The design industry’s been quite inward-looking. Designers are designing for designers, you know, and magazines and… and I think it’s been, a lot of the design has been quite lazy, and I think we’re all going to have to work harder to create the things we create. And that’s a good thing. Tom Lloyd
Tom Lloyd
Co-Founder and Partner, PearsonLloyd
The beginnings of PearsonLloyd
Luke and I met at the Royal College of Art. I had actually done a furniture design degree in Nottingham, and Luke had studied product design at Central Saint Martins and we actually sort of flipped; I did, I was doing industrial design post-graduate, and Luke was doing a furniture design post-graduate. We both were sitting in both camps, emotionally, and in terms of where we wanted to do our work. So that was the kind of roots of the thing.
Luke Pearson
Co-Founder and Partner, PearsonLloyd
On taking on multi-disciplinary projects
We try and have a very holistic view of what products we might take on, and what projects; so there aren’t really any boundaries. We definitely don’t do architecture, but we’re pretty flexible; and if we feel we can do something, we’ll, we’ll try it, which is, which is why we tend to be quite pluralist.
When we started out, quite often the product design was more technologically driven; it tended to be around housing technology: furniture had a stronger connection with craft, and as such, that was a distinct separation. So both of us had trained in cabinet-making for a period, and both of us had this interest in science and technology, so for us, the two extremes were definitely linked; and our feeling was that where a lot of people fell down, because there were definitely product designers stepping into furniture, or furniture designers having a go at product design, we really did feel like we had the two hats on at different times. So for us, it was not so much seeing a gap, it was just saying, well, we really can’t separate the two, and we want to be operating in both those territories.
Tom Lloyd
On their approach to furniture design
A lot of what we do is, is furniture, whether it’s flying or in a city or in someone’s house, and as a result, a lot of the briefs, you know, a table, for instance, is very much we’re, in terms of user, we’re not challenging use, in a way, when we’re designing a simple table, where it’s much more subtle in terms of how it’s put together; what the sensation of using it is; but not, you know, we’re not challenging the baseline principles of that object.
Luke Pearson
Working collaboratively
One of the things that was very important to us was this idea of collaboration and the fact that two minds can in a way filter out the extremes, and, or grab hold of extremes; and it can work positively and negatively.
Tom Lloyd
Shared themes
I think one of the benefits of partnership is that you, we have a kind of, we have themes running through the studio: intellectual themes and conceptual themes and research themes, and we kind of know where we pick up, you know, ideas that aren’t always visual ideas, but they’re ideas that inform the process from one project to the other. And I think when we’re doing, you know, an airline project, at the same time as a dining table, as at the same time as a bus shelter, they can inform each other without stepping on each other’s toes.
Luke Pearson
Usability and image in furniture design
Furniture’s very interesting because it’s understandable at a glance, unlike a lot of products: you have to get to use them, or read a manual, to understand whether they’re any good, whereas with furniture, you only have to sit down on it and your first impressions are, it’s either comfortable, or it’s not. So from that perspective, you know, its usability is instantly appreciated, or not. And I think the second-most important thing is how it looks, because if people get bored of it it tends to get discarded. If it doesn’t wear well, it tends to get discarded. And they’re big items; they’re expensive, so it has to work well and it has to look good.
Tom Lloyd
Research
We’re always looking, I think designers always do; we’re always immersing ourselves in everyday activities and then drawing them back to what we do. But, you know, sometimes we have very specific user research, like the Design Bugs Out project, which is incredibly focused to the user. At other times we rely on a sort of broader knowledge base within the studio, and a history of looking at stuff to help us out.
Luke Pearson
The Cobi chair: the design process
Sometimes we’re working with very known technologies and then we’re just trying to say, okay, how do we intelligently use them, and other times we’re bringing bits and pieces from different industries together. It takes an awful long time to build up an overview so that you can say, okay, well, that’s okay, you know, we’ll use that process, and let’s try and find another one here. I think recently the Cobi Chair, of which we’ve got a model over here and a prototype here, that was very demanding in terms of the plastics technology, because it’s using state of the art technology and it’s pushing that technology to the limits. So it wasn’t so much a steep learning curve, it was just forcing us to design terribly carefully with a very, very talented bunch of engineers.
We started off by looking at different structural rigs which had two primary focuses: one was the seat and one was the back. They’d already started working on a very rudimentary idea, which this is now developed into, which was the idea that individual fingers could support a surface far more accurately than a single structure or a mesh. People want dynamic change, and if I just sit down [moves] in the chair, it rocks back when I want to.if I put my leg down, the front of the chair will deform. Now, the idea In this is to ensure that wherever I move and however I move, it follows me instantly; I don’t have to adjust anything or I don’t have to think about anything.
We started… I could probably find it in the sketches, by saying, okay, we’ll make the seat round, we won’t give the seat direction so that you can spin all the way round on it. So in fact on this chair, if I wanted to I could sit facing into the back and the arms don’t obstruct your leg. Now, that was a very early thought and in fact, I could probably, very quickly… well, here is one [laughs], that very early 3D sketch here kind of explains that intent, so we have this simple seat and this very thin neck.
Small-scale modelling
We also always work in small-scale models, which allows us to very quickly understand the mass of the object using rapid prototyping.
This was a detail, an early detail of the back of the chair which now is completely different, but the line is still there, but in terms of the actual structural detailed resolution it’s a completely different object.
There’s nothing like seeing furniture at one-to-one, perhaps more than any other thing it’s a one-to-one discipline, and that allows everybody involved in the team to understand it. Sometimes it’s quite difficult to interpret a scale model. It also allows us to look at the detail at the right scale and then judge things on a really fine detail level. This is the finished back, which is really quite similar.
Tom Lloyd
On the design industry
The design industry’s been quite inward-looking. Designers are designing for designers, you know, and magazines and… and I think it’s been, a lot of the design has been quite lazy, and I think we’re all going to have to work harder to create the things we create. And that’s a good thing.