Tom Dixon’s story is full of contradictions. A self-taught furniture maker who left school with one a-level, he is now fully ensconced in the British design establishment. In this year’s New Year’s Honours List was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) – the highest Order of the British Empire honour.
Dixon makes products that are successful and in some cases, affordable – he spent a decade as Creative Director of Habitat, and has designed for Ikea as well as running his eponymous furniture and lighting brand since 2002 – and yet prefers to talk about his failures, and his eccentric experiments.
On a flying visit to Berlin this month, he sat down with The Berliner at Fotografiska’s chic cafe bar to discuss the city’s design culture, selling his name, and how his next project is taking him under the ocean.
You haven’t spoken in Berlin for seven years. What’s brought you back?
For some reason we never did amazingly in Germany, even though Germany historically has been the place where design flourished. Germans love contemporary design, whereas the Brits are steeped in nostalgia.
It always perplexed me why we didn’t do very well here, but we got a new CEO who’s fluent in German, and who used to be a sales manager, and he really believes in Germany as an export power, and now we seem to be finding a niche here.
Have you had a chance to walk around Berlin? Do you get inspired when you come to a different city – do you walk around and get inspired by things?
I think what Berlin’s got, which London’s lost quite a lot, is a freedom for subcultures. Obviously there are many creatives in London, and design studios, but they have to be economical. Berlin still feels slightly loose.
London definitely had more of that when I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s. So I kind of miss the general grubbiness.
What would you say then are the big differences between British design culture and German design culture?
People often ask me, ‘what’s your design philosophy?’ And I say, “well, if you want a philosophy, you should ask an Italian designer, because he would go on for hours”. I like making things, and I’m more interested in how things are made, what they’re made from, before I think of the philosophy. A lot of my philosophy is retrofitted.
What motivates me more is the sculpture, the function and the manufacturing – those three elements brought together. I’m always at my best when I’m not being told what to do, and I can just play. I like British design that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
What are you excited about at the moment?
What’s exciting about design is that it could be anything. I’ve never designed a mobile phone, which is the most important thing in human history right now. I’ve never built a bridge. All these things are design. There are infinite worlds you can explore as a designer, but we’re often not allowed to.
Is there one product you wish you’d designed?
I can give you a hundred. Obviously, I’d like to have designed an iPhone or something really relevant, or the next generation windmill that saves the planet. I’d like to have designed something useful. The London bus, maybe, the Routemaster.
Okay, what do you think is the worst design that you’ve ever created? You just did a presentation [as part of Berlin Design Week] and you showed pictures of chairs you made at the start of your career, made of sharp bits of wire and old car parts. They look like torture implements…
Yeah, I would’ve not shown them had I been doing that talk twenty years ago because of my pride then, but I think they’re relevant now because they show a non-AI, non-computerised world.
They show you somebody playing about with design.
Yeah, they also show a ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude. If you go and talk in somewhere like Thailand, or even Germany, people feel like they have to have the certificate and have done what other people have done before they can output something, so I think just in terms of saying to people, “look, you can still be different, you can still do stuff that isn’t conventionally beautiful and succeed”. It’s the sort of the Sex Pistols analogy. I hated them myself at the time, but it’s amazing what they achieved with very little talent or training, when you look back on it. I could give you a catalogue of miserable failures, but most of them I haven’t got photographs of.
There must have been times when you were at Habitat, or, when you designed for IKEA, where you’re having to make so many compromises along the way, and you don’t come out with what you wanted, but then those things go on to sell well.
Selling really well is an achievement in itself. All too often, designers get sniffy about that side of things. They don’t see their job as being commercial. But if something doesn’t sell then it just remains a beautiful photo in a magazine. What’s interesting to me is that I’ve worked at a lot of different levels, more than most designers. A lot of luxury, but I also love democracy. The IKEA thing was all about democratic design at an affordable price – I love that from a conceptual perspective.
You know, I experimented with giving things away for free [in 2006 he filled Trafalgar Square in London with 500 polystyrene chairs, and then gave them away to the public]. I thought it was an amazing idea, but I look back now and it was quite a bad design. It was funded by a polystyrene company, and that involved a lot of compromises to try and do something for free in polystyrene, which is not a great material. It was an attempt to show that polystyrene is more than just a packaging material. It was interesting from a conceptual point of view, and it made me popular for about ten minutes.
You’re a CBE now.
Oh yeah, I’m a commander.
How do you feel about that title? Does it stop you being a renegade?
It gives me a better platform. [The British fashion designer] Katherine Hamnett chucked hers in the bin because of the UK government’s position on Israel; did you see that? What do I think? I had an OBE already, and I wanted to show someone one day, and I couldn’t find it. It turned up in the Christmas decorations box – the cleaner had put it in there. Symbolically, the title’s quite good, because now I could get married in St Paul’s Cathedral [he is already married], but I would love if it had some more practical outcome. I would love to have a horse, or something, so I could be a proper commander, or uniform I could wear, but there is nothing.
Aside from the commercial stuff, you’re working on a project at the moment to reestablish coral reefs, and help prevent coastal erosion. Tell me about that.
In the 1970s an architect called Wolf Hilbertz wanted to create an underwater city, and he designed a metal framework that lets limestone build up on it – this thing called Biorock. I researched that and got inspired about the possibility of helping to stop coastal erosion.
The usual response at the moment to that is just to dump a load of concrete on the sea bed, which destroys it.
But I’m working with a foundation in the Maldives, with biologists who are working on heat resistant concrete, and the idea is that we can find a way of building defences with it, and having coral grow on it. We’re starting with furniture to test it out, and six months ago I went to the Bahamas to start on the project with some chairs. So I made the chairs, came back from the Bahamas, sold them on the art market. There’s still one available if you’d like to buy it. So it’s a work in progress, but interestingly, of all the things I talk about, it’s always that project that people ask questions about.
Are you seeing yourself going in a more ecological, experimental direction, or do you want to keep doing the commercial stuff as well?
I don’t have much choice. I’m owned by private equity, so I’m on an unstoppable train that I signed up to. I don’t own the majority of my name. The coral project is something that lies outside of design that I think is important. It’s about finding a positive coping mechanism.
