The Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence in the South of France is just extraordinary. It’s so beautiful because, of all the original drawings that Matisse did, those of the crucifixion in charcoal are incredible. You then have the most amazing priest’s robes, which are beautifully embroidered, and then he designed this extraordinary stained glass windows and it’s just amazing. Very small, very intimate, but fabulous.
When I started out as an art student I had three weeks in America. I travelled to New York and went to the Guggenheim Museum. That’s when I just fell in love with architecture and buildings. I remember walking up this helix and suddenly finding myself at the top and realising what genius it was. I can recall looking down the amazing vistas of steps like it was yesterday. Stunning.
I’ve discovered this company called 3form who produce a really interesting range of products. For example they’ll take a piece of fabric and trap it in resin – laminate it. What’s incredible about this is of course when you start to light it, it does extraordinary things. One of the great things about it is that a lot of it is recyclable, which I really like - it’s very environmentally friendly. It gets even more interesting when they laminate grass reeds or chrome film which reflects the light. If you put coloured lights behind it all sorts of things happen. They’ve got a whole gallery so you can go and just pick a sheet of two metre by one metre or whatever.
It’s a very versatile and interesting material and in fact I’m thinking of using it at one of the Oasis Academies based in Oldham. The cotton industry in Oldham was massive and we want to bring the history of Oldham into the academy. We found that in this product range you can actually compress cotton flowers into the resin. So we can have a cotton resin panel that actually hangs in the reception area. It will just be decorative but there will be a historical poignancy to it.
Light - that’s it in a word. For me it’s about light. You can play with texture and you can play with form but playing with light is amazing. I was on a site this morning for a house I’m designing and it’s really interesting that this house is at the stage where it’s got the roof on, walls up and windows in, but no electrics at all. As I walked the client through the house we were able to understand the light that would be in play most of the time.
Lighting will change a mood. Areas that are dark now, will be changed when you light them. Natural light is an amazing thing. We’ve all seen it, particularly on something like the sea. I do a lot of sailing. Sail on a grey day - everything’s grey. The sky is grey and the water is grey. The sun comes out and everything turns blue, crystallises and sparkles. The whole scene comes alive as the Natural light shifts.
When I was at Art College I had this great tutor. I remember once crit we had and there was a guy there who really wasn’t entertaining the concept and the tutor just lent back and said:
"Let me explain the difference between an artist and a designer. What an artist produces, even if it’s a commission for a painting, is pretty self-indulgent. They’re producing their piece, their work. But a designer isn’t a designer without a client, and you’ve got to view the client as part of the strategic design team."
Any time I’ve been involved in design, it only works well when there is a fantastic partnership between the client and the designer. It’s about the skill of marrying those things together and sometimes knowing when you need to put your best foot forward and say: "Sorry that won’t work" or when you need to listen, invite their comments and learn from their perspective.
One of my favourite stories is when I went to visit a school in a very deprived area. This was before Oasis were managing the school. I walked into what really was one of the most frightening experiences of my life. There were literally kids fighting in front of me. I walked by the loo's and the doors where falling off the cubicles. There was human excrement on the bowls and the whole place was just falling apart. There was no discipline, there was massive absenteeism and it was only a 2% preferred choice of school by parents for that catchment area.
Anyway ABA get commissioned by Oasis, our client, to go in and do our stuff together with them and the leadership team. ‘Our Stuff’ is about educational change, leadership, curriculum and of course investing a substantial amount of money into refurbishing parts of the school.
Months pass – a lot of work, and then you go back to an open day. And you see the difference. It is so staggering. It is unbelievable. There’s a sense of discipline, of order, of joy, of empowerment, of creativity.
It’s just phenomenal and I will never forget this one little girl, she was fabulous, a West Indian girl who’d written a poem. It was called ‘The Circle of Inclusion’, which is the Oasis symbol and she ended up in this poem, eulogizing, about all that had happened to her and in the end she said "It’s all summed up in one thing, ‘The Circle of Inclusion’." At which point, I just about broke down because you suddenly realize that you created a symbol that the children are now using as a metaphor for a change in their life - and that symbol had helped them realize what change could be.
It was just a very profound moment, a very humbling moment.
I am so inspired by a three year project I’m working on at the moment – We’re creating the brand for Oasis. Oasis is a charity that helps set up and provide ten (now 12) secondary education academies across the UK as part of the Government Academy Program. What’s so amazing about it is seeing what happens when you take children from a poor environment into a good environment – physically, educationally and emotionally.
To see the transformation in their lives is really inspiring. The students ‘get’ the branding because they get visuals – they’re a visual generation, and they get the sound bite, they get the energy of imagery, they get all of that and it becomes a very powerful tool for them.
So what I do is this: I go and meet with the Academy Principal and begin to think through the designed environment - how they want to communicate their values and ethos and how they want to inspire and create growth in the students. Then we talk through the ways we could communicate those values through graphics, photography, animation, film and everything else – then, out of all of that we formulate a brief and branding strategy.
From that we derive, what we call, a tailored design proposal which goes right down to all the detail around where graphic panels or plasmas and sculptures might be placed. We involve the children and the staff leadership team to help them on the journey through workshops. That helps them to understand what it’s going to be like in the new academy. Some of the children might come from a very deprived background; some have never even been on a train or been to London. So we you want to help them imagine being in a twenty million pound academy - it seems impossible – but that’s what we do!
Designing or Branding?
I get asked if I’m in interior design or in branding and I answer it this way: I operate in a number of design disciplines, whether it’s branding or interior design, furniture, sculpture or illustration. The core skill I carry is that I’m a conceptual thinker. So what I’m helping the client do is deliver a concept in all those disciplines and environments. So it’s a merger of design and branding - it uses interior design skills to understand how a brand will work within the interior environment, then branding skills around graphic communication to help bring the energy and the vitality into what is physically produced.
So with the work I’m doing with Oasis Academies I’m coming in much more as a branding consultant, as a specialist branding consultant, who’s had a number of years’ experience in the educational realm. They really value my experience and understanding of branding and education. They’re buying the creation of a co-ordinated communication strategy, from web through to literature, to the design environment itself.
