Case study:
Dowel Jones.

(Please note in the following conversation: questions from the author are italicised)

Context
The Geelong Weaving Mill Sister Chairs is a limited-edition collection as part of the sister chair. The Sister collection was designed by Tom Hancocks (Instagram, Sixtysix Magazine) who is a New York 3D designer. We started working with external designers in 2028 and we started commissioning other designers to design for us. We work with three studios; one in Buenos Aries, Argentina, one in the Gold Coast and one in New York.

The way the Sister chair began is, as we are not only interested in working with furniture designers but because we are furniture designers, we understand the language and the theory, and conceptually, we get the structure, the physical, the emotional, and so we thought it might be more interesting to commission a designer to work with us who wasn’t a furniture designer to see how he would approach it. Tom Hancocks is not well known in Australia but is quite famous in the US and he produces 3D imagery. He works on luxury fashion brands, campaign imagery and a broad array of different projects, so I asked him to design the image of a chair and we will do the rest of the work to make it a reality. This is why that chair looks like nothing else on the market – because it wasn’t designed by a furniture designer, but it was produced by a furniture company. He put together a series of 3D renderings of chairs and instead of us adapting it, we took the renderings to a fabricator and said this is what we kind of want to make. Over one day we worked with him to make a prototype of the frame. Then we took that frame to our upholsterer and we said this is what the upholstery should look like and this is how it should fit in the chair, and after about six months of going back and forth with various prototypes, we came up with the Sister’s collection which is the chair, the lounge and the double. The name ‘Sister Chair’ came from the relationship between the two different sizes of chairs in the group. They were like siblings. We were launching the chair in New York in 2018 and we didn’t have a name so we decided on ‘Sister’.

We came up with the idea of blending both traditional and contemporary manufacture by collaborating with the Geelong Weaving Mills, one of the oldest wool manufacturers in Victoria. They have a one-hundred-year history, so this was about applying their manufacturing to our contemporary manufacturing, which is the design of the chair. Later, we approached the senior curator at the Geelong Gallery and said we have this idea for a collaboration for the Geelong Design Week, and asked them if they would they host the exhibition.  As a result, for eleven days, the collection of the Sister Chairs was presented in the Geelong Gallery as part of the Geelong Design Week.

So it really is an exercise in interdisciplinary design, collaboration, design as an object, art and celebration rather than just the design of a product where people buy it and then use it.

This Sister Collection is made to order. We have sold them since 2018 year-round. The Geelong Weaving Mills make blankets from excess material left over from making their standard products. When they make their standard fabrics, they have leftover material, and that’s what they make their blankets from. This means that once or twice a year they put together really short runs of blankets and so before they launch a new collection, we contact them and ask them if can do a launch of the chair with them. Last year we did a launch at the Geelong Gallery and we had an influx of contact from people all around the world asking how could they order one. We sourced as many blankets as we could and continued until the blankets ran out. Then we stopped selling, once there were no more blankets.

Where and how are they seen and sold?

Most of our business is in commercial interiors and residential interiors. These include office fit-outs, hotels, universities and a little bit of residential – people’s homes. But the interesting thing about this chair is we had people approaching us to buy it, not as a chair but as a piece of art, an eclectic thing to collect for their home that they may or may not use. There is no predetermined context for this project, mostly because people felt some kind of nostalgic attachment to it through the language of the blanket which gives this huge overwhelming sensation of products like the New Zealand blankets from the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

Past, present and future practices
How has the professional design industry changed since you have been in it?

I recently gave a talk at the NGV with someone who is ten years older than me and someone who is twenty years older than me, and we were able to talk about ‘ten years ago’ and ‘twenty years ago’. In my talk, I was able to say that when I went to university we went to libraries to look for design inspiration but in the last twelve years the prevalence of the internet and social media, in terms of design consumption; twelve years ago, social media wasn’t so prevalent. Twelve years ago, there were say, ten major Australian furniture brands and there are now thousands of micro-brands because of their availability through social media.

So where do you see design heading in the future?

It depends on the way the world heads! Because we manufacture locally, for the past twelve years I have been thinking that at some point, there will be a shift to micro-local production. For the last one hundred years, people have been importing from low-labour (cost) countries and not even thinking about production as an aspect of design, whereas in a company like ours, the actual production of it is just as important as the design of it. It’s about people producing something locally. The future of design is about micro-production. There’ll be micro labs, so it’ll be about manufacturing in smaller circles, to smaller markets instead of mass marketing where one brand, like us, tries to service every market in the world, we’ll service a smaller, local market.

Good Design
What words would describe ‘Good Design’ for you?

In Dowel Jones we work to three pillars: Physical durability – it’s got to be made strong enough so it will last a very long time. Everything we make is super bomb-proof! The welds are super strong, it’s over-engineered so it never breaks. The second pillar is aesthetic durability – it needs to last for a long time aesthetically and also needs to be about to be re-powder coated or recovered. And the third one, which is the hardest, is emotional durability. In the last four years, we have been looking at how we connect with consumers with the idea that we want people to look at our product outside the economic value and find its emotional value. We believe we have been doing this for the past four years successfully.

Visual Language and Aesthetics
Thinking about visual language and aesthetics, there is definitely a very characteristic look that you have through all your products, particularly this. How do you describe the aesthetic qualities and what aspects of visual language do you use to build that aesthetic quality?

Dowel Jones has a certain way of working. We look at ourselves as graphic designers who produce furniture. We produce graphic languages. Because labour costs are what they are in Australia, we have to be as efficient as possible with the production of furniture to keep the prices down. The way that we do that is by trying to create unique language in the most minimal way possible. Instead of putting a gold section here, and a bent section there, it’s about how can we reduce graphic language down to the smallest aspect that is identifiable and that uses the least amount of material and the least amount of machine time.  We work primarily around production efficiencies.

So, does that result in an industrial or austere, functional, minimal design look and aesthetic feeling?

Yes, totally, the graphic language we use is quite minimal in that there isn’t a huge amount of embellishment; meaning the way we talk about it with clients is ‘the more detail you add, the more you have to pay. So, if we can reduce the language down to being really tight and efficient then the more cost-effective we can make it in Australia.