The design industry is so huge that you really can’t escape the fact that it considers itself a marketing function and it is about styling. We don’t work to market trends. We don’t have, what are they called? The roundtable discussions with potential buyers. It doesn’t interest us. For us it’s much more about a creative endeavour. It’s much more of an art. Jay Osgerby
Edward Barber
Co-founder, BarberOsgerby
BarberOsgerby: beginnings
I'm Edward Barber. Jay Osgerby and I set up a studio about ten years ago, 11 years ago and we do a very broad range of different design objects from furniture through to product design, lighting and some, starting to get into clothing as well and footwear.
Jay Osgerby
Co-founder, BarberOsgerby
Childhood influences
I think as a child growing up, I was always fascinated by the way things went together. I really loved making things, painting and drawing and I always knew, from my earliest memory, I always knew I was going to do something creative which probably involved some form of construction.
Edward Barber
Yeah, I mean I had no idea at all. I mean I loved drawing when I was a child and I loved making stuff, but then I went to, I did a foundation course, then I thought I’d do fine arts and then I realised I didn’t want to do that; I wanted to do something with design. So I did a degree in interior design then I went on to do an MA in architecture and now I’ve ended up designing furniture and products so… And even then, you know, things could still change.
Yeah, I think having access to the library at the Royal College was probably as inspiring as any of the tutors.
Jay Osgerby
Inspiration from RCA
But also perhaps being really inspired by some of the old designers and architects sort of made me go in this direction.
You can’t help but be influenced and really inspired by that environment where in one room someone’s making a garment, in the next room someone’s making a vehicle and someone’s laying down graphics.
Edward Barber
Exactly, I probably spent a third of my time there. Even though I was doing the architecture course, I probably spent a third of my time in the photo labs doing some screen printing and just generally messing around because it, you know, it’s a creative place.
Jay Osgerby
On the design industry
If you’re talking about the design industry, the design industry is so huge that you really can’t escape the fact that it considers itself a marketing function and it is about styling. We don’t work to market trends. We don’t have, what are they called? The roundtable discussions with potential buyers. It doesn’t interest us. For us it’s much more about a creative endeavour. It’s much more of an art.
Edward Barber
On their approach to furniture design
Any product or piece of furniture we design, in our opinion, has to have some sort of personality, have some character so that it’s not just an inanimate, dead table, chair, whatever. It has to have something that, you know, you can relate to in a certain way.
Each project takes a new direction and that’s what we talk about when we say it’s like an artistic pursuit because we’ve got certain things that we need to experiment, you know, whether it’s colour; whether it’s machining metal; whether it’s working in timber, you know. Each time a project comes up, we think, okay, well, we haven’t worked in that field before; and it has to be appropriate to the project, but at the same time; you know, for example when we did these Iris tables for Established & Sons and they’re a limited edition piece. And so when you’re doing limited edition pieces it gives you the opportunity to really experiment because obviously the cost, I mean the price that they sell them at gives you that; which is generally higher; gives you the opportunity to be a bit more self-indulgent and experiment in things that you couldn’t do in mass production. So actually edition pieces can be really fun and for that project we experimented with anodising which we’d never really done before and creating a piece of furniture out of machining aluminium which, again, is a very expensive process to do, you couldn't do it as a production piece.
The Tab lamp
There are two reasons why we developed this lamp, because, firstly, they didn't have anything like this, but also, desk lighting's changed a lot over the last few years, because people used to type or write, and now, ninety per cent of people work on computers so they work in front of a screen, so you don't really need a light to light your screen. So actually a desklight now is really to create a little bit of atmosphere, or maybe light your notebook which is off to the side.
Jay Osgerby
Early design ideas for the Tab lamp
You know we've got some of the really early sketches here. I suppose the idea came from, as Ed was saying, this idea of taking some of the over-function out of the anglepoise and creating something incredibly simple. Like this folding profile, here, gives you the function, it sort of, you know, it enables you to not get glare, but also to be able to focus the light back onto the wall or down onto your sketchbook. And in fact when we were trying to, using this split-line detail here communicate one of our key influences, which is the sort of design of, what we call hidden design, or the design of engineered things like aircraft wings and so on, so this split-line here is rather reminiscent of the sort of split-lines you get on a wing, you know.
Edward Barber
This one is designed to go by the sofa, so when you're sitting down, you have it by the side of you, and you can turn it here, and you can angle it.
Jay Osgerby
Prototyping
Very quickly we move from the sketchbook into white card models or foam models and then again, you know, within a matter of hours or a couple of days we often work in the material itself, so if we're talking about something like this, we very quickly made an aluminium prototype.
Edward Barber
Incorporating sustainability to transform funiture into technology
We designed this, well, as I say, four or five years ago. A halogen bulb was the obvious choice for this kind of light, but now things have changed a bit. You need to use more energy-efficient bulbs. So what we've done now, is we've converted this into an LED lamp. Now this is a very crude, first prototype, it doesn't look like this, I can assure you. But this gives you an equivalent amount of light, so we've actually got five LED lights in here in the end.
When we design something we want it to in effect last forever, in terms it's not so, it hasn't got a sort of style or a trend that's going to sort of disappear after a few years, you know, we want it to visually stand the test of time. And for that reason, you know, a lamp where you can change the bulb, in theory, as long as you can still buy those bulbs, you know you can have it forever. As soon as you go to an LED solution, this is all part of the lamp, you can't change it. OK, it could last for twenty-five years, but ultimately when that fails, you have to throw the whole thing away, so it changes lighting from really a piece of furniture into a piece of technology, there.
On avoiding design trends
We’re following sort of our own path and along that path there may be bits where we sort of come closer to whatever’s going on at the moment. Maybe it’s the use of a material or colour or something, but we actually actively avoid any trends that we can see. We veer away from that and go into a completely different direction.
Jay Osgerby
Yeah. So when we go to Milan , we don’t go and do the fair because we don’t want to see it all. We don’t read the design magazines. We try and just focus on our own ideas and what we want to do and not be influenced by market factors at all.