Everywhere you look at Colebrook Bosson Saunders’ London Bridge headquarters there are ‘arms’ for supporting flat-screen monitors in various stages of prototyping, reduced to their simplest form like metal skeletons; rough pencil sketches tacked to the walls, contrasting with the virtual CAD models on computer screens and the three-dimensional prints showing early visualisations of products yet to be completed.
Head designer Andrew Wills shows me round his studio; he picks up a prototype to explain how it works, highlighting the perfect balance of engineering and design that is synonymous with CBS.
The company was formed 17 years ago and quickly established a niche by designing around the rapidly advancing technology of the Nineties. Its innovative products include laptop stands, cable management solutions, gas-lift monitor arms and mobile workstations. The Wishbone flat-screen arm, developed in 1999, was the first of its kind, and it has been ubiquitously copied. But Wills is magnanimous; after all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. ‘It’s a good thing when people copy us. It means that they’re wasting time when we’re busy doing something else,’ he says.
So what makes CBS products successful? Wills says this is a complicated question. ‘I always thought, when I was studying, that if you had a good design it would sell automatically. But I’ve learned that sales and marketing are vital,’ he says.
He’s seen award-winning designs with disappointing sales and less innovative products fly off the shelves. ‘To be successful, you need to get the sales strategy right. If it’s not in the big stores, then it won’t sell, no matter how good the idea,’ he says.
While Wills acknowledges the vital role of marketing, he is quick to point out that CBS is a design-led company: ‘All of the directors have design backgrounds. That’s what we do, and that’s what makes us so strong in the market.’
CBS has a tradition of finding new designers whose work they admire, and asking them to join. ‘We have either qualified product designers with a very strong understanding of engineering, or engineers who have a strong understanding of product design and aesthetics,’ says Wills. ‘It is actually very hard to find designers who can do this kind of product design, because it pushes the boundary between design and engineering.’
At the design studio of CBS at London Bridge, the design team uses a computer program called Solid Works, which allows them to create 3D CAD models that can be automatically translated into a blueprint to be sent away for manufacture. Cosmos FEA software is also used, which allows a product design to be tested to its theoretical breaking point.
Below the design studio is a workshop where prototypes are built and products tested. ‘It’s an unusual product area,’ says Wills. ‘If you take a mobile phone, for instance, there are a lot of design issues, but it’s mostly a matter of packaging. Our products have to move in every direction; there’s different joints, they carry a load and they have to be very pure from a visual point of view.’
The design process always begins with extensive research, and this as an area that Wills and his team are keen to push even further. ‘We’re doing more and more research into possible areas for innovation,’ he says. The company employs dedicated researchers to ensure that it remains at the forefront of technology.
As head of design he guides and inspires the design team. ‘It would be unfair to say that I take on projects entirely myself,’ he says, ‘but I will often come up with an initial idea, a sketch, or something that I think we should work on, then one of the design team will actually make it come to life.’
The designers come from a range of backgrounds and cultures, ‘from Japan to Yorkshire’, he says. I suggest that the studio seems to buzz with creativity. ‘We’ve no shortage of ideas’, he agrees, ‘but talking it through to production can sometimes be painful. That’s when issues of cost and technical constraints can start to bite.’
The purity of form that Wills talks about is the crux of CBS’s designs. There is a visual purity that he likens to a perfectly balanced bridge, ‘engineered just right to support weight’.
It’s true that CBS products are pure of design, that nothing is superfluous, but there is a human quality too: as well as the obvious anatomical reference to the ‘arms’ that support flat-screen monitors, products are given human names; sometimes little anthropomorphic jokes are designed into less-visible areas, such as a smiling face created with a single curving line of plastic beneath two screws.
‘I think there is a beauty in really wellproportioned engineering, when you know that something is just right,’ says Wills.
Lauren Welsh at Muraspec
Finding new talent is crucial for design companies, and like Colebrook Bosson Saunders, wallcovering specialist Muraspec has learned that you sometimes have to seek out designers whose work you admire.
Many design graduates struggle to find a niche after the creative freedom of university: employers are often wary of taking on nascent designers with little or no professional experience. But Matt Hayes, design development manager at Muraspec, knows it’s a chance that’s worth taking.
In 2006 Hayes attended the New Designers fair at London’s Business Design Centre. Among thousands of exhibitors, the work of one graduate, Lauren Welsh, caught his imagination.
‘I had my work on display on the Glasgow School of Art stand, and this included a wallpaper range I had been working on during my final year,’ explains Welsh.’ Hayes asked her to join the company on a one-year placement and, in July 2008, she was taken on fulltime by the Muraspec design team, based in Peckham, south London.
Welsh hadn’t heard of Muraspec before the show. ‘I think it is quite hard for students to find out about commercial companies while they’re studying,’ she says. According to Welsh, students are far more aware of the residential sector: ‘That’s why Muraspec has been making a conscious effort to approach students and universities.’
Her first brief was to adapt a design from her textiles degree for production as a range of flock wallpaper. It was the first time her work had gone into manufacture, but it was also Muraspec’s first flock wallcovering. ‘We were all learning what we could and couldn’t achieve,’ she says.
Flock wallpaper has recently shed its uncool image with stylish designs from fellow Glasgow School of Art graduates Timorous Beasties, among others. ‘I liked the idea of using a traditional process to create a contemporary design inspired by my own drawings,’ says Welsh. She eschewed the floral patterns and damasks usually associated with flock wallpaper in favour of something more chaotic and creative, naming the design Zuni after the Native American tribe she used as a basis for research.
For Welsh, and for the rest of Muraspec design team, drawing is the foundation of design. ‘I used special mark-making techniques to create the free-flowing line that developed into Zuni’, she says. Unlike most wallpapers, Zuni’s pattern it isn’t balanced. It has areas of intense mark making, which then open up to less concentrated sections. The intricate, tangled line is frenetic in places, tentative in others. Welsh’s drawings have been made compulsively tactile. ‘I have been to visit customers and they continue to stroke the design as they speak to me, unable to put it down. This is what I loved about the flock process – the touchy-feely nature of the finish,’ she says.
Adapting such a personal piece of artwork to a medium for mass-production must have been challenging. How did she preserve the integrity of the work? ‘As with every design Muraspec produces, the original artwork had to evolve to become a viable product. I had to alter the scale of the design, but I feel that the changes were an improvement on the original,’ she says.
Welsh says there are always obstacles to the design process, problems that need to be overcome: ‘If everything comes together too easily you are left thinking, “Why is this so easy?’”
Although she finds the whole process satisfying in its own right, it’s the stage when the design goes into production that gives her most pleasure. ‘As a designer, there’s nothing more satisfying than that final moment. That’s when you know all the stress and tears were worth it.’
