Name: Tom Dixon on his design past, present and future | Braun | British GQ
Uploaded: 2025-05-29T12:39:35.000Z
Duration: 8 min 57 s
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The Japanese philosopher Yonagi Suetsu once said make beautiful things, make things to be used, eliminate anything that is unnecessary.

How do designers achieve this simplicity of form?

These are some of the questions that I'm going to be discussing with visionary designer Tom Dixon.

Tom Dixon is one of Britain's leading designers, self-taught with an endless curiosity.

I'll be finding out just what it is that drives Tom to create.

Tom, what was it that initially drew you to design?

I started making things pretty much for pleasure.

People started buying them and at one point people started calling me a designer.

So the kind of career twists and turns I've had have given me a very different perspective to other designers.

Like everybody at that time, everybody was in a band so it wasn't an unusual thing, but we did end up being quite popular in London, signing a record contract, going on tour.

I'd started welding live on stage as a kind of performance art kind of piece.

I then subsequently broke my arm in a motorbike crash and couldn't go on tour, but by that time I'd already started making things.

So there was a kind of seamless transition if you like, but precipitated by an accident.

So I do like to say I'm a totally accidental designer, but literally.

It's quite a compelling thing to melt metal and meld it together.

You're watching fire transforming a piece of metal.

It's one of those techniques that doesn't require huge amounts of skill, but allows you to make things that are quite strong very fast.

I was immediately struck by how it suited my impatience.

So this is always quite a good example of what happened next really, which is that actually rather than using the scrap metal, I was just making the chair out of the welding rod.

So somewhere between a visit to the Science Museum and seeing models of bridges and the primitive early computer programs that were triangulating objects, the idea for this chair came.

I was trying to make the lightest chair in the world in metal.

How and where do you find inspiration for the things you design?

It's kind of strangely similar to when I started.

The joy of just creating something that can happen with your hands, or it could be inspired by a tool that you might have just bought, or a visit to a factory.

I might get interested in cooking and spend some time in a restaurant here.

So I'll do a shift once every couple of weeks as a sous-chef, and that will teach me more about food and how restaurants should be designed than anything actually.

A lot of my time is spent trying to force my designers off the computer and back into the workshop.

I think it's really important for us to model everything full size and full scale.

The process still is, in my view, more akin to sculpture than it is to design, at least from the departure point.

You can shortcut a lot with a computer later, but you have to make the models.

Dieter Rams' famous maxim, less but better, is very much one of your guiding principles as well.

Sometimes there's a lot of superfluous, and it gets harder and harder to do something which is reduced and still interesting.

So you have to balance the temptation to add the bells and whistles with trying to produce something which is significantly different to what's out there, and still maintain a kind of purity and a functionality about it.

What qualities would you say make something timeless or iconic?

It's about being the first to do that shape, or improve that function, or just move the conversation on.

If you try and do something that's different from what's happened before, and if you do that, then it has its own little spot in mini history, right?

I was making myself with my own hands out of scrap metal at the beginning, and then got taken up by a luxury Italian manufacturer, which gave me an international reputation, I guess, and then ended up in the Museum of Modern Art.

Tom, as I walk through the space, I notice that a lot of your designs are very simple.

What you've done is you've found something beautiful in a very simple narrative.

If you can make something simple that people haven't seen before, then you've won, you know, and it's the hardest thing to do.

What is it about this design language that fascinates you so much?

Well, it's not just my design language, it's kind of the basic building blocks of everything.

This is going to be a bit like going back to play school, right?

But, you know, the shapes that are very satisfying are the basic underpinning shapes, so the cube, you know, the circle or the sphere, the cone.

I spend inordinate amounts of time at work stacking things up.

People laugh at often big crashes as all of it topples down, but, you know, trying to find a harmonious new arrangement of these basic shapes is what we actually spend quite a lot of time doing.

So, you know, this could easily be a lamp, right?

But there you've got just your super basic shapes making something more interesting.

Everything I've come across has been so, not only aesthetically pleasing, but also so tactile.

They engage with the environment simply and effectively.

You know, I think tactility is a good one.

I mean, if people want to pick something up, that's the first step, right?

So you'll see a lot of the things have probably got more fatness and thickness and more material than you'd normally need, but that means that the things have got longevity about them, and I think that's one of the things we're seeking in our designs is to have things that stick around for a long time.

Interior design became an intrinsic part of what we do.

Bigger hotels like the Mondrian are like designing a village.

You need to make the things work as a whole unit, but you've also got to consider the journey through a variety of different spaces.

So it's a very interesting typology to work in.

What advice would you give to young designers?

You know, I had the luxury of being unknown and anonymous for a really long time and making things at my own pace.

The danger for young designers now is not having time to evolve their own individual aesthetic or their individual ideas.

Many of the things that I've done, I didn't ever expect to happen, so I'm hoping for a few more surprises, a lot more excitement, and also to surprise the people that like what we do with some unexpected amazingness.

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Tom Dixon on his design past, present and future | Braun | British GQ

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