The world according to Doug
Visionary writer and thinker Douglas Coupland launches new furniture collection
TORONTO
Listening to a talk by writer, designer and visual artist Douglas Coupland can take you in many unexpected directions, from Lisa Simpson to spittoons and, perhaps, even a bit of a discussion about art, design and writing.
At the Interior Design Show in Toronto last weekend, he launched a new furniture collection centred around the old-fashioned escritoire, or writing desk — fitting for the author of Generation X and dozens of other works.
“It’s something that Doug uses every day in his writing so it’s something very familiar to him and very personal,” says Allan Switzer of SwitzerCultCreative, which collaborated with Coupland on the project.
Coupland agrees the collection (it includes modular bookshelves and checkerboard table and floor lamps) is a reflection of everything he uses daily.
“These are pieces that would unleash a universe of creativity, dopamine, high style and timelessness into their user’s world.”
Listening to Coupland one is awash in sound bites. Here’s a sample from the show:
Answering a question about how a design presents itself and how he likes getting involved in complex processes:
“A lot of people may not know this, but after graduating from art school in ’84, I had this job designing baby cribs of all things. And I’ve actually designed half the baby cribs in Canada, so my roots are actually in manufacturing.” On collaborating with Switzer: “He got the peanut butter in my chocolate; he got the chocolate in my peanut butter. It was like, ‘you do design work, I have a factory, hey this could work.’” On how pieces come together: “I have this thing with colour. If I look at the right colour it ... puts my brain in this happy spot ... You know what it is? Escritoire, which is this fantastically esoteric furniture category; it’s like spittoon or something.” On escritoires: “You just put all your brain in there and you close it up at the end of the night and it’s all in one spot.”
On his own escritoire, which is lacquered in a Japanese style:
“Every time I see its lush civilized richness, my brain releases a small hit of dopamine.”
On the emotional resonance of furniture:
“Your living room, your office and the inside of your car actually are the three biggest indicators of what your brain’s like on the inside.” On his writing desk: “(It’s) a safe haven in a really — thank you, Google — very harumscarum world.” On his many interests: “On the best writing day in your entire life, it’s only going to be two hours, so that leaves 22 more hours, and I sleep for nine hours a night, so that leaves a lot of hours where you’ve got to do something else, so why not do something visual?” On whether he’s a fan of Lego: “If liking Lego is a crime, yes.” On limitations of technology: “Oh, but they’re being obliterated every day.”
On finding a visual reference to just the colour he wanted in the checkerboard lampshade:
“I just about s--t my pants actually, because it was like everything I ever wanted in the world ... the blue, that’s the happy brain blue.”
On his approach to writing versus design:
“Design is the non-fiction version of art … words live in a different part of your brain … nothing gets written unless I can see it in my head.”
On the two years it took to put the collection together:
“Making anything is hard; it takes time and money and a few failures before you finally get it right.” On our hectic world today: “One of my favourite new things — but it’s actually an activity when you think about it — is doing nothing. Because most people nowadays there’s no dead patches; you’re always on a device, and I do that too, but sometimes … not doing something is very much doing something.”
On always being the youngest in his class (he was born Dec. 30) and being an overachiever as a result:
“Honestly, I feel like Lisa Simpson.”
On the cone-like sculptures in the room where he’s pictured at his desk (see page 1):
“I have this obsession with stacking objects that come in industrially modular sizes, so hexagon nuts, dice, spindles and one year it was plastic lids from all sorts of containers … there’s this colour sensibility I have, obviously. I like using every colour at once rather than choosing one or two.”
On going into a Michael’s craft store:
“That smell of mulled wine, those artificial flowers they have in the centre of the store and they’ve got the ribbon aisle … and it immobilizes me … There’s something about colour. Some people are more sensitive than others; I’m just crazy sensitive to it.” On art: “You can only keep one idea in your head at any given time. The thing with the visual world is you can have it all, you can have everything right in front of you and I think that’s a big distinction I like to make out of my life, every room of the house.” On starting the design process: “Furniture design always starts with paper … and if it’s a cocktail napkin, even better.”
On how he would label today’s generation, in which he references a show he’s doing called 89plus:
“It’s based upon the assumption that people born after the Cold War or people born 1990 (or later) are purely digital, that they never have to unlearn obsolete technologies and because of that there’s a sort of freedom of thinking that comes from never having to unlearn.
“The thing about 2013 is we’ve never been smarter but we’ve never felt stupider, we’ve never felt less creative but we’ve actually never been more creative than we are right now. The whole notion of intelligence, the whole notion of relevance or necessity or obsolescence is changing by the hour practically.
“I was born in ’61. To me, I perceive the change, I can see it happening, I can feel it real time but I think that for the younger people, it’s not change; it’s just the real world … the ultimate delineator from one generation to the next is the assumption that the Internet is the real world.”