Engineer, cartoonist, inventor, artist – Tim Hunkin is many things, but is he a designer? ‘Design just sort of happens,’ he says. ‘I start everything I make with an idea but I’m never really sure what it’s going to be’.
What he makes is eclectic, eccentric and always inventive: public clocks for Hawkins Bazaar and London Zoo, interactive exhibits for the National Archives and Victoria and Albert Museum, and old-fashioned arcade games such as Whack a Banker – a timely take on the old Whack a Mole game. ‘‘You pay 40p to hit as many bankers as you can with a mallet in 30 seconds as their heads pop up,’ says Hunkin. Unsurprisingly the game has been a big hit with visitors to his pier amusement arcade in the Suffolk seaside town of Southwold.
‘I think it’s seen as old-fashioned to work by trial and error these days,’ Hunken continues. ‘Even if I spend an afternoon in my workshop milling something, my brain has not gone to sleep, it’s focused on the job and also the things around it – I very often have good ideas when I’m in the middle of doing something like that.’
Hunkin calls this empirical way of working ‘intuitive engineering’ – a method of design he says has suffered along with the decline of Britain’s manufacturing industries.
As well as ‘making things’, Hunkin has also toured the USA and Australia with his lecture How to Cheat at Art and written and presented the hugely successful Channel 4 TV series The Secret Life of Machines, not to mention drawing cartoons for The Observer newspaper for more than a decade.
This unusual career, or careers, began at Cambridge where Hunkin studied engineering. ‘I was at a public school which pretty much existed to get people into Cambridge, because they got points for it or something. They thought I was stupid so they decided to get me in on the easiest subject,’ he says. For a while he thought he was destined to become a conventional engineer, but an ‘entrepreneurial streak’ led him to a life less ordinary.
‘It was a funny course because it was so theoretical… which was misleading for people like me who hadn’t experienced much life. It does give you the idea that all problems can be solved with sums, which is just not true.’
But the course also gave him a sense of self belief: ‘I feel a bit embarrassed by the elitism of Cambridge, but it did give me an enormous amount of confidence; I sort of assumed that I’d be able to do what I wanted.’ But like many graduates, Hunkin wasn’t immediately sure what that was. ‘I wanted to do something with my hands,’ he says. ‘I was desperate to make things even then.’
His break came about through a happy accident that transformed his hobby – drawing cartoons – into a job that would sustain him for 15 years: ‘I had a portfolio of all the things I was up to and this journalist had come along to an event for some reason and a colleague was looking for a comic strip to go in the colour supplement of The Observer – so that was it,’ says Hunkin, characteristically downplaying the encounter.
But wherever his career has taken him, Hunkin has always come back to what he loves most: ‘making things’. In 1999 he designed and curated the Science Museum’s show on ergonomics called The Human Factor, working with Sarah Angliss and Will Jackson. The show was based around diagrams from ergonomics textbooks and crash-test dummies, some of which featured in the exhibits and some of which stood on top of the exhibition walls, occasionally twitching their heads or hands.
The successful collaboration of Hunkin, Angliss and Jackson led the three to form Mongrel Media, which went on to work on other exhibition projects including several garden shed-based exhibits for the Eden Project visitors centre.
Another exhibition for the Science Museum, The Secret Life of the Home, has been a permanent and very popular exhibition since it was installed in 1995.
So has he ever wanted to turn his talents towards something more practical, like office furniture for instance? ‘When I was in my 20s I did make a bit of furniture, not that it was ever very practical, but no, not really. I don’t know if what I do can be called practical, but I do think it’s useful; I think it’s useful for people to be able to laugh at bankers and for people just to be able to have a good time.
‘When I was a kid, the thing that I learned very early on that the most satisfying thing to make was something that would make people laugh. And I’ve never lost that.’
