Jan 22, 2019

Episode 9

Marcel Wanders, cofounder, Moooi

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Dutch designer Marcel Wanders’ penchant for lighthearted and surprising concepts has elevated him to the upper echelon of the design elite. He’s a rule-breaker who doesn’t shy away from complicated ideas. Take his Knotted chair, which put him on the map and transformed the design landscape. His latest hospitality project, the Mondrian Doha, perfectly represents Wanders’ personality: playful, serious, magical, and elegant. “I’m deliberately pushing in my work all these elements,” he says, “because it develops me as a person, and it makes it possible for people to connect to my work in a [deeper] and profound way.”

This episode is brought to you by Global Allies. For more information, go to globalallies.com.

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Hi, I’m Stacy Shoemaker Rauen, editor in chief of Hospitality Design magazine with HD‘s What I’ve Learned podcast. Today I catch up with Dutch designer Marcel Wanders in the Moooi showroom in New York. Always entertaining, he delves into how he was first kicked out of design school, how he doesn’t always play by the design rules, and how he adds playfulness to his products and interiors, especially his latest, the Mondrian Doha, which is a feast for the senses.

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi, I’m here with the wonderful Marcel Wanders. Marcel, thanks so much for joining us here on our latest podcast.

Marcel Wanders: My pleasure.

SSR: And we’re glad to have you here in New York. So, let’s start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

MW: I grew up in a little town in the south of the Netherlands in a family with five kids and a mom and dad, and my father and mother did run a store—a shop in a little town—and that’s where I grew up.

SSR: Where were you in the five kids? Were you in the beginning, the middle, the end?

MW: The middle of the middle of the middle.

SSR: And the store, what did they sell?

MW: It was a typical store in a village: household equipment and luxury goods and toys, stuff to write, stuff to read, all kinds of stuff. But of course, toys also. It was funny, of course, because in the shop of course, stuff breaks. You get stuff back, and I always got the stuff that came back. I always liked to unscrew it and just find out what’s inside. At some point I was able to repair here and there, of course. I learned a great deal on that. I was interested in these objects. I was just interested in them, whether it was a toaster or a racetrack or whatever. I was always interested in the things and how they worked, almost to the extent that when I went to design school, for me products, basically, the architecture of it was kind of … I was completely transparent. If you give me a product, I know where the screws are without looking. I know where the motor sits without even touching. It’s like the logic of things, I grew up with that since I was 4 years old. So, that was really interesting. I was drawn to the physical reality of objects.

SSR: Do you think that’s what drew you to design school, just to figure that out more?

MW: I don’t know. I think I was a creative kid. I was drawing a lot, and I had my own little room where I had hammers and I was always making stuff, and so I wanted to do something creative. When I was young, I checked out to do landscape architecture and I went to school, and then basically they were all wearing green boots and I’m like, ‘I’m not going to wear green boots all my life. Let’s not do that,’ and then a bit later, someone told me about design. Design was not a thing. It didn’t exist in a way, and then someone told me there’s something like design and you can study that and I’m like, ‘Making toasters and maybe a broom here and there, that’s not so bad. This could be something that I like, and I could feel is very relevant for the world.’ Within the concept of creativity, I felt this is something that makes sense to me, and so I applied.

SSR: You went to two schools, right?

MW: I was probably the last one accepted in design school in Handover, and I was probably the first one out because they kicked me out after a year, and I tried to find other schools. Nobody wanted to accept me except one school. So I studied there, and while studying there also I applied on another school, which had evening and weekend education. That was a very industrial school, so I did that both simultaneously for a few years and then I quit both and I went to school in Arnhem, and that’s the one that I finished.

SSR: After school, did you start your own firm right away or was there some time that you worked with others? Tell us the timeline.

MW: When I finished school, it was kind of a thing already. I had by then won quite a few design prizes. I had by then some little products in production with companies that I cared about, and so my end exam was on the front cover of a national design magazine, which is really weird. So altogether, I had clients immediately. Nobody dared to hire me because I twas not the type to be hired, I guess. So, I kind of had to do my own studio right away from the start.

Then, I did a few projects, and then I did a project for KLM [Royal Dutch Airlines], and it was project that was launched by one of the ministries of the Netherlands, the culture ministry, and they asked two big studios, and then one in the Netherlands and me, so it was weird to have four studios. Obviously, I had no chance versus the big studios. But it was a great project and I learned from it, and also after that project, one of the studios asked me if I wanted to work with them. I thought: If I work with them for a few years, I will learn a lot about real projects,  not these creative cultural things, but the real deal. I said, ‘I’ll work with you guys, but I’ll pick my own projects with you and I’ll stay for two and a half years and no longer. The first project that I’m going do in your studio is the KLM project,’ and they agreed, and so I still won my project. But simultaneously, I also had my own studio and I did my own projects and so I had my studio since the beginning.

SSR: And what was exactly the project for KLM?

MW: Back then it was the inflight service, and it’s funny because through that project and through my time at this bigger studio with KLM, I got kind of hooked on this idea of inflight service, and so when I stopped working with this big studio, I felt that I really wanted to find a way to do some projects in that realm. There was a really small company in the Netherlands also that was doing inflight service for airlines, and so for a few years I worked with these guys, and we were super small. I was a super small studio. The company was small, but three, four years in a row, we won the most important innovation award in the airline industry with the work that we were doing.

At some point, there was a project for KLM again for a coffee series of some kind. So, I really wanted to do this coffee series in biodegradable plastics. If you do a big series, you can never do that because there’s always a few things that you can’t make from the material, but now this was a small series of objects and we could maybe do all of them and so the whole thing could be discarded at once [because it’s biodegradable]. So, we were working on this, and then we found out we can’t do it because the biodegradable materials at that point in time (I don’t know how it is today) they had a maximum temperature for water around 87 [degrees] or so. If it’s over 87 degrees, it just doesn’t keep up, and of course, you want to serve coffee, right? And so I was so annoyed. I was so annoyed. I really wanted this so bad. I’m like, ‘This is the one thing we have to do. We have to find a way.’ I remember to this day that I was in bed and I was hallucinating that we could find a way to have water cook on different temperatures. I have to find a way.

Based on that, I had an illegal experiment done. To do experiments in the air is not so easy, but I had a friend of mine, measure the temperature of water while cooking in the air because I knew it was not 100 degrees. So it turned out to be 78 degrees, and the temperature of the plastic could go to 85 or something, and so obviously we were able to do this series because water cooks on a very different temperature in the air than on the ground, on a lower temperature. That was a fantastic finding, and so we were able to win that contest, and win again the international innovation award, and so we were super happy.

A few months later, I was working with a little company and suddenly I couldn’t get them on the phone anymore. It was a bit weird, and soon after I knew that one of the big competitors just bought the whole company. They couldn’t stand it. ‘Those little fuckers. Get rid of them, buy them’ And so that was my airline period. And so like 25 years later,  again KLM [asked me] to do their inflight service. I was super excited. They didn’t even know I had ever done that project, so it was really random, but I was super excited and I was like, ‘This time I’m not going to lose this. I’m not going to lose this,” so it was really great after 25 years.

SSR: So did you win it?

MW: Yeah, yeah. It’s been eight years, and we are constantly working on the airline inflight service for KLM with success. People are super excited about it. It’s beautiful.

SSR: How are you trying to elevate that whole experience on an airplane?

MW: I mean, basically what we try to do is [design a] concept in which the most important idea behind it was that we want to make them from passengers to guests. So, yes, they’re on their way to somewhere, but they are here and so this is not only a journey, this is also a location. This is something where you are, and to really make people feel that they are a guest, that was the main idea, and we took that on all kinds of levels. If you do design like that, the whole inflight service, it has to do a lot with hospitality ideas and it’s not only a few pieces of porcelain and some forks and knives. It’s a bigger road.

SSR: Going back, the other firm got bought out and now you have your own studio. You did the knotted chair, right? That was the next kind of big break for you?

MW: Droog Design was set up by two people in the Netherlands who were kind of friends of mine, and they just went to Milan with a bunch of random designers that they really liked and they thought were doing something different and I was part of that. That was kind of a big hit in Milan. It was really well-received. And so the year after, we went back to Milan and they had this concept of dry tech. That’s how they call it, and basically we were invited by the [Delft University of Technology] on the aeronautics department to study composite materials. And so, I made a chair based on that technology. That chair was groundbreaking in the compass of technology, but it was I think fundamentally different in its design perspective. It was way more romantic. It was handcrafted. It was imperfect. It was decorative, and it was all the things that design was not in those days. It was a big thing. It was all over the world immediately.

SSR: Is that why you think people responded to it so much, because it was something different?

MW: Well, let me say it this way. I think as a designer, you have an audience and you want your audience to be as big as you can. Now, we all have our way that we are in connection to the world and some people are maybe more visual and some are maybe more auditory and some are maybe more rational. There’s all kinds of ways to read the world, to be in connection to the world. I’ve always tried to make things that truly give valuable information on all these levels, to make things that are smart in a way, and so rational people will have something to read, but to do something that is visually striking so people that have eyes can see something they will never forget. People that are more tactile, they have something that makes them feel different or they can touch it in a way that excites them. People that are more spiritual, you can build a story that really speaks to them. I’m deliberately pushing in my work all these elements because it’s good for me, because it develops me as a person, and it makes it possible for people to connect to my work in a [deeper and] profound way, but also in a more broad way, which allows people to make connections that they had never before.

I made a little vase. It’s an egg vase. Some friend of mine, she works at a magazine, she’s a very visual woman.  She had the egg vase. So she came to me and says, ‘Marcel, it’s really special. I have a brother, and he’s really dear to me, but we never have anything in common.’ He’s a banker or something like that, an insurance guy, you know the type. ‘We never had something in common, and now I’m coming to his house and I take for him as a gift your egg vase and he’s super happy when he opens it, but he has one in his house already. It is the first time that we had a connection about something.” There are totally different reasons why they like it, but they really were connected for the first time in their lives. I think that’s magic.

SSR: And you’ve done almost 2,000 products now?

MW: Oh, I don’t know. I don’t count them. I leave that to the bookkeepers of this world, but yeah, I’m full of ideas and sometimes I’m able to make a few.

SSR: But is that magic, what you just explained, is that why you love product design so much? I mean, to do that many, you kind of have to love it.

MW: It’s not my intention to do a lot. It’s my intention to do things that have meaning, that are important. I think it’s a way to calculate probably, if you do a collection for Alessi, you do the spoon and the fork and the knife, and if you count all of them, [you end up at a number]. But I don’t know the number, or where it comes from. It’s really irrelevant to me I’m interested in seeing how the opportunities that I get, how the responsibility that goes with it can be meaningful for my surroundings.

SSR: We’re in this beautiful showroom of one of your brands, Moooi, and it started as lighting and now it’s turned into a powerhouse. What have you learned business-wise to take ideas and then grow them into big businesses? Not everyone as a creative can also have that business acumen, and it seems like you’ve married the two.

MW: I don’t think I have a talent for business at all, but I have decided I must have an interest in it. As a designer, you kind of work with a lot of different companies, and basically I’m advising them, right? If I propose a project, a product, then basically that’s gonna be the fundamentals of that company. And so, whether the people in that company are going to have money to go for holiday or put their kids in school, it depends on my advice. So I always felt it’s super important what I do. You can’t all the time be super business-oriented, but in a way you have to be, and so that interest has taught me a lot because I’ve always been in connection with my clients in a certain way. Of course, if you are successful at some point, you have a studio that’s a little bit bigger than you on your own, so there’s quite a few people there. That’s a responsibility. These people want to have the job also next year. I started making my own products because nobody wanted to make my lamps and nobody wanted to make my chairs, so I just started my own and that’s Moooi today and it has grown. So, obviously, at some point you have clients, you have your own studio, and you have a company and you basically have to understand business. I was always open to learn but also at some point I was probably the oldest business school student ever. In 2014, I graduated from probably one of the best business schools in the world. I’m a full MBA.

SSR: Congrats.

MW: Thank you.

SSR: That’s impressive.

MW: Thank you. Yeah, I impressed myself a bit.

SSR: When you talk about your firm, I mean, you have close to 70 people, right?

MW: My studio is about 70 people. Moooi is probably about 80.

SSR: And what’s your culture like in your firm? How do you run it? Is it project basis? Is it team basis?

MW: We have the teams organized, so we have a graphic team, we have a product team, we have an interior team, and then we have the order team, which has to run us to make sure that stuff gets done. Yeah, then we work by project. It’s always projects. We start something and we hope to end it in a good way. Sometimes projects take a short time, that’s a half a year. Sometimes it takes a long time. That could be 12 years depending on the project.

SSR: Especially some hospitality projects take a little bit longer.

MW: Yeah, but for instance, the KLM project that I talked about, I mean, from the beginning until the moment that we launched, it was probably two and a half years or maybe three, but we still work on the project. It’s evolving every day and we regularly make new parts for that collection, so that’s long.

SSR: So for an HD Interview, you once said that you wanted your designs to ‘provide excitement for our ordinary days to be made more special.’ I love that. Can you elaborate on what that means?

MW: Well, that’s kind of what design is, right? I mean, as an artist, maybe you can just make your work and you maybe make things for one person that wants to spend $5 million on a sculpture just because, and that’s great. As a designer, you have a humble task of making sure that tomorrow if your mom comes in your house and you make tea, that the cup is fun and it makes you happy to drink it and it works also, so it’s a simple thing, but it elevates your day a little bit, just not a lot, but a little bit. If you do that over ad over again with lots of objects and lots of people, at some point, it becomes a valuable thing.

SSR: You have a very whimsical style. I think you have masterfully blended form and function and playfulness. I mean, does that go back to that statement a little bit?

MW: I think there’s very little humor in my work, but my work has a kind of lightheartedness. I think there’s a lot of linguistic quality in the work, which if you understand it, it kind of is fun. In a way, the work that I do, I’m not trying to make the newest thing. I’m trying to make something that basically is marrying things that we know and things that we don’t know. I don’t want to give you something you don’t know. I want to give you something that you knew, and I want to give you a poetic new version of it, right? Now if I would tell you a joke, then I would tell a little story. I start this little conversation, and I make sure you’re on the train of my story and at some point, you kind of feel where we’re going, and at that moment that you feel where we’re going, I make a sudden move left or right, right? That’s a joke. I surprise you with the next step. But at first, I make sure that you are in the story, that you kind of get the idea. And so, if you look at the work that we’re doing, it’s kind of that, right? I want to first make sure that you know where we are. This is a chair and it looks soft and it’s beautifully simple. It’s got four legs, and then it’s got these really flare-y legs like a bit of an elephant, and then you sit on it and then suddenly you roll away because there’s hidden wheels under those elephant legs. That’s a bit of a surprise. That’s the novelty in the work, so first I bring you something that you know and then I surprise you with something you don’t know. That’s something that if we do it well, it makes you happy. It makes you excited. ‘This is fun. This is nice.’ That’s not a joke. If it’s a joke, it’s nice once. I can’t tell you a joke twice. You’re like, ‘Come on Marcel, you told me that joke,’ right? If you do it well, what we do is something that has true value that lasts a long time, but it gives you that lightness.

SSR: Do you apply that to your interiors as well? Because you’ve done some beautiful hotels from the Mondrian South Beach to the new one in Doha.

MW: I never thought about this so much, but I think we do have the same sense of lightness. We do want you to recognize things and we still want to surprise you with something else. I think they’re very different things, interior and product, but there’s maybe some similarities.

SSR:  Is there one interior project that you’ve done recently or in your portfolio that you really love for a specific reason?

MW: If we do a project, we do a project, and if I’m not totally happy with it, it’s not ready, and then we continue working. The product that is most recent in interior design that we completed is a hotel in Doha, and it’s quite a spectacular and dramatic, wonderful universe, and it’s very near to my heart.

SSR: We featured it not too long ago and I really loved how you talked about the mosaics in the elevator and how they’re not the same as you look at them straight on and then the miniatures in the guestroom and how they tell a different story. Can you  delve into those two aspects a little bit?

MW: There’s so much to say. It’s funny. When we start working on a project, we always dive into the culture. We study everything. And at some point, there was a wonderful exhibition about Arabic miniatures and they’re really amazing. It was funny because it was an exhibition in Amsterdam in the New Church, which the New Church is 500 years old or something like it, but it’s called the New Church because the old church is older. So in the New Church, there was an exhibition of Arabic and Islamic miniatures all collected by a Jewish guy. They’re fantastic. That already made me so happy, right? It made me really happy. But anyways, that exhibition itself was fantastic, and so when we got this project, I’m like, ‘Okay, let’s do our own miniature. This is going to be great.’ So for like four months, we’ve been drawing to do a miniature, and then at the end of course we blew it up in the room, so there’s, like, an Arabic miniature but it’s blown up as a wall in the space. It’s really cute. It’s contemporary but it has the flare of the miniatures. And now for the opening of it, at the end, and this was never planned, the hotel asked me, ‘Can you do an interesting invite?’ I’m like, ‘Okay, this is great,’ so now we have it printed in a very beautiful way; we’ve printed the miniature as a miniature and sent it as an invite to people. That’s really cute.

Yeah, we work with mosaics. I love mosaics. I don’t know why if you love design, why you can be so excited about a white wall. If you love that centimeter on the wall, if you love that, if you think about it, is then the conclusion that the best thing to do is white? I’m not sure. For sure not always. I’m always seeing this formula, right? Like there’s this beautiful interior design studio and they have a new project and the senior designer comes in on Monday morning and says, ‘I have this incredible concept for a new hotel. It’s going to be amazing. I see it completely. It’s going to be all white.” It just doesn’t excite me.I think it’s wonderful that there’s a lot of that, but we don’t need another one, not by my hand. I love design too much to not do it.

SSR: You’ve worked with a couple operators-slash-brands multiple times. What do you think makes for a successful collaboration between you and the owner or the operator or both?

MW: As a designer, you have to be able to communicate well. You have to really be able to say what you want to say and you have to sell your story really well, but what’s more important is that you can listen really well. If we could do hotels on our own, we would do it but we can’t, and together maybe we can, only if we listen. You have to work together. A good operator really knows what he needs in order to do his task really well. It’s basically a machine that we’re developing. A hotel is a machine. If it runs just like clockwork, then everybody’s happy. If it doesn’t run like clockwork, it can’t be beautiful enough. It can’t be beautiful enough. It’s irritating if it doesn’t work, right? And so you have to really understand what is needed for a superb operation. If you’re a 5-Star hotel like we do them, but maybe even more for the more economic hotels because maybe there’s less room for mistakes. There’s less opportunities to do the extra step.

SSR: With so much on your plate, how involved are you still in each project and how do you find that work-life balance that everyone tries to achieve?

MW: I think the good thing is through the years you get better as a professional. I think we all notice it’s not something because I’m so full of myself, but we all know that, right? If I see what today I can do in an hour, it took me two days 10 years ago. You oversee stuff. I remember once I was 25 years old and I went with my portfolio to Andrea Branzi and he went through it fast, and I understood, he’s understanding everything that he sees, right? And he asked me questions, and it was so clear he saw everything. He knew exactly what was on the table. I could’ve talked for hours on it but he got it.

If you are a professional, at some point you get more and more knowledgeable. You can see through drawings. You can see exactly what’s happening, and so that allows me to oversee the projects in my studio really well because I understand what I see really well. I know what I don’t have to see. I know in the studio that we have fantastic people that can do amazing work if I let them, and if I steer them too much, nothing comes out, so it’s a beautiful balance. If you want to work together, you have to work together. You have to let people work and you have to trust them, and then at the end, you have to make sure it all happens to the standard that you stand for. I’m traveling a lot, so on top of this, I’m often away, so we found ways to communicate long distance and to have me overlook things even through the eyes of other people.

SSR: And looking back, knowing what you know now, is there something you wish you had known back then that you know now?

MW: Sometimes I think maybe the cost of all this investment and all this hard work and the misuse of who you are as a person being so on top of everything is a bit high. Sometimes I feel it’s maybe a bit damaging. I could’ve stepprf back here and there, but would I have believed myself if I would’ve known? I guess not.

SSR: What do you think of the industry today? What keeps you up at night? What do you think of as some of the opportunities that are happening? I mean, you’ve seen so much since 1988. How do you view the industry today and what are you looking forward to?

MW: We have a serious problem, I think. If you want to entertain people and excite people and get them to love what we do, sometimes you have to do so much that it becomes ridiculous, right? If you see what you can see as designs on websites, it’s all virtual. It’s never made and nobody has to have it, but it’s so cool and so wonderful, and from our brains, it springs magic, right? So it’s fantastic to see all that. And then reality kicks in, right? Then you have to make a chair that people can sit on, really sit on, and then it gets really difficult to be as exciting. The real world is not so exciting as the virtual world, and so I think that’s a bit of a thing for us, so we have to find a way not to overexcite ourselves and to be unrealistic in our expectations of reality and still be able to give people some real value. It’s our humanity and it’s our soul that can come in there and do the job because our tactility, our human presence, our material beings, that’s the only thing that we have where we can win that game in the real world. So that’s going to have its influence because we’re all alike. If you’re interested in design, you’re not going to wait until you get into a hotel. You’re going to be online, you see all this cool stuff, and it’s cool. It’s super interesting. You have a huge amount of creative people that make fantastic things, and the reality is really different because the photograph of that piece of textile that you see online, there’s been 15 photo editors working on it and they did their Photoshop and everything, and then suddenly it’s looking like fabric. So I think that virtual world is something we have to learn how to deal with. Basically, we have to deal with the material world, the real world. That is something that we at the end want to perceive and want to feel, or if they decide to upload our brain on the internet and then just forget about that we have bodies, but that’s maybe not today. That might be another few weeks. Then we can have it all. Can you imagine? Just upload your brain. I imagine you’d lose a few kilos and get some more muscle and just now I’m in Hawaii. I’m on holiday eating coconuts. Not so bad.

SSR: What’s coming down the line for you? What are you working on now? Any cool new projects that you have in the hopper?

MW: We’re almost ready with a project for Starbucks, and I’m super happy with that one. It’s going to be cool. It’s such a different company to work with and such a fun little project to do. We made some really nice little objects, and super happy with it.

SSR: So is it all product for them or there interior work too?

MW: It’s just unique pieces, mostly editions that they’re going to be selling there, start our universe, which is, I don’t know if you’ve seen, but that’s quite something. It’s quite special. It takes a coffee experience to a different level.

SSR: As a Starbucks lover, I’m excited to see that. What’s a project or a product that you haven’t designed that you still would like to do? Is there something still kind of on your wish list, bucket list?

MW: Well, being in New York, I can say that it is on my bucket list to do an opera at the Met. I have a bit of time. I can wait another few years, but I will do an opera at the Met. They don’t know yet but they’ll find out. I’m super excited to do that. I learned so much from opera. I go to operas around the world. If I’m somewhere, I’ll always try to go. I’ve learned so much from it because most creative terrains have their own limitations, right? The opera has everything. It’s got sound, it’s got poetry, it’s got costumes, it’s got lighting, it’s got everything. It’s so complete and so overwhelming and just imagine that as a creator, you get the capacity to put someone in a chair, tell them to shut up, and put the lights off. You say,  ‘Now, watch.’ Like, ‘This is it. You’re mine for the next two hours.’ That’s a power. It’s unbelievable. It’s fantastic. I mean, I made this chair. We’re both sitting on it, right? It’s a different connection to your audience, right?  It’s fantastic. I think it’s amazing the power behind performance and behind movies and opera. Opera, of course, is a divine creative field. It’s fantastic.

SSR: And why did you get kicked out of design school?

MW: I mean, I think I was maybe not the easiest student. Basically the school back then was a typical design school at that point. It was like a classical idea on design where design, more than anything, is a strategy. It’s a strategy. You follow the strategy, you get the good product out. And even though it was my first year, I felt it can’t be strategy, and then I was lucky enough that I found out about Memphis and that really opened up everything for me because I understood, ‘See, it’s not strategy. It’s culture. It’s something else. This is going to move.’

It was interesting because I wrote just half a year ago, I wrote the letter to Branzi to thank him for doing all that great work. I compared what happened for me, I compared it with this story. So, it’s only 200 years ago, 250 years ago or something like that, a French doctor came up with a really interesting idea. In those days, medical doctors, they were collecting pieces of bones, skeletons. They were collecting parts of people and putting them on water, so they were collecting. They were investigating the reality of life. This one doctor comes up with this one idea. He says, ‘It’s a bit weird that we find skeletons of mammoths all the time and we never see one. I mean, could they be extinct?’ That was the first time that someone came up with that ridiculous idea that something could be extinct, which of course in a world that was dominated by the church, that could never happen because God didn’t make mistakes. Such a thing was outrageous, the idea that this universe was in motion, that this was not something stable but something on the move, and that’s 200 years ago. It’s really not so long ago. I felt that when I saw the works of Memphis. I felt, ‘See? We’re moving. We’re not stable here. Design is not one idea and then we do it. This is going to move and I’m going to be part of the movement,’ and that was difficult for my teachers because I didn’t want to follow their rules. I also didn’t feel there was a reason, and so yeah, they didn’t like me.

SSR: If they only knew.

MW: Well, they know. In fact, I had, I think 10 years ago, so they asked me to do a double interview and to invite someone for a double interview and I invited one of the teachers behind my expelling, and we had an interesting conversation. He kind of confirmed, they couldn’t see it that way. For them, it was a classic design idea, and you can’t blame them for it. You can’t blame people for not being further than they should be, right? That was the time, and I just couldn’t accept it. It was an interesting conversation. It was funny.

SSR: Any thoughts of you going back and teaching or do you teach now?

MW: I have taught a lot and at this moment, I don’t. I write and invite people to read what I write. I send books to schools. I have a good amount of interns all the time. The last time that I taught in our school, that was a fantastic year. Great students, wonderful, but I gave them a huge amount of freedom and a huge amount of opportunity to decide. I will never grade them. They grade me. I don’t grade them, so it was a bit of my own way of doing it. Then, that whole class the year after, like 80 percent of them flunked and they had to do the year again, and then I decided I shouldn’t do this. I just don’t fit in that system. It doesn’t work.

SSR: But you found your niche elsewhere, so you’re good.

MW: I’m communicative in what I have to say and what I do. I think it can be found, and I think there’s something to learn here and there.

SSR: Were there any mentors along the way that you looked up to besides Memphis?

MW: I think there are fantastic designers everywhere and there are very few designers that if you study them you won’t learn anything. There’s a lot of heroes out there, and then there’s a few superheroes. They’re very near to my heart. They’re wonderful. They’re important. I think the heroes are people like [inaudible] who made one after the other fantastic thing, but never really changed our field, never made a new idea, a big new idea, but there’s people like Alessandro Mendini and Eames. Those are people that changed the ideas of the world. Stark on his own, a few times. Those are the superheroes of this field.

SSR: We think you’re a superhero too, so thank you for being here. We really appreciate it.

MW: Thank you very much.

SSR: Hope to see you soon.

MW: It was my pleasure.