Whats on your mind?

• When we started out product launches were so exciting, but now we are working on a minimum of ten much bigger projects at any one time and we find that we are much less interested in trade fairs. There are so many of them, there’s always another one just around the corner. Tom Lloyd
• As I get older, my desire to be seen out and about atevents is diminishing. You have to take the whole scene with a pinch of salt and the press can be as bad as it is good. We need a bit of it, yes, but it’s not the be-all-and-end-all. It can also be damaging emotionally. Getting press was initially aboout getting work, but the better-known we get the more irrelevant it seems. Luke Pearson
• When Tom and I set out we had unbridled enthusiasm and we knew we would succeed. We knew we had something different. We were both graduates at the Royal College of Art, we had both studied furniture and industrial design, and we both took an interest in science, technology and yje environment. There was a gap in the industry we could fill. LP
• We travelled around Europe and knocked on the doors ofthe companies that we wanted to work for. Prehaps it was naive, but it works. For five years we didn’t work in the UK at all. We found that in Europe people were very receptive – much more than in Britain. They saw that you were serious and had moved country for a chance to work with them. TL
• Oscar Wilde once said, ‘Only a fool knows himself.’ That is so relevant to design. LP
• I am cynical of the Brits – there seems to be an inbuilt acceptance of failure. When we set out we believed we would do well. It’s not about being arrogant, just confident and enthusiastic. LP
• Graduates today have to be much more focused. Often they will graduate with, say, three products that they might sell, and get lots of press coverage, but can they sustain that? What we do is different. You have to sell a lot of office furniture, say, to get any royalty on it. There’s much more of it about so it’s harder. LP
• When I was at Central St Martins College of Art and Design they were turning out 18 students in a year. Now that figure is more like 100. What are they all goign to do? A lot of these people aren’t designers, they just have a design degree. Statistically, you have more people in the field who are less talented. That said, really talented people will always find a way. LP
• It does make employing people a little difficult. We get ten CVs a day, which we can’t process. And the someone writes ‘Dear Sir/Madam’ and you think come on, you can do better than that. Sometimes we recruit people who knock on our door. Sometimes they are foreign students who have come a long way to see us. TL
• Being a good designer is about innovation, empathy and intelligence. We have to assume we can make the world better. I still have ideals. I still think we can improve the world. LP
• Without empathy you can’t design – it is vital. This is one of the benefits of a partnership – it knocks off the corners of the ego. I have no drive to create the world according to Luke. Nor does Tom want to create the world according to Tom. LP
• Design should be emotinally enriching, sustainable and ethical. We turned down a client because what they asked us to design was just another chair. Why? There was no reason for it, it was banal and facile. Yes, you can raise the bar aesthetically, but the commercial environment shouldn’t hanker after that. TL

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