Hasta La Ideas

Interview: in this exclusive interview designer Tom Dixon tells us why he decided to design his first watch – and how he wanted to make it easy to read the time (+ movie).

“We’ve spent a lot of time doing lighting over the last ten years, and also more recently furniture, and now we’ve decided it’s time to also do accessories,” says Dixon, speaking in the Tom Dixon showroom at The Dock in north-west London.

“I’m trying to produce something with an expressive neutrality,” he says. “I tend to try and work out what I can strip out without losing character.”

The result is Block Watch, which features a square case stamped out of stainless steel or brass. The watch face is circular, with etched numerals and markers. The watch’s hour, minute and second hands are powered by a high-quality Swiss movement.

“I tend to try and work out what I can strip out without losing character,” says Dixon, explaining his design philosophy. “A watch has really got to be round if it’s analogue, because the hands sweep round. I wanted to make sure you could tell the time – because with all too many contemporary watches you can’t tell what time it is. And I wanted to set it in a square because the strap has to go to a square anyway.”

The watch is available in either stainless steel or rose gold (plated) with matching mesh straps, or in brass with a chunky brown leather strap.

The mesh strap is inspired by vintage TV detective Kojak, Dixon says. “It’s got this chain link bracelet, which I guess is a reference to when I was growing up – Kojak, maybe.”

He adds: “It’s just the minimal elements you need to make a watch all reduced to their bare essentials and, I hope, still expressive enough to be something you want to buy.”

Block Watch by Tom Dixon is available to preorder now on Dezeen Watch Store with free worldwide shipping. Prices start at £166.67 excluding VAT.

www.dezeenwatchstore.com

The post “With too many contemporary watches you
can’t tell what time it is” – Tom Dixon appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in this movie filmed in Milan earlier this month, leading designers and manufacturers discuss the phenomenon of copying and how they are responding. “It’s become an increasingly big problem for us,” says Tom Dixon. “People can steal ideas and produce them almost faster than we can now.”

“An original design product will have a cost higher than its copy,” says designer Marcel Wanders (above). “It’s very simple. Stealing most of the time is more cheap than buying.”

Unscrupulous manufacturers visit Milan to photograph new prototypes and then rush out copies before the original products reach the market, according to Casper Vissers (below), CEO of furniture and lighting brand Moooi.

“It’s very sour if you have presented a product in April and it’s in the shops in September, but a bloody copier has it already in August,” says Vissers, speaking at Moooi’s spectacular Unexpected Welcome show in Milan (below). “This is what happens at the moment.”

Vissers adds that legal action against copiers in Asia is expensive and, even if it’s successful in the short term, it does little to stem the tide: “You need huge amounts of money [to launch a law suit in the Far East] and if you win – if – a new limited company in China will start production [of copies]”.

Copiers are increasingly shameless about their intentions, says Tom Dixon, speaking at his presentation at MOST in Milan. “People feel very confident copying things. Some people come around with spy glasses photographing things but other people are more overt and come in with iPads or film crews.”

Dixon says the problem is getting worse, with markets around the world and even the UK market increasingly flooded with copies. “Everywhere we go in Australia or Singapore or India we’ll see many, many copies, and that’s also hitting more and more the UK as well.”

Gregg Buchbinder (above), CEO of furniture company Emeco, says the solution is for designers to push manufacturers to make more sophisticated products that are harder to copy. The furniture collection Emeco developed with designer Konstantin Grcic for the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island (below), for example, “was a very difficult project to do. Although the chair looks simple, there’s nothing skipped.”

“The more difficult it is, the more difficult it is for people to knock it off,” Buchbinder adds.

Emeco aggressively pursues copyists through the courts and earlier this year won a case against fellow US manufacturer Restoration Hardware, which had copied the iconic Navy chair.

But outside Europe and the US, copyright law is less robust and harder to enforce. “It’s very, very difficult to protect yourself legally,” says Dixon.

Dixon’s company is directly responding to the problem of copying by developing a range of new products designed to make life more difficult for counterfeiters.

“What you’ll see [at our Milan presentation] is a number of coping strategies,” Dixon explains. “We’ve been trying as much as possible to invest in tooling and slightly more advanced technology. We’re working on adaptive models where we make specific things for clients. A new bespoke division where we make things for people, so we adapt our products to suit a client’s needs. So there’s ways of dealing with it. We’ve just got to be faster and smarter.”

See all our stories about copying in design ».

Milan is the second stop on our Dezeen and MINI World Tour. See all our reports from our first destination, Cape Town. This movie features a MINI Cooper S Paceman.

The music featured is a track called Divisive by We Are Band, a UK-based electronic act who played at the MINI Paceman Garage in Milan on Friday. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen Music Project.

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who copy our products” appeared first on Dezeen.

Milan 2013: tracking along conveyer belts at MOST in Milan, British designer Tom Dixon’s collection for Adidas includes garments that convert into luggage and camping equipment (+ slideshow).

Named The Capsule, Dixon‘s range for the sports brand includes parkas that transform into sleeping bags and hooded tops that zip into small pouches.

The designer has also created a set of overalls that can be deconstructed with zips and poppers to form a long coat, a cropped jacket, trousers, a skirt or shorts.

Backpacks unfold to form wardrobes packed with enough clothes and accessories for a weekend away.

Hung individually or displayed against tarpaulins, items rotate continuously along rails, while others are laid out on camp beds.

The exhibition is housed in a former railway station, so sounds of steam trains and industrial activity are played around the space and smoke is pumped out into the air.

The lightweight waterproofs and outdoor apparel are coloured in shades of blue, yellow, grey and green, and will be available in Adidas stores from mid November.

Dixon has also launched a collection of champagne buckets and faceted furniture inspired by gemstones at MOST, an exhibition venue he founded in 2012 at the Museum of Science and Technology on Via Olona.

See more designs by Tom Dixon »
See all our coverage of Milan 2013 »
See our Milan 2013 map »

Here’s the press release from Adidas:

Adidas by Tom Dixon unveiled at MOST during Milan’s Salone del Mobile

Mobility, modularity, and a dynamic, 21st-century life are the core concepts at the heart of a new collaboration between Adidas and the renowned British industrial designer Tom Dixon.

Debuting this month at MOST in an experimental factory installation, created by Design Research Studio and set in an immense environment of a reconstructed 19th Century railway station, the resulting collection runs the gamut from convertible travel bags and luggage to sleek sportswear and apparel.

The adidas by Tom Dixon collection uniquely reflects both Adidas’ forward-thinking technologies and Dixon’s inventive style.

The teaming up of Tom Dixon and Adidas is an opportunity for grand exploration into the sport’s world expertise in performance, matched with British ingenuity, both representing unique craftsmanship and innovation.

Known for his radical and highly influential selvage aesthetic, Dixon has since the 1980s championed a return to honest materials and British craftsmanship.

In the first instalment of his two-year partnership with Adidas, this singular sensibility is expressed in padded parkas that convert to sleeping bags, ‘ultralite’ hoodies that can be zipped into small pouches during travel, and a spectacular modular five-in-one overall design that converts to a coat, jacket, pant, skirt, or short.

Accessories also work double and triple duty as duffle bags convert to suitcases and garment bags to backpacks. The innovative collection offers an exciting glimpse at the future of sport style.

Apparel is priced from €110 to €1300, while footwear ranges from €170 to €270 and accessories from €220 to €350. Adidas by Tom Dixon will be available in stores worldwide from mid November 2013.

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for Adidas appeared first on Dezeen.

News: ”Legal systems don’t really defend designers at all” when it comes to copying, British designer Tom Dixon told Dezeen today at the Global Design Forum, a day of talks from leading figures in the design world as part of the London Design Festival (+audio).

Above: Tom Dixon spoke to Dezeen after his talk at the Global Design Forum today

In his presentation earlier this morning, Dixon commented on the threat foreign manufacturers pose to his design business. Searching for his work on eBay produces seven pages and only two genuine items, he said: “All the others are copies at a third of the price from Hong Kong.” Copiers use drawings from designers’ websites to produce accurate replicas and even steal marketing images to paste into their own online catalogues, he explained. “It’s very quick and pernicious. I used to laugh it off and be flattered that people bothered to copy, but now I’m more nervous.”

Speaking to Dezeen after his talk, Dixon explained that “in Australia for instance, if you call something a Tom Dixon replica you can bypass the law: you’re stating what the thing is, it’s a replica, so therefore it’s legitimate even though it’s a copy.” He says that designers “just have to be smarter, faster and quicker to market.”

Dixon is therefore enthusiastic about technological advances that are making the manufacturing process more fast and flexible, citing his use of robotic machines that bypass the high set-up costs and inflexibility of mass-production and enable the same design to be produced in Britain, the US and China simultaneously, simply by sending a computer file.

“Localised production will become more and more the model, just because we won’t be able to afford to ship things so much,” he told us. “Perhaps you do want things which are more adapted to your personal needs and maybe you’ll cherish things which are more personal anyway. Previously those things were only available to people that could afford tailor-made shoes but there’s no doubt that it’s already possible to personalise things for your own needs right now. So that could be a massive growing trend.”

In May the UK government announced changes in the law to give ‘artistic’ manufactured goods the same term of copyright protection as music and literature, following a campaign spearheaded by Elle Decoration UK editor Michelle Ogundehin.

Read Dezeen’s report on how localised, digital manufacture is revolutionising industrial design here, and watch our movie filmed with Tom Dixon at his digital mini factory in Milan here.

The Global Design Forum is a new conference taking place today, organised by the London Design Festival to bring together designers, critics, technology experts, trend forecasters and trade and government representatives to discuss the global agenda for design.

See all our stories about Tom Dixon »
See all our stories about London Festival 2012 »

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at all,” says Tom Dixon appeared first on Dezeen.

Milan 2012: today is the final edition of our daily TV show from Dezeen Studio at MOST in which we round up some of the other things that have been happening during the week.

Tom Dixon demos the Digital Forming software he’s got on show that allows customers to customise their own bespoke Tom Dixon lamp or speaker and then purchase it online with the click of a button, Piers Roberts introduces the Designersblock exhibition in the cloisters of the museum and Achille Sassoli takes us on a tour of Carpigiani’s Gelato University. We also have footage of the MOST party from earlier in the week, as well as yesterday’s The Great Stamp Giveaway where 400 lucky visitors got their hands on a free Tom Dixon lamp.

Today’s music track from Dezeen Music Project is Sweet Cow (remix) by Kid Circus.

Dezeen are filming and editing all week from Dezeen Studio powered by Jambox at MOST, located at the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia. You can find it at the address listed below.

National Museum of Science and Technology,
Via Olona 6, 20123 Milan, Italy
Entrance through Via Olona 6

Dates: Tuesday 17 April, 10AM – 9PM Wednesday 18 April, 10AM – 6PM
Thursday 19 – Saturday 21 April, 10AM – 9PM Sunday 22 April, 10AM – 6PM
Press Preview: Monday 16 April, 3PM-7PM

www.mostsalone.com