Designer Marcel Wanders on bringing his playful vision to Shanghai – interview

Marcel Wanders was probably never cut out for design school, which is maybe why his first one kicked him out. The acclaimed product designer – and provocateur – now sometimes finds himself lecturing the next generation. “I always say I’m not there to have an opinion on their work but to applaud their ideas, to help them make their concepts deeper,” he says. “Design is about culture. It’s about creating something unique, not following other people’s rules – even if that’s what a lot of designers have been educated to do.” The 62-year-old has designed some 1,900 objects for design brands like Moroso, B&B Italia, Boffi, Alessi, Flos and Baccarat, as well as famous names that range from Louis Vuitton to even Marks & Spencer. His designs have also become part of the permanent collections of august institutions from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum to New York’s MoMA. “Functionality is the lowest standard in design, even if a lot of designers pride themselves on it.

When I say that I can see the shock across the lecture room,” he says, chuckling at the memory of some of his students’ faces. “There’s a silence, or a confusion at the idea. But, really, if a chair is just about functionality then it’s competing with a €16 plastic chair, which will do the job just as well. And it’s a nonsense to say that a more expensive chair is about making fit better. Of course design is about more than that.” Wanders’ own designs may still function, but they also challenge, perplex, entertain.

Among his most well-known works are the Knotted Chair – the result of a process he developed by which rope can be hardened like steel; his Carbon Balloon Chair – which looks as though it’s been made from party balloons, although these have, again through a process of his own devising, been dipped in carbon; and, most famously, a vessel modelled on a spectacularly explosive nasal emission. It’s called the Airborne Snotty Vase. Now he’s bringing his vision to Shanghai. There, Wanders has opened the latest showroom for his Moooi lighting and furniture brand, which he co-founded 25 years ago as a means of championing the work of up-and-coming designers and which now includes the established likes of Jaime Hayon, Maarten Baas and Hilde Koenders, among many others. “We’re going to find out what [design] speaks to people in China, because in a world in which there’s a lot of everything there’s only one Moooi – and I think there’s still excitement for something more playful, not corporate like a lot of design today,” enthuses Wanders. “[The Chinese] are new to the idea of individualism maybe, so I think it’s going to work well there”.

Wanders’ own latest design is the Lady Amherst lounger for the Chinese brand HC28 Maison and named for the spectacular pheasant native to southwestern China. Part chair and part sculpture – it’s even mounted on a plinth – the Lady Amherst is Wanders’ first daybed and “perfect for the peacock type who tells the kids to go away because he’s going to take a nap – right in the middle of the room,” says Wanders. “I’m Dutch and we’re not the kind of people to use that kind of chair. We’re too humble.” He’s joking – the chair was commissioned by a friend who, naturally, understands what Wanders is about. “Design is about a lot of things – creating an atmosphere, starting a conversation, life, humour, the senses, beauty, even spirituality,” he says. “If art and movies and poetry can be about love – poetry isn’t just about writing sentences, is it? – why is a design object thought of as being about its use? I think my job is to create and that means something new.

It doesn’t have to provoke but it does have to say something new. I think the design industry is moving towards that idea.” Getting his clients to understand this ethos is not always easy. Wanders concedes that there are maybe three or four projects he wouldn’t want to show anyone, which he counts as not a bad track record. These, he suggests, were products of early naivety: “Success came too early to me in a way, before I had the understanding of design I needed, but people still wanted to make my ideas,” he shrugs.

Or of business necessity – “it was a matter of taking the project or laying people off”. These days he must be one of the very few designers to also have an MBA degree, which has since helped him be as successful commercially as he is creatively. “If design was about making money you’d do something else,” he says. “A lot of great creators don’t make it in business. And most design companies have humble turnovers.

But they are run by very passionate people. If I make a thing I want to give it away, but I can’t do that all day or I’ll be in big trouble.” And yet, Wanders stresses, like art and movies and poetry, design too can be enjoyed without great expense, despite many complaining about how this often seems not to be the case.

But, as he points out, while only 1,000 or so people own a Knotted Chair, many millions more will have been exposed to the ideas behind it – online, or in print – and found themselves perplexed or amused by its seemingly gravity-defying form. “Design is free. It’s ownership of design that’s not free, but that’s the least important part of it,” as Wanders puts it. You can and should enjoy design, he suggests, much as most people are able to enjoy great art without owning it. “You can buy a postcard of a Picasso,” says Wanders, a man who once produced a gigantic 35kg art book with each of the works depicted at one-to-one scale. “Most people who open a design magazine are not looking to buy a sofa,” he says. “They’re trying to understand who they’re going to be tomorrow. Design is my way of communicating [those ideas] to the world.

If I can do that and it touches people, that’s success.”