I spent a rather lovely Tuesday afternoon during London Design Festival ambling around a gallery space at twentytwentyone discussing the difference between art and design with Ronan Bouroullec – I love my job! Then I pinned both Bourourllecs down for a proper interview…
There’s a huge variety in your work. Does each thing you do feed into everything else?
RB: Certainly, we try but each brief depends on the context. For me a good designer is like a good actor, someone with a large palate of character. A bad designer, like a bad actor, is one who is repeating the same situation. So we try every time to reconsider the subject, reconsider the way of working, but at the same time, and this is maybe not so important, but [we’re] building a clear body of work.
EW: The projects take place all together in the studio, so we try to touch each project by different manners; sometimes it’s drawing, sometimes it’s 3D mock-ups, sometimes it’s… so still there is a kind of aggravation between different things, but it might be that there is a little bit of feeding from one subject to another, because they’re all mixed.
I’m told your motto is ‘the user decides’….
RB: I think that that’s not really true, I think it’s probably because we are not very good at talking about our work!
Is it something you believe – that your work should be judged by the people who use it?
RB: We believe in the fact that it has to be adapted; that the object has to have the ability to adapt itself to lots of different situations…
EW: When we have been making office furniture for Vitra, we are dealing with a certain number of people, it’s probably more likely to evolve than at home, because work is work, so it’s a matter of necessity to bring an element of freedom and self-adapting…
RB:… but when we did the vases or carpet or something like that it’s true too – the fact that things can be reconsidered, that they can be cut in two and displayed in a different part of the house. When objects are going into different landscapes in different situations, they need to adapt from one space to another, and in the end we are doing objects in several thousands, so every time they have to face a different environment.
But I guess you have to let go of a little bit of control in order to let the user get involved…
RB: It’s very generous to say that, but that’s not the case. We have just very clearly defined the parameter people are free to do what ever they want.
I’ve heard that you have quite different personalities to each other. How would you each describe yourself?
RB: I am passionate… I need everything very directly, I need to be passionate to be interested in someone, in something. I have been interested in this discipline since I was 15, so I am focusing on something that is a part of me… I need people who share the same passion, which isn’t always easy.
EB: I think I am organised and messy. Maybe too optimistic. And then… I am the opposite of worry, I don’t worry enough. And I am a handy-man. I do things with my hands.
And how do those personalities work together?
RB: It’s quite interesting to have these two personalities because we are not…
EB: …in the actual everyday process, it’s not really clear, because we share a lot of common abilities, most of the issue of being two is more to do with being able to contradict the project itself, so that you are inside and outside at the same time…
RB: Mostly to see what is wrong…
EB: …or to see what is good. Sometimes having the possibility to be a bit schizophrenic. As we are two, sometimes I can highly concentrate on one part of it, because he will take care of the other part. I think as soon as you do something, you have to consider it from many many points of view, sometimes all these point of view start to make you deal with a certain complexity that makes you go a little bit away from something… so if I want to, I can really concentrate on one part, because he would take care of the other one and that’s quite interesting for finding strong ideas.
Your work is compared to poetry. How do you feel about that?
RB: The more and more I understand… I feel like the issue of design is more to decide what sort of culture surrounds us. Let’s say that technological issues, production issues, the tools that we play with… are the colours, but they’re not the real issues. The real issue is what kind of culture you bring to it. If we do a corkscrew, it has to work as a corkscrew, but the real thing is more the way you remember, the way your hand feels about it, then there is all this other part, which you can’t really control, which is the culture…. I think we’ve got many words for it, but it’s true that we look for a certain elegance, or a certain thing that makes the quality of a character; that brings a flavour; that means something.
I’d like to talk to you about Textile Field, your installation for the V&A, at last year’s London Design Festival. Where did the inspiration for that come from?
RB: When something works you are touched by it, and the brief was very simple – the fact that a normal museum is the wrongest place I know, because they are just missing… there is no charm in a museum for me. They are very static. I don’t understand why you have to suffer, why you cannot lie on the floor. I really like to be in situations just conteplating the landscape – this is one of my favourite situations to be in and contemplating a museum, I do not find I enter into a trace [as I do] when I am very happy in a field watching the clouds; to be in front of something marvellous to be touched by it.
This was a test, I don’t think that we reached a super high level of it, but it’s just a way to say that a museum doesn’t need to be like a church when you need to suffer, when you need to be in hard conditions. The idea was to invite people to come to lie, to observe a painting, or not. So it was a mix [of people] sending an SMS or trying to kiss the other one, or concentrating on the drawings and I like to see all of that in this place. I do not care that people were [only] interested in lying on the floor, it’s the question of the life inside that’s interesting to me.
EB: But maybe one thing… we really stuck to making something functional. This has always been one of [our] really strong guidelines. I mean we were offered the space, we could have done anything, even with no relation to the space. We could have in a way taken an empty gallery. We wanted to make a kind of furniture.
I think sometimes we try to find some great answer for one moment in your life and I think the great answer is more an open playground like Hyde Park. I think that was one of the qualities of the piece, changing a lot while at the same time, keeping things quite open minded.
And then we have this clue in our work, we always try as much as possible to highly concentrate a project – not to be too messy and not to have too much. The piece in the V&A was like the ground, because it was just a piece of fabric and that’s that. I think it really helps the people to take this as some kind of public furniture, because they didn’t try to understand it, for them it had no meaning to search for, they could just enjoy it.
I was afraid of the piece, because I was not sure: would the people be able to go beyond the initial look of this piece, like minimal art from the 60s and 70s, which most of the time they don’t touch? But they just see the structure… I have a nice picture of some kids making a tower, four of them then three of them, then two, then they all fell.
It’s the first time that we sort of… happiness, just happiness. And I think this happiness was due to bringing some fabric. Most of the time fabric means something quite personal, something quite warm. It just gives them this freedom. I was quite happy conceptually speaking, I didn’t know if it would work or not, but as Ronan said: “In front of art pieces you lack a little bit of your self behavior, you have the impression that you don’t really understand it, so you speak really quietly “Do you like it?” “Yes” and then after a while… “Well, I’m not not sure I got everything…” “Actually I was bored!” And to bring a sign to say: “Behave like you are, do what you want” helps [people] to look at the art piece.
And how did The Wrong Shop collaboration come about?
RB: I think this is something we spoke about during two years and we said: “Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, no, no…” For me drawing is a part of us, but it something which has always been very intimate and not shown, not related directly to our work.
It started two years ago, we had the chance in France to have two exhibitions, but with some months [between them]. It was a sort of retrospective in Centre Pompidou Metz, which was a 1000m2 exhibition, so it was our objects. But there was the exhibition too in Bordeaux and so we wanted to have something different, so we decided in the Bordeaux exhibition to not show an object at all, but more different things, some pcitures of the process, some drawings, some abstracts…
EB: Everything was 2D…
RB: Just pictures…
EB: It was pictures, drawings…
RB: And this had a new success and we thought it was interesting to talk about our work like that. Maybe that was the first moment that we decided to show drawings… and then a lot of people wanted to buy or to see or to understand. So we decided, almost like the objects, there is maybe an interesting thing to reproduce it. If it is a good drawing there is no reason to just have one, we could maybe find a way to print them and so we started.
As [with] everything it is very important for me, but it has a lightness which is simple. When you are a designer, you’re not supposed to draw, or when you are artists you are not supposed to do objects and I think that creative process is more complex than that. There are some people are very very good at doing the same thing, but we like to jump from subject to small, to big to million to one-off piece, so drawing is a part of it.
Also, design is very positive – you try to solve things; you try to find a solution, in which you try to adapt, it’s a positive discipline. Drawing is something in which you can be sad and you can contemplate it… so it’s another palate, it’s another field of expression.
It is something totally direct; you do not have to be frustrated doing two years between the idea and the final thing in front of a shop window. You manage the time and [you decide] when it’s finished.
Probably for me too it’s the fact that drawing is something which is more intimate; that we do not have to share each object of each colour of each millimetre. Drawing is something that we can practice differently and not in the same way and not together… and I think it’s this abstraction and this fantasy that feeds [into our] work. It’s not very clear to understand exactly how from the start, but I think it’s healthy.
What are you most proud of?
RB: Nothing for me.
EB: I have got a lot of love for my daughter actually. She’s two years and a half and she’s making silly things.
What advice would you give to an aspiring designer?
RB: To work a lot. You need to work to do something interesting and the most important thing is to have a lot of empathy – to develop this capacity to learn to understand very quickly in different situations what you can do, how to deal with people… because a good project is not a good project by itself. It has to be intelligent in a context. So you enter a factory – you have to very quickly understand the machines, the people working, their skills and you have be intelligent about not a project in general, but exactly here in this situation with these people in this mood…
EB: Me, I think what is important is doing projects in any kind of context. That’s a problem at the beginning. You don’t have a big company, but you can always make things, you can always find a workshop to practice, to find out, to make a bag… Make, do, do.
A lot of things in design are about finding just the right gesture at just the the very moment something is done. Design is not very wide – once there is three, it’s already an opera in design. Most of the time logic is in nothing and you will only discover it through practicing.
We are partially self taught because we started really early and a lot of things that have been added into proejcts and become a starting point or spinning poing were just because, for example, I wanted to make a sofa and I’ve tried to stitch and through just the fact of trying stitching things came out of that.
While practicing you get into the habit of playing with reality and in design, reality is so dense and limited and heavy, that you have to confront the reality and doing things is a way to do this.
What’s your favourite colour?
EB: Ah! Green
RB: The same thing, but not the same type of green.
EB: You don’t know my green! My green is… there is a blue which I love, which is a dark dark blue which is near to the green, nearly turquoise, like the duck blue, teal… maybe I move to this, dark blue really near the green.
RB: Mine is green with a bit of yellow, which is not an army green… [points to a nearby leaf] darker than that.
Further reading for the especially geeky: