Tom and I met at the entrance to London Zoo on the outer circuit of Regent’s Park. It was 7am, still dark but none of the chill one would expect on a late October morning. If you’ve never witnessed the phenomenon of the pelotons that race around Regent’s Park every morning, it’s quite scarily spectacular. We jumped on the wheels of a group of Hackney design folk who Tom often rides with, but it wasn’t long before the conversation was suffocated by the effort of keeping up with the Pas Normal dressed youngsters. We headed off to VIA cycling emporium.
Loaded with coffee and croissants I asked what approach the studio had to tackling climate change. In the early 20th Century, one of the founding ideas of design was to make things more efficient, more attractive, easier to sell and make more profit. Tom says that today, it’s a question of redefining the hierarchy of the value proposition and instead putting the planet at the top. He says we need to make the planet a participant in the solution. He looks back at the original aim of the studio that he and Luke Pearson founded and says it was to avoid trends and to design for a future relevance. Put simply: keeping that lump of carbon in use for longer.
There has been a huge shift in the narrative of the Design Council’s output: from the user being at the heart of the process to the planet taking the prominent position. “I really like another phrase,” added Tom, “which is, you have to make the planet a co-beneficiary of your decision making because unless the planet is benefiting from that particular decision, you’re making the wrong decision.” Tom teaches on the furniture design course with a sustainability focus at Nottingham Trent University where he explores a particular theme through the eyes of one of his clients. He is very aware of the real sense of jeopardy felt by his students who are being told that the world is crumbling around them. But despite this, Tom is optimistic that they understand the new narrative and can apply it to every part of their lives. He observes that they are working out how to deal with it. And so must we.
Tom is also the part time Master of the Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry, where he is using his position to push forward the sustainability agenda within their mission ‘to inspire new generations of creative thinkers to design a better world.’ ‘The focus of my time at the Faculty of Royal Designers is design’s contribution to enhancing Social Justice in the world, with the Climate Emergency being a central component of this challenge.’
A new entrant into the market attempting to respond positively on this issue is Dutch company, Niaga (‘again’ backwards), that talks about the principle of ‘reversible connections’. This means that any two materials that you connect together have to be reversible, hence, always designing for diss-assembly. For example, consider the hugely challenging issue of laminate sitting on top of chip board, how do you reverse the connection between those two materials? It’s a powerful principle that allows for repair, allows for recycling, and allows for re-use. With furniture accounting for approximately 30% of the embodied carbon in a building’s lifecycle it seems obvious that if furniture is designed to be reused then this furniture should be kept in circulation longer that the current 5-10 years. If this was the case, then a furniture subscription service with multiple custodians would demand that chairs and tables could be repaired and refreshed. To do this, however, we need to value a new aesthetic, one that celebrates the old stuff and where the story of the furniture’s past use is obvious and appreciated. The home of the Pearson Lloyd studio has a very strong reuse aesthetic. They kept every bit of steel and timber on site so they could re-use and re-use. They were clear with their contractor saying “don’t bring anything in or off-site that we can’t use again.”
You’d think it was obvious, but Tom tells me that not every brief they receive has impact on the climate at the top of the requirements. In fact, Pearson Lloyd are developing their own circularity brief that they can tag on to any project they feel would work well for the studio. One aspect that particularly interests Tom is the management of waste. How to avoid it (square tables rather than round – more efficient use of materials) and design for reuse and avoiding landfill. “We’re doing a project with Nottingham Trent University and Modus this term, around waste streams where we’re using Modus’s plywood waste for the students to use for their prototypes. Waste stream is a kind of new material source for designers, and it has to be seen as a sort of logistical alternative; it’s not going into the recycling, it’s going back into the system to be distributed.” In another example he tells me how working with an East London start-up, Batch Works, Pearson Lloyd have designed a range of desk accessories for Bene that are 3D printed using recycled bio-plastic (PLA), sourced from post-consumer food packaging diverted from landfill.. They are effectively mass producing straight off the Pearson Lloyd design files. When Bene sells a thousand desk tidies to a large corporate client who at some point no longer need them, Bene will take them back and regrind them into a new product. “That’s a closed loop system – it’s just one tiny example, but it’s established now and growing”, says Tom. And how does the FM team know what to do with them? Well, that’s the next link, the next part of the connectivity.
My time with Tom is up. We’ve ridden in circles and our conversation has been anything but linear. But there is purpose and power and Tom has both. On and off the bike.
