlds and I guess, I mean I loved the year, it was absolutely fantastic. But in a sense, it didn’t really help me because [laughter] it confused me -
AD: You’re like, I like all of it!
EB: Yeah, I mean there were certain things I probably didn’t want to do, but I would have thought two-thirds of them, I thought, oh god, these are great. Anything, I’ve never stopped mentally exploring processes and ideas and anything that has a level of innovation, I always find fascinating. That’s, I think, why I love design now is that every project throws different problems at you. So up until I went, I suddenly had to make a decision, obviously I had to do a course in something -
AD: Did you feel, I don’t know, a little bit railroaded by this, you need to specialize in one thing?
EB: I mean I probably did. In the end I didn’t specialize [laughter] -
AD: Yeah, I know.
EB: I hedged my bets so much. I did a degree in design, but I chose the college because they did life drawing every week.
So I kind of didn’t want to let go too much of the art stuff. I didn’t want to… I loved drawing, I loved life drawing, I really loved fine art. But I kind of knew in my heart that I wasn’t, that wasn’t quite the right thing for me. I knew that it had to be something a little bit more technical, something a little bit more, maybe mechanical. I loved when I was at the school, I absolutely loved drawing biological drawings of plants and bone structures and cell structures. And there was something I found very pleasing in that. And I think that was probably the earliest signs of me wanting to get into maybe sort of design or architecture.
AD: You know, it’s occurring to me as you’re telling me your story, between the photography and the boat that you lovingly maintained and the life drawing, all of those things were sort of honing and attuning your powers of observation which then, of course, intersects with your desire and your understanding of how materials and mechanics work.
EB: Yeah, it’s true. I mean while I was studying design, I spent a couple of summers working in Canada on construction sites. I mean it was fundamentally to pay for my degree, but you know, I obviously chose that because I wanted to learn a bit more about construction. I wanted to understand how buildings worked. So I did that for a couple of summers and then I ended up going back to Canada to work a little bit more and it was at that point that I thought, okay, maybe architecture is what I should be doing.
And I had always imagined one day that I would end up at the Royal College of Art and of course they do have an architecture course there. And so I ended up applying for that. And I remember the moment when I actually, it was a bit of a rush because I was in Canada and I realized that the deadline for the applications was, it was only about a month after I realized that I was going to apply. So I had to get back to London, get a portfolio together and I finally, I remember arriving at the college and they said, “Oh yeah, put your portfolio in this room,” and it was a room, it was so huge. High ceiling and it was about, I’d say waist height in portfolios.
AD: Oh my gosh.
EB: And I just looked in that room and I just thought, and I just threw the portfolio in and I thought well, that’s not going to happen. Anyway, miraculously, and I mean that, I got an interview and yeah, got onto the course. And I guess that’s really where the next chapter of my life began because it was in the first week there that I met Jay Osgerby -
AD: Wow.
EB: Who became, you know, first a great friend and then sort of in an ad hoc way, we became [laughs] business partners and co-creators. And that was in the early 90s.
AD: What was the chemistry, with the friendship, when you first met Jay? You had no idea what your future behold -
EB: No, not at all, and I was typically for me, I was still not even convinced that architecture was actually the right thing to do as well. So we got on really well, we were into the same sort of music; we used to go clubbing together. We had a similar sense of humor [laughs] which was a little ridiculous and sometimes a little dark. And yeah, we just had a great time. We ended up in the end sharing an apartment together and that led to… Well, the college, I suppose the course, at the time we didn’t really feel it was challenging us in the way we had hoped.
It was going through quite a tricky time anyway and so we took it upon ourselves to start working together on projects. We actually found, through various friends of ours, we found projects to do. So we did a bar in London -
AD: And these are extracurricular?
EB: Completely and much to the absolute horror of our tutors -
AD: Oh wow [laughs].
EB: No, no, it was really bad; I mean it was really bad -
AD: Tell me more!
EB: Yeah, well [laughter], we kept it very quiet at the beginning but of course towards the end of the first year, you know, you have a show to show your years’ work and our years’ work was looking pretty slim at the college. So we thought we’re going to have to show some of this other work. Now, it was fairly practical, it was somewhat avant-garde, but it wasn’t what you’d expect to be doing at the Royal College of Art. But at the same time we were learning so much about construction again, but also how to manage clients and budgets and all these things which we’d never really had an experience of.
So it was a massive learning curve for us and we were working all the hours, we were working through the night. Anyway, we finally ended up showing one of our projects, alongside our college work, our course work. And that created a massive problem because this was also at a time where there was a recession going on and I think some of the tutors were probably not that busy themselves. [Laughs] So we’d somehow managed to find some work and we were effectively put on a threat list of, you know, you’re going to leave. Some of the tutors wanted to throw us out of the college.
And at that point I almost thought, well, you know, maybe that’s the best thing, maybe we should just leave and get on. And then I thought, no, I’ve really wanted to come to this college and there’s a lot more to learn here. So we stayed on and having said that, I spent a lot of time in the photography department as well because I’d spent, I think, six months before travelling and I wanted to develop and process and print all my films. It wasn’t a very linear path through the Royal College, but great fun and you know, the end result was that we did learn a lot. We made some great friends and I started working with Jay.
AD: Yes, and that relationship with Jay has proven to be enduring and I’m sure challenging at times.
EB: There’s been many, many challenges along the way. We’ve been working together, I suppose we did these projects at college and the first one was in ’92, so that’s, what are we in now? It’s nearly 30 years isn’t it?
AD: Wow.
EB: Yeah and we’re still best friends, so something is obviously working.
AD: Yeah, I’ll say [laughs].
EB: No, there’s been huge challenges, business challenges, financial challenges and design challenges. But it’s probably easier to ride all those problems when you’ve started together. I mean we didn’t work for anyone before we started our own business -
AD: That’s what I was going to ask. So right out of school the two of you formed a studio?
EB: Yeah, we did. I mean it wasn’t that we thought we were being smart, or that it was a good idea, it just sort of happened. Because we’d already done these couple of projects and they led onto more projects and we did have an ambition to go and work for someone, who is actually one of the tutors at the college, and one of the more favorable tutors. And, I don’t know, the project he had for us just didn’t quite materialize, I don’t know what happened to it, but we just kept working, kept working.
And finally we got to a point, I think it’s bit like when a plane is going down the runway, you reach a certain point where you’ve got to take off, you can’t stop, there’s not enough runway. And we got to that point where we just thought, we can’t really work for anyone now. We’re ruined; we’re ruined for any other business. I mean working for any other business.
So we just carried on and we just muddled through. I wouldn’t necessarily advise people to do that because even the most fundamental things, we didn’t know. We didn’t really know how to actually run a studio; we didn’t really know really how to file things correctly. We didn’t really know how to invoice; we didn’t have any skills with managing clients. But bit by bit you just work it all out, I guess.
AD: Can you actually detail how you worked it all out a little bit?
EB: Well, through mistakes you know, mainly, through mistakes [laughter] some which are quite costly, some which were… You know, occasionally we had a really great client who fully understood that we weren’t very experienced but could see something within the way we worked that they liked and they wanted somehow, they wanted to work with us. And so I really thank those early clients who stuck with us and let us experiment on their houses and whatever it was, restaurants and so on, and probably cost them a lot of time and money. But they were very supportive and that was great.
AD: Those are meaningful when people are with you because they believe in you and not because they believe in how efficient you are [laughs] necessarily.
EB: No, exactly and I think, I don’t know how it is in America, but in the British education system, I felt, you never really got to feel like you were, not so much respected, but you were never really made to feel that what you were doing was great and was good, it was always kind of, it was very much sort of, not bad, but you could do this or this should have been done better. And all these things, and so when you’ve suddenly got, you’re out in the real world and a client says, “This is fantastic,” you sort of think, what? How’s that?
This is great, okay, I’ve done something right. [Laughs] But that was, yeah no, very rewarding and very, yeah, just rewarding and fun and I think it was very soon into our first two/three projects that we started to design furniture for these projects. We were doing quite a lot of residential work in those days and people would say, “Oh, could you design me a table,” or could you design me whatever, a lamp to go in my living room because they wanted the complete, vision of what we were doing. I didn’t study furniture design or product design. I was more studying interior design in my degree. So it wasn’t something I’d ever done before. Jay had done furniture design, so he was more familiar with it.
But we ended up designing, occasionally, some quite nice pieces and it was really, it was the very first piece that we did together, which was for a restaurant in South Kensington in London. And it was made from plywood, it was a low table, like a sort of coffee table, I guess. But it was very architectural looking, it didn’t really look like a coffee table, it was quite sculptural. And it was something that we didn’t really think too much about, but we had it made by this fantastic company in London called Isokon -
AD: Hmm-mm.
EB: So we were sharing an apartment at the Royal College and it was in this amazing tower block which was at the top of Portobello Road in West London. And it’s called Trellick Tower and it was designed by an architect called Goldfinger who is in fact the namesake for the Bond film -
Yeah, he fell out with Ian Fleming because he built a very, very modernist house right next door to Ian Fleming in London and he was very upset by it. And his next book, The Baddie, was Goldfinger. Anyway, so we were living in this apartment on the 22nd floor and it became our studio. And so we had this table built and friends would come over and say, “What the hell is that? Where did you get that from?”
And we said, “Oh no, it’s one of ours, it’s something we designed for this restaurant.” And eventually we decided well maybe we should show it in some kind of way and it was at that time that Wallpaper magazine was just, I think it was in its first issue or second issue. But it was creating quite a buzz and we had no funds whatsoever to you know, take a booth in the Design Fair in London. So we actually called the editor, Tyler and said, “Look, why don’t we design you a booth for the London Design Fair because you need to be represented.”
And he said, “Well, we were thinking of doing that.” So in the end we designed it and put this table in the centre which got a lot of exposure.
EB: Designers tend to be pretty entrepreneurial [laughs]. And so with that we got, it was Giulio Cappellini who spotted it -
AD: Cappellini always shows up at the right place at the right time [laughs].
EB: And he just said, “Wow, what’s this?” And so we were introduced to Giulio by Tyler Brûlé and he said, “I want to produce this.” So that was, well, obviously a bit of luck, for sure. But I mean I would call it engineered luck. So we were introduced on our first piece to Giulio Cappellini and then we started working with Giulio and that’s really how we were introduced into the Italian world of furniture and then the wider range of manufacturers.
AD: Well, that is the red carpet way to get introduced to furniture.
EB: This was in ’97 I think, or, yeah, probably ’97. So Giulio Cappellini, for those of you who don’t know, was, well, he was a furniture manufacturer, but beyond that, he was really a curator. He produced furniture that was very different and very new, using new techniques, very innovative things. Things that wouldn’t probably sell, weren’t commercially viable. But he didn’t really care about that because he was a sort of, yeah, he was a collector, in a sense, and he gave amazing opportunities to people who he saw might or were already gonna be great designers, I suppose.
I mean if you look back now at those people that he had sort of produced their first pieces, it’s quite an incredible collection of people. And he was very happy to put inexperienced and straight out of college people on a platform and show their work, which at the time, and this is before the internet, where you couldn’t just self-publish yourself. He didn’t have a website. So he was very important and highly instrumental in the industry.
AD: I always like to think of him, like the Clive Davis of furniture design [laughs].
EB: Yeah.
AD: Very much a visionary, very much a talent spotter and also in his convictions, passionate about opening up the pathways for design to be able to flourish.
EB: He was one of these people who didn’t really see barriers and he gave you so much leeway. You know, he would just, you would design something and he would say, right, we’re gonna make it, we’re gonna do it. But it was more like a gallery in a sense. I mean he did have commercial pieces that were being produced and obviously the company, you know, did make money and did survive, but I think the things that he was most passionate about were really the more experimental pieces.
AD: Clearly that’s a highlight at the beginning of your career, and I’m sure it was a learning curve as well.
EB: Yeah, it was. I think, again, it was that feeling that you’re actually being appreciated and someone is taking you seriously.
AD: Yeah, god, that’s everything isn’t it?
EB: Yeah, yeah, it was really quite a big difference, I think, it was a real shift at that point where someone was taking your drawings, making them into three dimensional objects and then putting energy and effort into promoting those things and you, globally. And that, you know, that was pretty astonishing really.
AD: You don’t seem like the kind of person who had to really wrestle his ego out of the way. But I’m sure some rapid international success can present problems that maybe you grew too fast or you know, growing pains of some sorts.
EB: I think we were both as shocked as each other that this was happening [laughter]. I don’t think it really, we were excited by it and we wanted to do more of it, for sure, but I don’t think it really changed anything for us. I think we certainly felt like okay, this is Cappellini but I mean, you know, what about someone else. What about Vitro, what about Flos, what about all these other companies that we also completely loved, but are much more difficult in a sense.
I mean, I don’t know if they were more difficult, but you certainly had to have more, I guess more of a back catalogue of things to show them before they would take you into the fold and take you seriously.
Giulio, he gave us the starting point and then we then had something to build on and something to aspire to, to go to all these other great companies as well.
AD: That’s fantastic and it sounds like that really opened doors, but also fuelled your passion.
EB: It did, it did, and so then suddenly we had sort of two paths that we were following. We had the architecture, obviously, still, and then we had the design side. And personally, knew, even after a year of doing the furniture and products and industrial stuff, well, one or two years into it, I knew that that was something that I was much, much happier with, more, I felt it much more interesting and rewarding than the architectural stuff.
AD: I could see why that might be. I mean at that scale it’s much easier to innovate and iterate and explore and experiment -
EB: It is and also you get the chance to, I think what… When you’re doing architecture, mostly anyway, your building is the prototype, effectively. Of course you can build window details and you can do mock-ups of the floor junctions, with the walls, you get an idea of it. But until it’s actually built, you can’t do a prototype building, basically, in 99% of the cases. For me, I like to think, I like to have time to work on things and change things and perfect things.
I like the process of the prototype. You know, if you’re designing a chair, for example, I mean you might have 20-30-40-50 different prototypes where you’re looking at every little detail until you get to what you feel is the right thing. And so that process I find really fun and exciting.
AD: You said 30 years or so, working together with Jay and much of that running your own studio. You have crafted for yourself a life where you don’t have to stick to just furniture or architecture. You work across many disciplines and industries and it sounds to me like that’s born of your need to experiment and not be stuck in one place. It’s that foundation year where you were like, I can do all of this -
EB: We often used to say that our studio felt a bit like a Royal College where on each floor you have someone doing some upholstery for a new sofa and then you’d have someone welding or soldering or you know, working on some electronic stuff. And another studio, and then you have someone building a, I don’t know, a chair out of wood in another place and it really felt very energetic and very sort of creative and just exactly how we wanted it really.
So over the years what we did is, we’ve split off, so we have Barber Osgerby, which is the company, I guess, or the studio, where we work typically in furniture industrial design. And then we turned the architecture and interior design studio into another company called Universal. And Universal, the name really was because at the time we were doing so many different things with that. We were doing exhibition design, retail, restaurants. And that company has grown.
One of the, I suppose fairly recently in London, the ACE Hotel in Shoreditch is one of the projects we did with Universal. And then we started another company called Map and Map sprung out of the Barber Osgerby Studio and was more focused on tech, I suppose. Or certain strategic work in industrial design and tech area. So for example, Map recently did the Quantum computer for IBM, which they launched.
And then Barber Osgerby, we work across such a wide range, as you said. We work in furniture and lighting and… But we also work with galleries, we work with Gallery Kreo in Paris and we have worked in the past with Haunch of Venison gallery in London. And gallery work is a really, again, another way to experiment.
We use that, I guess a format; working with a gallery is that you’re not constrained. You’re not really constrained by production processes. You’re not really constrained by budgets and you can put materials with other materials that you couldn’t do in a mass produced product. And so you know, we might take a process and just really take that as far as we possibly can, which was a project we did, in fact, with a company called Established & Sons.
We did a series of tables, called the Iris Tables which were made from between 40 and 60 segments of machined metal that were anodized in a range of really strong, beautiful colors. These things are not cheap to make, but that’s fine because it’s a gallery show, there’s only a few pieces being made. And it’s for a very, very different reason from; let’s say a plastic stacking chair, for restaurants and cafes. And so we’ve kept all these avenues of work open so that we can, I guess, just keep experimenting.
AD: On a practical level, do you have your fingers in all of these areas in a way that suits you and are they all held close, like do they all operate out of the same spring factory that you’re in?
EB: We always had lots of different studios that were somehow linked. And at one point I think we had five studios that were all somehow linked. They were on different streets, but there were underground passages that linked them [laughter]. It was quite interesting. If you were trying to avoid someone, it was quite easy because you’d just disappear underground and then appear up on another street in Shoreditch. [Laughs] It was very close. I mean in about, again, two years ago I think it was, we sold a majority stake in two of the businesses, Universal and Map. We’re still involved. It was really about merging actually, with a digital agency.
Because so many of our projects were going into that digital arena, it didn’t matter whether it was a hotel or an exhibition or whether it was a tech product. You know, everything had such a heavy digital component and we felt that it was actually beneficial for the studio to be linked much more closely with that world. And so we sort of merged those two studios together with another digital studio.
AD: I can see how that would make sense and also it would probably provide some added infrastructure to kind of support this growing organism.
EB: But then Barber Osgerby is still in the spring factory. We didn’t -
AD: Yay.
EB: That’s always been a very different sort of business, I guess, in a way. We always feel like we’re sort of tinkering about, doing experiments of different materials and working… I don’t know, it didn’t, it isn’t something that we wanted to, I guess, release in a way. It was just something that, it was just Jay and myself really.
AD: On a practical level, it can be really hard to buy yourself time to experiment and innovate if you don’t know that the results of this innovation are gonna be fruitful, or this experimentation are gonna be fruitful or work for a project. And I know projects come with budgets and deadlines, so how do you build in space for you and Jay to just play?
EB: I mean it is difficult, definitely, but I think a lot of that has come with experience, of knowing how to work with clients. So quite often you know, we might be briefed by a company or an individual from a company for a project and we will think, this isn’t actually very interesting. We don’t really want to do this [laughter]. But -
AD: I was gonna ask that question too, so I’m -
EB: There is something in there and how are we gonna… Maybe if we can flip this project around and focus in a different way, we can actually turn this into something really interesting. And I think, actually there’s an example which, I guess it’s probably 10 years ago now. We did a project with Sony based out of Tokyo. And they called us and they said, you know, we want to do an exhibition really to show people what we’re up to because we’re actually still a very innovative company, although we’ve lost some ground.
Mainly because there are other players in the market, Sony in the 80s was, certainly in Europe was everything. You wanted to have a Sony Walkman, a Sony TV, a Sony everything. And obviously with the advent of Apple and some of the Korean companies, they’d lost, some market share, anyway. And they came up with an idea which didn’t really resonate, I guess, with us. And so we went back to them and said, listen, you know, we loved Sony as a company and just thought this would be an amazing opportunity, a great project. And we said listen, if you’ll show us what you’re actually working on, take the lid off, take us to Tokyo, show us what experimental stuff you’re working on, maybe, if you’ll allow us to, we’d like to show people what that is, but in a really sort of un-commercial and experimental way.
So we went to Tokyo and we went into the labs there and they showed us all the work they were working on in sound. And one of the things they were working on was this incredible technology which was a solenoid, which you could put into any material and you could make that material vibrate and turn it into a speaker.
That in itself, you know, is pretty abstract, but we ended up making these objects that were incredible speakers made out of wood, made out of Corian acrylic, and we showed them in this enormous, I think it was 5,000 square foot, it was an anechoic chamber, which is like a recording studio where you cover the walls in triangles of foam. So that inside, it’s acoustically, completely dead in there. So you can’t really, you can’t hear anything. In fact after you’ve been in there about a minute, you start to hear your own blood rushing around your head because your ears are internalized.
And what we did is we showed these objects and it was just the most bizarre abstract exhibition, but it was a real phenomenal hit because it was Sony showing in Milan, but without promoting a product or a commercially available product. It was just showing their way of experimenting and working and it was just, it was really brilliant for us to work on and brilliant for them.
AD: Okay, so this is a really fascinating example that you shared with me and one of the things that I love about it is that when the brief came in and didn’t resonate, instead of making an assumption or a judgment on it, you tinkered with the brief.
EB: Well, that sounds like we were being really sort of crafty. It was trying to get them to understand that we could do something much more interesting for them.
AD: Yes, and so that’s what I’m trying to get at. It’s almost like when you meet someone and they rub you the wrong way, but you know they’re a good person, so you put in the time to get to know them -
EB: Yeah, yeah.
AD: It’s a kind of, an acceptance policy, like I know there’s something here, but let us be part of the creative DNA of even this very beginning of the relationship.
EB: Yeah, definitely, but I think more and more, as the studio has evolved, this happens pretty much most projects, honestly. Another example would be the Tip Ton chair, which is a chair we designed for Vitra, probably again about 10 years ago. And that came about from a completely unrelated; it didn’t even start with Vitra. It started with the Royal Society of Arts in the UK, they asked us to do a survey of school furniture in the UK and make recommendations of what we felt were the right, going forward, what would be the best school chairs to use because the government was embarking on this amazing project for building new schools.
So we really, on an advisory panel, I suppose, and having done our research we realized that there weren’t actually any really great chairs being used in schools, in the UK I’m talking about. And we felt there was an opportunity to design a new chair that really addressed the way that kids were being taught now, which was very, very different from when I was at school when we all sat in a line staring at a blackboard or a whiteboard.
It’s more about groups gathering, watching videos and then having discussions and then doing project stuff around a table. And so we started to go into a big research project and realized that some research had been done back in the 60s that showed that if you could move while you were seated, as a child, so if there was some sort of movement, it would increase concentration quite significantly because you can increase blood flow in the body because you’re using your leg muscles to move therefore you’re getting more oxygen to the brain.
So that was some research that we uncovered and then also working with Vitra, of course, we realized that in office chairs, if you have a forward tilt, it means your spine, when you’re working at a table, it means your seat tips forward and therefore your spine is kept straight.
So that’s a much better posture to be in for a long period of time. So we just combined those two things together. So this forward tilt and movement and it’s a very, very simple plastic stacking chair, designed for schools, or education anyway. And it’s been a pretty big hit for Vitra and for us.
AD: What I love about this, the way you’re describing the most fruitful projects usually don’t come from somebody saying, “I want you to make this for me.”
EB: No. Almost certainly not.
AD: Right, sometimes that’s how the briefs come in, but it sounds like the way that you work is to accept the brief as more of an introduction and invite that relationship to start from the very beginning.
EB: That’s exactly, exactly right. I couldn’t have put it better myself! That’s exactly… But it doesn’t always work. I’m probably making it sound like every time it’s a massive success, it’s not. Sometimes you might go back to the company or the client and say, look, we think duh-duh-duh and they say, “Absolutely not, no, that’s not what we want to do.” And in cases like that, mostly we don’t take on the project.
AD: Well, if you can’t work the way that you know that you work best, then you know your hands are tied and that’s a really frustrating way to work -
EB: I mean we’ve done it in the past where we’ve taken on a project at the beginning which we’re, you know, not 100% convinced by and always thinking that down the line we’ll turn it into that thing and sometimes it just doesn’t quite work and there’s nothing worse than embarking on that project when you’re too far, where you’re kind of obliged to complete it, but you’ve lost, you’ve kind of lost the interest in it and the people in the studio, you know, are a bit fed up [laughs] and everyone is like, you can work on that.
I mean I have to say, luckily that doesn’t happen very often, but it definitely has happened in the past.
AD: Yes and then you know, there are separate lessons in that and they have to do with follow through and definitely salvaging all of the positives and I’m sure there’s, in those projects that you would deem not your favorite, there’s still value in learning how to steer around those in the future. But you can’t steer around them if you don’t know what they look like.
EB: I mean it’s not; every project starts in a certain way and ends up different. At the beginning of every project, even if you have this kind of vision of what you think it might end up like, it’s very rarely going to be the same, it’s always… And hopefully way better than your initial vision. I mean weirdly, the first idea is often the best, but it’s only an idea, it’s not the actual finished product. So it will evolve, always evolve. And you know, it’s not as if, Jay and I just sit there and do a sketch and say, right, this is it, that’s it.
There’s a long, long process. I mean that’s the thing about design, it’s a hugely collaborative process. So there’s a lot of input that goes in from people in the studio here, you know, we have a fantastic team and also the companies we work with, they have great engineers and they obviously input into that process the whole way along. And I think the skill of a good designer is to understand when things need to change, you know, because you could only force something in the wrong direction for so long and then, you know, I mean it can be forced to the end, but you don’t end up with anything great.
You have to really understand how the problems have come about, what they are and how to resolve them. And if that means changing things, that’s part of the process and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
AD: Right, right, well, those powers of observation are serving you there and also you know, an adaptability that seems to have been a theme throughout your life.
EB: You do need to be able to adapt. You can’t be a pushover either though because I think the bigger the projects get, the stronger you need to be to be able… It’s very easy and it’s happened a million times where an engineer has said, no, you can’t do it like that and you don’t know whether it’s because they don’t really want to have to do more research or whether they just, I mean there’s a lot of engineers, there’s brilliant engineers and there’s less good engineers. And you know, you have to sort of work out whether that’s true or not.
So we’re quite hard with them, we do push them and push them and they come to a point where they say, look, it’s not feasible and then you sort of have to, I guess you give in. But -
AD: Do you think that’s a product of engineering tracks, they are sort of formed in an educational program that’s not necessarily creative. So they’re kind of given science as, in a more rigid way.
EB: Possibly, possibly, but I think it’s all down to the mentality of that engineer. I mean there are some engineers we work with, and the more problems you can give them, the more excited they look.
EB: Because they’re problem solvers and they, you know, they see their job as a challenge. They want to be able to do what is possibly something that looks impossible, that’s the ultimate result for them. If we can give them something that looks impossible to achieve and they achieve it, then they, A, they’re very satisfied, but that’s really the goal of a good engineer. Whether it’s a structural engineer or a mechanical engineer, I think, a good one wants to find the best and a new way of doing things.
AD: Yeah, I’m glad you’ve spelled that out; I had a smile on my face the whole time you were talking about that. It kind of reminds me of the Space Race [laughter].
EB: Right [laughter].
AD: Sending rockets to the moon, it’s very exciting. [Laughs]
EB: Well, you can’t, I mean you’re not going to do something great by doing something that’s been done before. The one that was done before was the great one and you’re just doing [laughter] another thing.
AD: So, your design life is very, it sounds diverse and intersectional and it’s interdisciplinary and very fulfilling in so many ways and it sounds like it keeps you learning and growing and evolving. But then you’re also a full spectrum human with, I’m sure, family and - In a pandemic, we’re in a global crisis, all of this.
EB: Yeah, yeah, I mean I’ve got two kids that I’m trying to home school -
AD: Wow!
EB: On Zoom.
AD: How old are they?
EB: Five and four, so they are not really able to do it themselves at the moment. And I don’t know, I feel, we’ve all had it pretty tough, some a lot tougher than others, but I do feel for kids, not just my kids, but I mean they’ve just, they’ve had their whole world completely turned upside down. I mean my kids barely remember life before Covid. They’ve been out of school for almost a year now, on and off. They’ve just been so interrupted and not being able to have that social interaction with their friends and not being able to do so much of the sort of, anything to do with teams. It’s always very individual. It’s quite, yeah, it’s pretty freaky for them.
AD: Yeah, yeah, and I struggle with Zoom just because it’s less kinesthetic, like I’d love to move around, I can focus a lot more easily if I’m moving around, but Zoom keeps you sort of pegged to the screen.
EB: No, definitely, I think the real, obviously being able to see people over a screen, in an instant is an incredible piece of technology and there’s no doubt. But what you don’t ever get with these things is you don’t get the energy that you have when you put people in a room together.
And I think that’s really become such a problem for us in terms of the design process. We’ve realized that you know, you just plod through these meetings and you know, I think there’s pretty much no one who is upset when there’s a Zoom call finishing.
It’s not [laughs], it’s just not really a joyful experience whereas in a normal week Jay and I would be flying off to Italy or Switzerland or Germany or Scandinavia or the States to have meetings with people and engineers and having dinner afterwards. And that’s when the real discussion of the projects continue and probably the better ideas happen, is in the social side of it. And that’s all gone, so it feels so sort of pedestrian and plodding and yeah, I cannot wait to sort of get these things started again.
AD: Yeah, I’m with you and I’m starting to feel hopeful. So, looking towards the future, I mean you’re clearly in a sustainable relationship with Jay and the practice and you’ve, together have figured out also how to grow it into these other areas of interest and it seems to be, and then merge it with a technology company to give it some fortification. So where is there to go in the future and -
EB: Well, I think with this whole year that we’ve just had, I think in a way, just getting back to normality is going to feel like an amazing new start, in a way. But I think beyond that, I mean Jay and I, we never, we just don’t really know, we sort of have a plan, but we don’t have a specific plan. And so things like Universal and Map and then we opened a studio in New York last year for Universal and we’ve had a studio in Australia for a period of time. And things, we just suddenly, right, okay, let’s try something else, let’s try and do this.
And those opportunities just, you know, a bit like we were talking about with the actual project. I mean opportunities come as well and it’s a question of what you can turn those into. And so I don’t really know exactly what’s going to happen. I mean we have a fantastic group of manufacturers that we work with on a very regular basis and that’s really, that’s great for us. We’ve got 50-60 projects on the go at the moment and that won’t change because we enjoy that and we have this fantastic relationship.
But I think there’s going to be a new chapter now, I think, coming out of this last year.
AD: Personally speaking, have certain things crystalized for you in terms of, I don’t know, what direction you want to point yourself in or something that has more meaning that you didn’t assign to it before or, has anything come into focus because other things have been stripped away?
EB: On a very personal level, rather than the business level, I think, I mean my wife is Italian, Amber is Italian and we’ve discussed for many years that at some point we’ll end up moving to Italy. Not necessarily permanently, but to live in Italy for a period of time. And I think the kids are at a certain age now where it’ll be great for them to be fluent in Italian and to really understand Italy. I mean Amber is very keen that they spend quite a long time to understand the Italian culture, to really get underneath that.
So in the next few years I’m sure we’ll end up moving to Italy and… I mean that doesn’t really change it that much in terms of the studio because we spend, we probably go there twice a month anyway. So I will probably end up, instead of flying to Italy, probably flying to London. But this isn’t, I mean again, this isn’t concrete, this is something that we’ve definitely been discussing, thinking about.
AD: I can see you thinking about your children in that way though, that needing that connection to their Italian heritage.
EB: I think it’s only fair. I mean they’re half Italian and they’ve spent some interesting, interesting years in London recently. And it would be nice to experience something else. I mean I, in my first, I guess 20 years of my life, I didn’t ever live anywhere else apart from the UK and it’s something I wished I had been able to do. I mean I had cousins whose father and my uncle used to travel; I mean his business took him everywhere. So my cousins were in Singapore one minute, Beirut the next, New York the next and it was just, I think in a way I actually feel like knowing sort of through my cousins and actually through my grandfather as well, the engineer, who travelled extensively in the 50s and 60s, to Cuba and I don’t know, Egypt and places.
I mean seeing their photos, I kind of live vicariously through them and that’s why I think I have this burning passion to get out and discover the world. So I think it would be great for my kids to be able to live in another country or other countries.
AD: Hmm-mm, well, I’m looking forward to that, if it transpires.
EB: Yeah.
AD: So, looking forward and looking back, I always like to, I like to ask about legacy and I think that the word ‘legacy’ has in the past sort of meant the egocentric reputation that a successful person leaves behind.
AD: I think now the word is starting to, in more ways, it’s deepening its meaning to mean more about how have you opened pathways for yourself and others and also how have you strengthened your connections to the past? Thinking about that kind of a legacy, how do you think about yours?
EB: Well, I suppose all artists and all creatives, I should say, I think they all think about their legacy in some sense don’t they? I think it’s, some are quite mildly egotistic and some are violently egotistic [laughter]. I think both Jay and I have probably fallen in a slightly more quiet category, but at the same time, I mean it’s important really in a sense that what you do is relevant to the time that you’re living in. And I think that’s really legacy.
And if you look back at the great, I don’t know, whoever they are, architects or artists or writers, you know, they really sort of captivate the era within their writing or painting in. And I feel that if we could have achieved that so that when people look back to the work that we’ve done, that we really encapsulated the times that we’re living through. I think that’s a really, that’s as much as you could hope for in a sense, for a legacy. I mean of course, you know, you can publish a book and you can get your pieces of work into museum collections and so on, and that’s great. But I think it’s more about what have you contributed to society and how has society interacted with the things that you’ve produced.
AD: Very nicely put, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your whole story with me. -
EB: Pleasure, pleasure.
AD: With me. This has been -
EB: Yeah, no, it was great, it was really, very, very, it’s interesting to, I guess, to talk about, I mean I never, I’ve never done this before, in a sense, I’ve talked about the studio and our work many, many times, but I’ve never really discussed my whole kind of life from start, from the start and yeah, it’s pretty therapeutic, I suppose. [Laughter]
AD: It has been so enlightening for me, thank you very much.
EB: Thank you.
AD: Thank you for listening! To see images of Edward’s work and read the show notes, 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, Stitcher, 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, production assistance from Ilana Nevins, Laura Jaramillo and Anouchka Stephan and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is proudly distributed by Design Milk.
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Edward Barber © Alisa Connan
What is your earliest memory?
Standing on a headland surrounded by heather looking out to sea on the Island of Anglesey.
How do you feel about democratic design?
There are so many aspects to design that I find fascinating. The creation, the innovation, the material choices and the processes needed to manufacture objects. These ingredients do not always come together to deliver democratic design. That said, most of the time I set out to design things can be accessible to everybody but sadly that is not always the case.
Loop Table, Isokon Plus, 1996 / © David Brook
IBM Q System One, designed by Map with Universal Design Studio, 2019
What’s the best advice that you’ve ever gotten?
Don't worry about anything unless you can affect the outcome.
How do you record your ideas?
In my sketchbook which I always have with me.
What’s your current favorite tool or material to work with?
Rotring fibre tip pen.
Sketch of Tip Ton, ink on note paper, 2010 © Barber Osgerby Studio
Tip Ton, VitraHaus, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 2017 © Vitra, courtesy of Mark Eggimann
What book is on your nightstand?
On my bedside table, Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton.
Why is authenticity in design important?
So much time, creativity, expertise and money are invested in the development and making of a product. When a product is copied it amounts to theft because the recompense for all the previous investment is stolen. Secondly, copies are always inferior products.
Near-field speaker with stool and prototype television in an anechoic chamber, Sony exhibition, Salone del Mobile, Milan, Italy, 2010 © Lorenzo Vitturi
Favorite restaurant in your city?
A tiny Japanese restaurant, Jin Kichi, in Hampstead.
What might we find on your desk right now?
A few different prototypes. A new glass light, a wooden backrest for a chair and a lot of other things which I’m not sure what they are.
Development sketches of Loop Table, ink on tracing paper, 1996 © Barber Osgerby Studio
Who do you look up to and why?
My uncle was a great inspiration to me. From an early age took me to visit interesting architecture, gardens and art galleries which started my interest in the arts. He also taught me much about the natural world as he was an avid naturalist.
Edward’s sailing boat on Anglesey circa 1981
What’s your favorite project that you’ve done and why?
I think most projects become a favourite for a period of time.
On & On chairs in rotational stack, Emeco, 2019 © Barber Osgerby Studio
Iris 1200, dimensions 1200 x 1200 x 390mm, Established & Sons, 2008 © Peer Lindgreen
What are the last five songs you listened to?
Dave Van Ronk - Green Green Rocky Road
F J McMahon - Sister Brother
Washington Phillips - Mother’s Last Words to her Son
Elizabeth Cotten - Wilson Rag
Karen Dalton - Something On your Mind
Double Space, London Design Festival installation, Raphael Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2014 © Lee Mawdsley
Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, Dedon workshop, Lüneburg, Germany, 2016 © Gerhardt Kellerman
Where can our listeners find you on the web and on social media?
Instagram: @barberosgerby
Website: barberosgerby.com
Clever is produced by 2VDE Media. Thanks to Rich Stroffolino for editing this episode.
Production assistance from Ilana Nevins and music by El Ten Eleven—hear more on Bandcamp.
Shoutout to Jenny Rask for designing the Clever logo.
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