Inspired by the fact that he still owned things he’d designed and made at school, and wanting to highlight the importance of design in education, co-founder of furniture brand MARK John Miller, curated an exhibition called Making Designers, showcasing the products that now well-known designers had made while they were still at school.
It turned out he wasn’t alone in his nostalgia for his early attempts at design – the exhibition included a coat hook designed by a lower sixth Jay Osgerby, a balloon-powered car that David Irwin designed at primary school, and his own toy bus made as part of an O-level project, alongside equally delightful creations from the likes of Ab Rogers, Matthew Hilton and Terence Woodgate.
John says: “How can you be a designer, or an architect or an engineer if you have not had the chance to make things with real materials, with hand tools and machines, to understand what different materials are capable of, what they can do and what makes them break? Even for those who are not going to end up in design – designing and making is such a good way to learn about problem solving, planning, budgeting, teamwork, negotiation, communication… It’s also the least truanted subject at school, which must tell you something!”
Jay Osgerby agrees: “The Coat Hook was one our first A-level projects. Part of the curriculum involved learning different manufacturing techniques and this one was about laminating wood. We were set a brief to make a coat hook, so we had to do the research to figure out how the thing could be made. Then we had to make the moulds to curve the wood around from scratch. The whole project was really interesting. With hindsight, the first piece of furniture I designed with Ed [Barber] was the Loop Table using exactly the same technology. We designed the Loop table without really knowing how we’d make it. A number of things came together to make the idea of plywood happen, but certainly one of them was the fact that I knew how to do it having done it at school. And I’ve recently had a limited run of the Coat Hook produced in different colours. I think it’s actually still quite relevant to the work we do now.”
With design and making in education repeatedly coming under threat, the exhibition made a polite yet firm point about their importance, both for the designers of the future, but also for pupils who end up doing something else entirely.
David Irwin argues that design has a role even for those who don’t go on to become designers: “Design as a subject is quite unique if you think about what is required from the student,” he says. “You have to imagine something that doesn’t exist yet and then realise it in tangible form. This involves curiosity, speculation, idea generation, analysis, and creative thinking in order to solve problems and I think this sort of creativity and innovation is useful in any profession – and in life in general.”
Jay Osgerby says: “I would have found my way to design without doing Design A-level, but having “making” throughout the curriculum was essential. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now had I not had that, because I just wouldn’t have known about it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s called physics, craft, technology or design. Creative thinking is fundamental to society. Human beings need to make things in order to be happy. I am fiercely defensive of the creative arts and the creative industries. It’s vital to recognise their importance from government level right down to parents putting pressure on schools. Design is essential – it’s one of our biggest industries, but more importantly, we’re good at it – and it gives the people who are involved it in huge amounts of pleasure. I love my job. I can’t imagine a better job in the world.”
Further reading for the especially geeky:
- feature :: concrete; the quintessential hard stuff
- feature :: life through the lens of a lomo
- feature :: hand lettering
- feature :: the history of typewriters
