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JON HARRISON

Working as a fashion photographer’s agent, Jon Harrison developed a muted envy. With a desire to be more involved in the creativity, he says: “I moved to a job from hell, I hated it, and I didn’t know what I was going to do.” Imagining a workshop, a little shed filled with his chisels and planes where he could make bespoke pieces of furniture, Harrison undertook an evening class to trial his longing; there he became hooked more on the design process and felt like it was the wrong class. “It didn’t matter because I had the realisation I didn’t want to be a photographer’s agent for the rest of my life.”

Going back into education at the age of 33, he emerged a few years later from the Royal College of Art with a master’s degree in product design: “I don’t regret the journey I’ve had but I wish I’d chosen to do this 10 years previous.”

Now sharing a studio with friends who design collectively under the name Assembly, Harrison also works on his own projects and lectures part-time on a product and furniture design course at Kingston University. “I wouldn’t call my work groundbreaking. I don’t think you’d walk past it and necessarily stop but it’s the marrying of materials and objects, and what inspires me is to make them work better.” Functionality is a big part of his work. Not only of the products themselves but also the function of the environment they occupy. “Aesthetics in a design fraternity can sometimes be a dirty word. It’s definitely not a starting point with my work but I don’t have a problem with it being a part of the design.”

Choosing very traditional materials, standard woods, metals and plastics, Harrison goes through phases of what he prefers to work with. Keeping the elements simple, he instead strives to learn more about the properties of the materials, how they work, manoeuvre and handle. “The more knowledge you have, the less you think you know I suppose. Everyday I learn something new and that’s what I love most about design.” 


LORIS & LIVIA

In an unassuming brick warehouse, the product designers Loris Jaccard and Livia Lauber share their space with a whole host of creatives. A few floors up are Gina shoes, Gareth Pugh works nearby while graphic designers, writers and architects fill the spaces in between.

Hailing from Switzerland, the enigmatic duo combine their individual ideologies to create a line of items they couldn’t have conceived singularly. “I don’t want a design aesthetic, I’m not looking for people to see our work and think this is Loris and Livia, we just want to create something that works and makes sense,” proposes Lauber.

They met three years ago through a mutual friend and jointly entered a design competition, which they didn’t win. On reflection, “we won in a way .. with our collaboration.” Not interested in designing something for designing's sake, the pair prefer to create products from a brief, for a particular space or a specific purpose because it gives them more of a frame to work within. “The question we always ask is not how, or is it going to be nice? It’s just why would we
do that?” suggests Jaccard. “And when we know the answer it gives us the concept.”

Jaccard chose jewellery and micro design at HEAA in La-Choux-De-Fonds and Lauber studied product and industrial design at Lausanne in Romandy; both came to London to explore their craft fully. Finding that their best ideas transpire away from the studio, in restaurants and outside spaces – escapism seems the best catalyst. Using their workspace for further development and practice,
the surroundings of which are scattered with cardboard mock-ups and prototypes, they work in a rather graphical way. “I did consider studying graphic design but I needed to work with three dimensions, and with materials, I just wanted to be hands on and experience experimentation,” Jaccard says. 

The duo understand the materials they work with and select the job for the material, not vice versa. Putting a strong accent on the tactility of their products, the designers also stress to appeal to all of the senses. They are interested in reviving older materials such as pressed glass or cast iron. “Processes where human beings are directly involved. An error can become something very beautiful,” Lauber says. "It's like a happy accident.”


PABLO LIMON

Seemingly the most used of all the workspaces: sketches pinned on the door, shelves crammed with well-read books, tools and wood strewn about, projects half complete, you wouldn’t think that the trained graphic designer Pablo Limon is only momentarily flirting with product design. Always wanting to be a designer of some description, he says: “I have entered the design world from different doors, but it’s the keys that allow me to arrive at a product.” 

Featured centrally in the window of b Store, two graphic MDF and plywood chairs – in a Mondrian style – are placed alongside a concrete lamppost with beech wood and aluminium accents, commemorating his exhibition at the shop. His magnum opus sits deeper inside – the white school-desk-style table with marble trimmings and black box weave interior is pristinely beautiful. With the products displayed offering various inspirations, Limon confesses: “My influences are Bruno Munari, for his didactic approach to design, Ettore Sottsass for his radical understanding and of this generation, Philippe Malouin for his innovative lucid designs.”

Limon grew up alongside the growth of Madrid’s underground culture and was therefore heavily inspired by graffiti when he decided to study graphics at IED. Studying a year there and one in Milan, he stayed in the Italian design capital for three years to study corporate identity. Moving to London a year ago, he has since devoted “100 per cent” of his attention to furniture design. “I have always been attracted to industrial design as a discipline.”

Believing this era is about creating items of the moment and not for the future, Limon prefers the value of a limited range of objects. The minimal quantities allow the expression realised in each piece to be much purer. Preferring to work alone but surrounded by friends and people who fulfil him, he proffers that books are his most intimate sources of enrichment; books from authors such as the American novelist Charles Bukowski, the Italian writer Italo Calvino and the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca are very close to Limon’s heart.


BETHAN WOOD

The idea of a product is a loose one. Not so much the concept of the product itself – a sellable, usable item – but rather the many ways this multifaceted word can be applied.

One designer who has firmly implemented, understands and most crucially enjoys the transient process of creating a product is Bethan Wood, who has painstakingly crafted a personal repertoire of pieces and projects to suit her own sensibilities.

The spanning range of interests at the heart of her work permeates through, from assisting the set designer Gary Card for various publications such as Man About Town and Another Magazine – where she carved oceanic waves out of wax for a fine jewellery shoot – to whimsically enhancing urban spaces with paper sculptures. Proudly featured as a designer in residence at the Design Museum London, Wood has her fingers in many metaphorical pies.

Her current fascination is with laminate, and its potential for "hyperreality". Almost trompe l'oeil, laminate can project the appearance of a more wholesome material, one with depth and intricacies, on to an otherwise flat medium. Her Super Fake collection was influenced by the materials that make up the city – especially the patterns and surfaces found in east London. “I became fascinated by laminate as a material that is used to evoke everything from marbles to mahoganies.” 

Always knowing she wanted to pursue a creative career, perhaps that of an artist, Wood has explored various avenues since her early teens. Starting out by working with a ceramicist, learning the technique and craft, it wasn’t until making her first stool on a foundation course that she realised it was the design of everyday products that truly spoke to her. 

She completed her MA in product design at the Royal College of Art, where her tutors had a huge affect on her ambitions. “Martino Gamper and Jurgen Bey influenced me to think bigger and deeper about my work in connection to locality and what I want to bring about from it.” This was when she finally had a chance to collect all her passions and interests into the multifarious practice she continues today.


FELIX DE PASS

Placed on Felix De Pass’s desk is an Alan Fletcher clam ashtray, filled with pistachios. “I’ve had it in my life for years, it’s the first design product I owned.” Now freelancing for the design and manufacturing company Established and Sons, Felix finished a BA in 3D design at Manchester Met before going on to graduate from the Royal College of Art with a master’s degree in product design. 

De Pass constantly photographs and mentally logs everything that inspires him – “like a nice little detail on a piece of wood or a bollard that hasn’t been considered as a design object but has some sort of character to it” – just in case he needs to call upon it later on. The biggest inspiration for De Pass, however, is his interior-designer father. Growing up surrounded by design propelled Felix toward his vocation, “In a way, it’s like I’ve been designing from a young age.” 

What he is working on now is breaking into the world of design, perhaps the hardest part of any creative field. Having always been interested in mass production and taking a lot of joy from resolving a problem that allows a product to be made faster, De Pass is trying to forge relationships with the companies and manufacturers he could work with. “Some of the stuff that goes into production – it just amazes me that it even got to that stage. It’s not necessarily about that’s better than that, it’s about the relationship between the designer and the manufacturer, having that understanding where they’ll try things out.” 

His aesthetic is simple, pared-down, functional and quite utilitarian. Removing the superficial from his work, he does not adhere to trends or certain fashions because “products are something that you intend to live with for a while so they need longevity”. The nature of his work is to sit comfortably within an existing lifestyle, unimposing. “It can be quite annoying if you have a product that just shouts at you, it’s usually a designer just showing off.”


TOM FOULSHAM

If this designer has anything, it’s imagination. Making things today that his childhood Meccano set couldn’t, Tom Foulsham has the skilled understanding of an engineer and the creative curiosity of a product designer. After studying at the Barlett School of Architecture, the London- born designer went on to explore product design at the Royal College of Art. “I’m really glad I’ve started to combine the two disciplines, it’s almost like I’m making my own space out of them.” 

Perilously balancing on the neck of a wooden chair are two sharpened steel pivots sat atop each other, powdered in canary yellow, they spin and pivot freely. Like some re-envisioned Anglepoise lamp, the freestanding Big Bird is an adjustable shelving and light unit. 

Made for this October’s Shoreditch Ball charity auction, adjusting the sequence of books on the shelf determines the angle. “The safer you make it the less exciting it looks, the unit has a delicate presence and a fragility that people are aware of.” 

After working under Ron Arad, the industrial designer and architect, Foulsham has turned to freelance design. Making mechanisms and working parts for other designer’s installations, Tom has designed a rotating bar for Absolut Vodka and a device capable of rocking a chair sustainably for the three-month duration of an exhibition of Arad’s. Without any actual engineering training he confesses: “I just loved taking things apart, looking inside and trying to make them work again.” 

Admitting that some of his products do become quite big feats of engineering, it’s the intricacies of the machines and the automatic kind of playfulness they provide that appeal to his own sentiment the most. His fascination extends even to his audience; Tom has such an interest with interactivity and getting physically involved that most of his products become performance pieces, which require an audience. “That’s what is interesting about art pieces as products because you get such a different audience, who have such an alternative perception.” 

Preferring to work with welded metal because it’s fast, simple and effective, the problems he encounters only help to inform him of what direction he is going in. “If you look at it properly then the whole thing is like one big problem so you’d never start it,”  he laughs. Having not fully realised where he is headed, he says: “I've come undone. Although I studied product design I’ve never settled down as calling myself a product designer, or classifying myself as one, but I guess the title is for other people to apply.” 



[This article was published inside B Magazine, a bi-annual design publication created by London’s cult fashion destination bSTORE - both sadly closed in 2012]