Name: Brainstorm Design 2023: A Deep Dive With Tom Dixon
Uploaded: 2023-12-07
Duration: 18 min 1 s
Description: Tony Chambers, Studio TC & Friends

Brainstorm Design 2023: A Deep Dive With Tom Dixon

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Next up, we have Tom Dixon. Tom Dixon. The man has been at the forefront of furniture and interior design for the past three decades. Tom is self taught yet he led the creative team at the British furniture retailer Habitat for 10 years before creating his eponymous brand in 2002. The brand is now featured in showrooms from Reykjavik to Tehran. Tom Dixon. The company is a prominent British luxury design brand specializing in furniture, lighting accessories and more with an aesthetic that is intrinsically inspired by the brand's British Roots. Tom's products have earned a claim for their pioneering use of materials and techniques. Today, he's going to tell us about his marine dream, an underwater factory and the development of bio rock. Please welcome Tom Dixon, right. We have a treat in store here. Click number one. I'm trying to show our first slide. Nothing's coming up. Oh, click three times in the oops, here we go. We go a little um sp that this um this is our marine dream that we'll talk about shortly. But to start us off today, I'd like you to take us back a number of years to your beginning, as I said earlier, self taught, no formal training in design but to create creative roots. Can you share with us a nice story of where you started? You've ended up here? Well, you asked me to dig up some slides. So here we go. Um So I guess I grew up in London in a time where formal education was not particularly prized. And so here you see uh my, my secondary school Holland Park Prison as they, they renamed it. Um and 19 seventies London. So it was an experiment in education. You know, London at the time you may remember was very tribal, you know, new romantics, punks, skinheads. Goth. Um And um yeah, so we weren't really that interested in, in learning stuff, but this school which was not, which was a failing school, had an amazing series of workshops, it had metal work, woodwork and ceramics. So there you see me age 16 in the pottery department. And I think it's through ceramics that I learn. At least when I look back when I learn about design because it's a transformation of a very cold wet, ugly material into something desirable to the power of creativity and the power of design. So it's touching you early on in this uh helping you escape the Holland Park prison as you, as you named it. And next stage. Well, you know everybody, I mean, I wasn't interested in design. Basically, I was, I was a much more normal kid, much more interested in, in cars and, and guitars. And so here you see, you know, I leave school uh with one qualification in ceramics. And, um, of course, I'm in the band and the band takes off and we travel to New York, we make records. The band is called, I'm not talking about the name of the band. B thank you. And, um, and you know, we, we for a very short time where we're quite popular. Um I then have a motorcycle crash. I break my, beat it on top of the pops. He's being very modest. They were big. We're talking about the, the design part of my career. So I am, yeah. II, I break my arm in um in a motorcycle accident and I'm replaced by a much better session player who's, who's now the best player for Pink Floyd. So I would think this could easily have been my destiny. Um But, but I'm already um I've learned to weld to fix my cars and my broken motorbike. And so the welding becomes a kind of superpower which which really allows me to make things very quickly. And I get transfixed by this ability to make strong structures in a, in a very quick and um unplanned way. So in this recuperation period after the broken Yes. So I get chucked out of the band. But luckily, um we'd already got involved in the nightclub business and um so I use the, the Welding as actually a performance on stage. And, and that's where I get my first clientele, the people that are in the club, you know, a lot of people in the club superficially, but they're hairdressers or, or fashion designers and they all want some metal work. So I learned how to be a designer through, you know, really through making informative pieces making, that was my marketing campaign. And then, and then I go into, into making things for people and, and I learned just through, through a lot of practice. Yeah, so moving on. So we'll after you, you, you turn into the Tom Dixon, we know now a very successful designer maker retailer. Um But today we're going to talk about an extraordinary project that you've been on for a few years in its this development of bio rock and in its sense, an underwater factory. Yeah. So I find this, this visionary Ecologist architects that worked in the seventies called Wolf Hilbert who dreamt of building cities under water and floating them to the surface. So of course, that didn't work. But in the process, he kind of discovered a series of techniques that allowed him to make a kind of naturally a natural concrete, reinforced concrete. It's like. So, so what happens is you get a metal structure and you charge it with a very small voltage of electricity from a solar panel if you like and, and it starts attracting the minerals from the, from the sea water and, and forms a version of, of limestone. Well, calcium carbonate, which, you know, you'll be familiar if you've ever had a kettle and it has a white deposit that would be calcium carbonate. But the, the electricity attracts the, the um the minerals to the structure and builds this, this natural cement. So, um you know, there's the city never happened, but in the process, he finds out a lot of different potential benefits of this technique, one which includes regenerating coral reefs and and then as a consequence of that, finding out that the coral reefs themselves are very effective ways of stopping, for instance, beach erosion, which increasingly now is, is a big topic. So I then go to the Bahamas and try out this technique. I decided I'm going to have an underwater factory and make some, you know, grow some chairs rather than create this metal, a metal framework. And then you, you, you drop it in the, in the water, it has to be warm water. So Bahamas is good and here the chairs maybe two years later. Um and you can start seeing already not just the accretion of the minerals but also other sea life barnacles and sponges grow at an accelerate accelerated rate as well. Um Three years later, there's a quite big incrustation of, of the material. Here I am uh fishing the first chair out of the water and, and you know, in a cross section through the material, the almost 20 centimeters of naturally occurring cement on the bars which are probably eight millimeters in diameter. So in a pretty effective way of growing of growing cement, obviously not very fast. You know, another thing is, you know, in the process of calcium carbonate, the carbon is another clue. So capturing carbon as well and it's been used a bit by various organizations to regenerate corals. So these are broken bits of coral that have been smashed by divers or by yachts and you can just tie them to the structures and they will grow four or five times faster than they might in nature. It's a really good way of regenerating coral. And then, you know, the last, well, one of the many benefits apart from, you know, increased marine life, but also coral regeneration is, is this increasingly pressing problem, which is the erosion of beaches through um through extreme weather events, which is becoming more and more, you know, more and more topical right now. And of course, the man's natural um way of dealing with stuff is just chucking a lot more concrete at the problem, right. So, you know, it's expensive, it's, it's um it's destructive to marine uh ecosphere kind of thing. Um And it's not that effective because concrete just reflects the the the wave power just bounces back and then pushes off and the problem to the next. So putting this simplistic solid wall is actually, and it's expensive, it's very expensive. So, you know, the principle here is that, you know, if, if, if, if, if it was possible to make, to regenerate coral reefs, not only would the structure be, you know, considerably cheaper. You have reinforced metal inside that, but you don't need the concrete because you're growing the concrete, you need solar panels anyway to power more and more of the world and, and so that there may well be something here that one can, one can do to mitigate some of the, of the things that are going on. So almost like a regeneration and regenerative project for the underwater rather than my stupid idea of the underwater factory or, or, or Wolf Hilbert's concepts of building cities on the sea. But we need Wolf and we need your stupid idea, which is not so stupid as a, it's a catalyst in a sense and it's a concept and an idea, it's very analog which, you know, we think you are amazing. So, what am I doing here? Exactly. How did you get in here? How is, well, I know why, how is A I in, you know, still in its infancy? I believe the use of A I is actually helping you get closer to this production. So, I mean, I think, you know, the, the beauty of A I and you know, we have heard a lot about the potential horrors and some of the more kind of, you know, incredible things that you can do very quickly with it is that they can imagine or you can demonstrate what, what would happen um within a virtual environment. So, you know, I guess there's going to be some talk about Digital Twins a bit later with, with Jan from Squint Opera that we're talking to about this project. But, you know, just to skim over the Digital twin idea is really that, you know, gaming technology has allowed us to create these whole environments that are virtual, that you can manipulate in real time, right? So, um and you can feed various streams of data into these models. Um you know, even NVIDIA, the the big chip maker right now collaborating with people like Lockheed Martin and the States to create, you know, virtual models of the whole world, you know, which are already being used to predict weather patterns and, and all kinds of, of um it's become very, very much better than the current way of testing the weather. So these models exist and, and you know, in my project, the difficulty is really and try to convince anybody that you should dump a load of metal into their seafront and then charge it with some electricity. You know, that's the sort of thing that really puts people off. But if you can, if you can do a physical test. So the next test is either in the Maldives or in Northern Australia and then you can model a much bigger because you know, to make any difference, you have to do things on a huge scale. Right now, we really have to accelerate some of these things and the difficult is really convincing people. So what's great about the digital model is not only can you create something which is a compelling argument, you can project it into the future as well. So you can say, well, what happens to the coral in 345 years time? You know, if it's growing at this rate now, you can just project that into, into the future. So the tests have been done, the data exists, the model needs to be created and this new test where we're collecting, the data is going to start in the next couple of months. So its usage first and foremost is empirical evidence that they think could work. You need some. Well, I mean, there's quite a lot of tests that have happened, but they're all on a tiny scale. So how do you convince somebody that is going to do that job of protecting their beach and, and that they don't need to spend £20 million or dollars on the concrete when they could spend three on, on the solar panels and the metal work to regenerate sea life, to bring employment for local communities, you know, maybe a dive experience and tourism and, and to actually regenerate the city rather than just add more massive man made structures in them. And again, it's also then helping you, which you're going to show now in a communication and marketing. Well, I think, you know, it does, you know, the way we're using it at the moment is, is not in the digital twin model, which is manipulative but just, just in a way to try and, and dream if you like. So that I think one of the big parts of design is to, is to get people to, to really visualize what things could be like and that don't exist already. So it's been very useful in just producing a whole series of iterations of structures that are somewhere between natural and man made for instance. And, and for sure, sometimes we just use them as structures to react against, say, well, that won't work. You can't tether it to the sea floor for instance. Um But at least it gives a kind of impression of what could happen if you start turning up the, the number of fish that can breed there or the amount of coral or what a dive experience might look like. So you can generate these, these um visuals very quickly. Um And I think they're all created through mid journey. Yeah. And, and uh by, by a great um uh digital artist called Ryan Taylor, actually, they're not my prompts here. Um But, but then, you know, the, the, the, you know what I've always found in talking about A I is whatever I say is out of date. Anyway, so you know what's happening right now is that particularly in the architecture and car building, you're not just using that visual is then an engineering model that you can take the data from and do technical drawings and then further on down the line plan the factory to make it. Um and, and also, and then feed other data. So then you can have your model having all kinds of, you know, weather data or sunshine data to see what happens different times of day, what happens in a couple of years and the rest of it. So, you know, because the models are not fixed and they're able to absorb lots of data from or learn from from other data as well. You're in a position where it's just in total infancy that these kind of of images are only um available, have only been available to us as, as lay lay people designers for a year and a half. Now it's still so much in its infancy, isn't it infancy? And it's also it's, it's, it's um it's power is increasing by the fact of 100 every time a new version is released. So, you know, maybe that every year, I mean, so in two years, that would be 10,000. Is that my math? Right? 100 times 100 somebody helped me out 100 times 100 10,000. Anyway, it's a lot, a lot more than Moore's Law. Yes. So, and here we are. So this is your dream or one of your dreams? We hope it can come to fruition. I think A I is helping it in many ways. Yeah, maybe, maybe I do get to a point where, where, you know, these structures are strong and tough enough grown under water to float them, you know, to drag them to the surface and use them as structures above ground as well. And they're a combination, you have very little control over over the final form. You kind of start something off and then you see it evolve, you know, like growing a forest or something. So there's something really nice about the combination of man made and nature working on the manmade rather than the opposite way. This is the empathetic side. I think that's how we make my visit here actually justified. Well, thank you, Tom. That was fascinating. I think you all agree. We have to make Tom's dream come to reality before we pass on to the next talk. I have one announcement to make the powers of persuasion of fortune have persuaded Tom to pick up his base again this evening. So during our cocktail reception, Tom and a couple of other members of the fortune team for me included are joining a few local musicians to do a groundbreaking session. It's going to be bio rock and roll, get it. So please come to the cocktail reception, hang around and bring your dancing shoes. Thank you very much for finding the time.