Name: Brainstorm Design 2024: Fat Chance
Uploaded: 2024-12-05
Duration: 15 min 34 s
Description: Tom Dixon, Founder and Creative Director, Tom Dixon, In conversation with Clay Chandler, Fortune

Tom Dixon, Founder and Creative Director, Tom Dixon, In conversation with Clay Chandler, Fortune

Brainstorm Design 2024: Fat Chance

Conferences

We often talk about designers and say that they are rock stars, but you're a real rock star. Disco. Disco. Ok. All right. Fantastic. Say a little bit if you can just very quickly about your unique path to becoming a designer. Um accidental really. You know, I had no idea what design was, but I just um had a motorbike accident stopped my music career. Um The bass player that replaced me is now in Pink Floyd play for Madonna played for Michael Jackson. So that could have been me. That could have been you. So, yeah. Um you, you're clicking my um uh oh, sorry, let me do. There we go. Um So, well, let's jump in, shall we to some of your current uh designs and what you're, what you're working on? Are we at the right place here? I'm gonna give you the clicker and let you kind of organize this. How about that? Well, I think I was asked to talk about um seating really. And so this is just to show, I guess we're crashing back down to the ground after having talked about artificial intelligence, United Nation Goals, you know, and big development projects and back to kind of the domestic scale chairs are great because for designers, although somebody did say earlier, we don't need any more chairs. They, they're a great typology for Eddie designer because they're human size, right? Um So I um um designed this series of chairs called fat. Um and they're called fat for an obvious reason. They've got these inflated comfort parts. Um because I, I am, I really don't sit still, which is what this kind of um is talking about. I like to fit poorly. You'll see, you know, during the talk. Uh What I noticed with these chairs is that you could actually make them into love seats and that kind of suited conversation better than just sitting side by side. So I thought I'd make a sofa which took into account a bit the modern age. Um Nice to see Kim Kardashian endorsing the fatness of the chair and her advertising her Spanx lines. And I think the name fat is, is, is really a celebration of more voluptuousness and more, you know, more comfort and more generosity, which is what upholstery needs. So these chairs are incredibly simple, there's nothing to them at all. And sometimes, you know, in design, you want to do less rather than more all they're doing is inflating those comfort parts. Um So, like I said, celebration of fatness and I think what I noticed really was more to do with how people are living and I wanted to do a couch or a sofa as we call it in England. And this is how people traditionally have sat on, on, on sofas, which is all in a line focusing on one, you know, focal point, which would have been the fireplace, then the radiogram and then the television screen. Right. And that's what people have done for hundreds of years. Right. Um, but of course, we don't live like that anymore. We live like this. So we're not all looking at the same thing anymore. And you don't need to have your sofa rammed against the wall, all looking at one thing in line because you're not looking at one thing anymore. One person's on deliveroo ordering their takeaway meal that they're going to eat on the sofa, the other person is doing their homework and somebody else is on Instagram, right? Um So this is really a story about how, you know how even your domestic objects change according to society. And I think designers can always work a bit better when um when things change. And so this is just an observation of mine that it's better to have a sofa that points in all directions really. So it needs to be kind of simple. And um so the idea was just taking those that extreme fatness and making it into the simplest possible modules uh child's play if you like and, and trying to find a way of, of, of uh being able to put them back to front and side by side and really bringing themselves to the middle of the room as a three dimensional object. So that's the result really, which is that um you're, you're doing like with the kitchen that used to be round against the wall, then the kitchen island became the thing where everybody collects and, and that means that you can really use the sofa in the same way, you just put it in the middle of the room and, and you're all facing different directions we're still communing. So I think people still want to be together. It's great. Just looking at those, uh makes me feel a lot more relaxed, kind of wish we had one on stage, we can sit any way we want it. There you go. All right. Well, those are marvelous and they're really uh kind of signature like your other great uh uh design lines. They have a kind of clarity of vision to them, a kind of simplicity to them. Uh They just make sense. Um And I I, and they, and they look terrific, really uh fabulous. So let's talk about people who try to imitate this, this signature approach and vision that you bring to all of your different projects because I know this is something that has kind of irritated you for many, many years, describe the problem for us. Well, maybe I'll just talk about a specific lamp and OK, this journey really and, and this is what these slides are about. You know, I was on a not for profit trip organized by the British Council to Jaipur in India where they wanted to find new um uh new typologies for the really skilled craftsmen of Jaipur that are gradually losing their skills, particularly the ones making these amazing water pots that are used in all of the villages in in in India to carry water because all of these water pots are being replaced by much cheaper plastic equivalent. And so that kind of heritage is changing. And here again, in terms of under designing rather than over designing, here is just the idea of kind of turning the thing upside down and making a light out of it. So the shapes are roughly the same, you know, that that thing of the hand beating that you see here is kind of celebrated and, and some of the curves and just incorporated into a lighting object which gave, you know, maybe 20 people now moved to a metal work city called Mora about, you know, a chance to make things that people were consuming again, right? So these have been very successful for us and, and we really our first hit when we started the label maybe 20 years ago. But you know, as you go to buy them, this is what you get on ebay and various other sites is vast amounts of not Tom Dick and Beat lights. Right. So, so this is a typical page online showing hundreds of copies and we've done an audit online and we're talking really about 800,000 units available now, a quarter of the price of the lamps that we can sell. So it becomes a bit of a problem. Um You know, some people say you should be flattered, you know, and of course, I am immensely and, you know, I borrowed the shapes from elsewhere anyway. So, you know, who am I to complain? So, but what do you do about that as a designer? Well, not a lot because, you know, effectively legal system. This is an Australian website. If you put replica Tom Dixon before the name, you're allowed to sell it in Australia as long as they explicitly say, yeah, this is a fake. So they can, they're calling out the fake and authorizing, authorizing the sale of it in Australia. I can't do anything about that. Um And, and, you know, the aesthetic is actually very kind of replicable and even IKEA, you know, do a bowl which is strangely reminiscent of the lamp, right? But what was kind of nice was the next step, which is the hacker community gets online and says, well, if you want a Tom Dixon lamp for $18 not $100 buy a bowl of IKEA drill a hole in it and hang it upside down and this is the result not bad. So, you know, I love you. I love the way the thing is borrowed and then re borrows again and, you know, there's ways of getting the look at much lower price. So I just thought, well, what is it that I can do against the copies where I can't do anything about the intellectual property? I can get people if they use our photographs. Actually, photography is more protected than, than shape in, in, in legal systems around the world. But what I really want to do is copy the copier. So my plan now, which we've just launched is to do Unbeaten. Do you get the joke? The Unbeaten writing that I take out the beating, I make it completely smooth instead of hiding the aluminum because I make mine out of brass. The CPI has to make that out of aluminum. Um I, I would celebrate the aluminum and, and I can now make these at half the price of my original. And I've got a completely new aesthetic, which is a more industrial shiny aesthetic, which I think rejuvenates lamp all together. So in the end, you know, in a position where copied the copyist better in my view and reduced my pricing by 50% which I think is about right. They're still beautiful though. I mean, is this, is this working, is this deterring? Well, it's only just launched. I'll tell you, I'll tell you next year. These things take a while to bid in. Lovely. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I, I think that there's there a kind of coping strategy if you like, um which uh has suited uh you know, my impatience anyway. And then giving me a brand new aesthetic. It's great. Yeah, those are really nice. Um And so these, these, these are not out yet, they'll come out. No, no, they're just out, just out. Yeah. So good reason not to buy uh the copies, I think. Yeah. So let's tackle this, this third topic that we were going. So I think, you know, so I, I talked obviously about design being influenced by changes in society but even better is when there's changes in technology. And what's been amazing, you know, over the last few years for any lighting designer, because that's the majority of what we do is is the revolution moving electrical lighting, incandescence to electronic lighting which led and led s have been amazing from a sustainability point of view because of the reduction in in power usage and the heat loss, you know, and you know, the other thing which I love about, you know, the modern world, which is hidden is the circuit board, which is the most beautiful piece of design which goes completely hidden in any mobile phone, in any car. You have a circuit in the refrigerator now, but they're largely just masks from view. So this is just a project about trying to celebrate the Led and trying to think of a new way of illuminating. It's kind of interesting even here where you, you've got the conventional lighting up here. Neoclassical, you've got the spotlights all running on LEDs and then you've got the screens which are completely separate, which are all running on LEDs. We've got a lot of light in here, but I wanted to kind of celebrate the raw elements of electronic lighting. And so this was an idea to try and just use the circuit board without covering it at all. So the circuit board becomes a unit, a module like a building block uncovered on masks and just raw with its LEDs on top. And with this, in fact, with two of them, a square one and a round one, just like with Morse code, you can kind of build a whole language of lighting. So using what's normally a track system, um so you can just plug the things in, you're in a position ready to deconstruct how you illuminate the space and think completely differently about, you know, how you like things and instead of having what we're seeing here, which is light sources everywhere, you're kind of able to build as an architect or, or a designer something using my kit. So I'm no longer the designer, I'm the producer of a of a building kit if you like for other people to make their own lighting solutions, right? It's kind of just uh you know, elegant simplicity. Again, it's sort of dots and dashes, right? Yeah. So it is like, you know, like I say, sort of the simplistic kids building, building a LEGO kit effectively. Um where, where really you can just completely change the ways that you illuminate. So this, this column, for instance, uses something like 8000 LEDs. So if you turn up, I mean, it's like having a sun inside your, inside your room and it kind of blasts out a huge amount of light, you can turn write down and make it almost like a sunset as well. So there's, there's um and then, you know, obviously with the other, the other ways you can just like use them the skirting board or you can use them as a screen or even make a sun on the wall like you've got in the Sentinel, what's this called? Um It's called code code. Ok. Get it. I get it. So I think, you know, the, the net result is really to try and say, well, you know, wouldn't it be nice to actually, you know, because the designers are always trying to make the perfect item, the finished item that you never touch again, the icon. But I kind of further the idea now of just providing, you know, more possibilities than I could think of myself, you know, and that's something I'm pursuing also in furniture with like, for instance, this project, which is just about using one extrusion of, of, of brass and, and and giving and this, this is my studio, everybody making a piece of furniture just out of this one very recognizable unit of, of, of brass tubing, right. So I think I'll evolve from being a design of objects to, to try and be a bit more a designer of systems. Yeah, we've only got 25 seconds to go. It's, it's just amazing. Um You know, how do you, how do you get inspiration for these kind of things? Do you have a kind of standard process for coming up? No, I think we always the um the each piece has a different narrative and a different story, but the obsessions remain the same. It's always about, you know, because I started off uh welding and then became a designer. I like how you make things, you know, the craft techniques or the, or the factory techniques or increasing the new digital techniques. And I love the material, you know, just converting something raw into something of value is something which, which I've always thought was like alchemy. You know, it's like you're transforming, you know, a piece of rubbish into gold, which is how I started with scrap metal. Right. Right. Well, it's one of the things that I think makes your work so, so unique and, and relevant is that, you know, as we're doing more and more things on screens and with led s your work is very tangible. It's very uh you know, concrete and and, and edgy. Um So, thanks very much, Tom. We appreciate you showing us your latest inspiration and we hope you'll come back. Thank you very much.