Independent Objects

Reading last weekend's HTSI, there was a line from Jasper Morrison that stopped me. He'd been noticing that anonymously designed objects worked better than the things he and his colleagues were creating. The better ones, he said, had "little or no creative ego involved; they were independent."

I read that twice.

When Design Becomes About the Designer

Product design creates a particular trap. You spend months with something, sketching it, sampling it, arguing about it, and by the time it exists you've formed strong opinions about what it is. Those opinions tend to show. They're in the angle of a seam, the weight of a zip pull, the way a logo sits. Some of that is deliberate. Some of it is residue.

The residue is the problem. It asks the person using the thing to engage with the designer's decisions, to carry the designer's perspective around alongside their own. Morrison's observation was that the objects free of this, the anonymously designed ones, the things nobody thought to sign, performed better, lasted longer, and fit more naturally into the lives of whoever owned them. They didn't need the user to meet them halfway. And that absence of demand was precisely what made them good.

It's a tension we recognise.

Designing Without Creative Ego

The brief for everything we make starts with a function, and the function belongs to the person carrying the thing, not to us. How they reach for something without looking. How the bag organises a day without requiring them to manage it. Our job is to understand that need well enough to serve it completely and then step out of the frame.

That's harder than it sounds, because the instinct in product development is to add, to distinguish, to solve problems the user hasn't raised. Every extra pocket is someone's good idea. Every exposed rivet is a decision someone was proud of. The objects Morrison was describing had none of that surplus. They simply did their job and asked nothing in return, and that restraint took more effort to arrive at than any of the additions would have.

The Interface Notebook came from exactly this kind of work. The question wasn't what we could add to make it feel considered. It was what we could remove without it becoming less useful, and we kept going until we couldn't take anything else away.

What Anonymous Design Produces

Morrison used the word "independent" and I keep returning to it. Not minimal. Not pure. Independent. The object doesn't rely on the designer's reputation to justify itself. It stands entirely on what it does.

That's the standard worth working to. Not whether something looks like Canard. Whether it functions so cleanly that the person using it stops remembering they made a choice when they bought it. Whether it disappears into how they move through their day so completely that they only notice it when someone else asks where it came from.

We haven't always got there. But Morrison putting a name to it is useful. It clarifies what getting there actually looks like.