29th June 2018

New Designers' rebel with a cause

When designer-maker Poppy Booth first rocked up at Kingston University, she wasn’t sure the world needed more designers. Having studied furniture and cabinet making at the Boat Building Academy and at École Boulle respectively, the driven and technically accomplished Poppy felt comfortable with functional, useful craftsmanship but found that the consumerist nature of the design industry – plus its obsessions with meaningless adornment, what she calls “hundreds and thousands” – jarred with her ethics.

But pushed by her tutors, Poppy discovered she was not alone. Discovering other rebellious spirits like Italian self-build master Enzo Mari, she realised that this resistance to consumption could be one of her strongest selling points. Now her work marries the exacting detail of a carpenter with a playful, often humorous attitude. At New Designers she’ll be exhibiting her Soap Box for Nihilists, a rebellion against a brief set by London furniture shop SCP, and Megaphone for Introverts, which allows shy but politically minded protestors to have their say without showing their faces.

Poppy is also a friend of Zetteler’s own PR assistant India Ayles, so with New Designers just around the corner India sat down with her pal to chat about sustainability, humour and collaborating with her dad…

Tell us about the moment you decided you wanted to design furniture?

When I did a furniture making course at the Boat Building Academy in Lyme Regis I thought I had arrived. All I wanted to do was work with wood and make furniture, the design was secondary. Then I went to the École Boulle in Paris, where I nearly had all my enthusiasm for making furniture beaten out of me.

At Kingston it was different, the making part was secondary. The tutors knew that I could work with wood and make furniture, but they didn't let me get away with just making. They encouraged me to conceive a concept, let it grow and ripen, and then make it. I did not take to this immediately. I was not sure that the world needed any new designs. I wondered if I had signed up to the wrong course and found myself rebelling against it. As I rebelled, I discovered people like Enzo Mari, who were just as critical of consumerism as I was. Then, in the final year of my course, it seemed as if I discovered what it was to be a designer: it was about creating things with a sense of economy, driven by strong ethics and a sense of how the world could be better than it was. I found that this was an activity through which I could express my principles and my sense of humour – an exercise in artistry and not just as a servant of consumerism. These days, I enjoy the creative challenge of designing something as much as I enjoy the making part.

Tools for life: Faucet Out and Hangers

Has there always been an element of wit in your work? How did you develop this?

I find humans really funny. I suppose it’s a kind of existential humour, which is always asking ‘What’s it all about?’ I think that a lot of it was a Dadaesque reaction when I first started spending time in cities. I saw people queuing for activities, eating on the underground, wearing suits to work and it all seemed pretty silly. I’m interested in language and the tools and rules that we have created for ourselves over the years. It started with drawing cartoons and postcards. Then at Kingston, I met my tutor, Carl Clerkin, who is a master of storytelling and creating extraordinary objects. He saw my drawings and has encouraged me to bring them alive by turning them into physical objects and to create a background story with each project.

Confessional Helmet

Your final piece at Kingston University, Tools for Life, was quite unusual. Can you tell us about this project?

We were not given a brief. I was in rough seas trying to justify producing something for the sake of it. The project haunted me for five months. Rather than produce a one product or piece of novelty furniture, I found myself experimenting with the absurd. I drew a collection of tools and furniture and collated them in a catalogue redolent of Thomas Chippendale’s 1754 The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director. I made a selection of the tools into physical objects.

The Tools for Life catalogue focusses on some of the important challenges we face in life: caring for our possessions, confessing our sins, persevering in the face of difficulties and digging our own graves. Each object in the catalogue also mimics the ridiculousness of our consumerist habits, particularly in the context of the sort of objects that you would find in a 1754 catalogue. A Victorian set of library steps became a table with a cherry picker inside.

The catalogue has a third dimension as well. The products that are featured in the catalogue are traditional archetypes: walking sticks, spades, ladders, rolling pins, objects that have evolved over centuries of use, reduced to their most efficient forms by the experience of generations. This is design that I admire, there is beauty in their simplicity and their personality invites us to become their familiars.

While many catalogues seduce consumers with novelty objects, Tools for Life invites the shopper to consider carefully what she needs in life; beauty, creativity, humour and friends.

Your dad is a furniture restorer and you often use his workshop in Dorset to make. How has his practice influenced your work, and do you often collaborate together?

I’ve grown up in my Dad’s workshop which backs onto the garden at home. It’s filled with a life-time’s collection of tools. We help each other a lot. I have so much to learn from him and I like to think that I can spruce him up with my creative projects in return. His workshop is pretty chaotic, but it's a place where everything is done to the highest quality. He’s complete perfectionist. I think that growing up in a slightly regressive environment has definitely had an influence in my work. Anything that is broken gets mended. Anything that is needed is made.

Soap Box for Nihilists and Megaphone for Introverts

From looking at your portfolio, each product seems to be designed with the aim to last a lifetime. Is your furniture a reaction to passive consumerism?

I would say that all my projects are in some way a reaction to consumerism – but not all are designed to last a lifetime! Having grown up in the countryside, shopping wasn't an activity, it was more of a chore. I am interested in how I can be a designer while simultaneously countering consumerism. I like the idea that a piece of furniture can have an expiry date and that it is ok to burn it or get rid of it, giving reason and space for new objects to be made. I find that many designers try to encourage emotional attachment between consumer and furniture in order for the object to become sentimental and therefore kept a lifetime. I am more interested in designing objects that stick around because they are either useful or worthy of keeping. I would say that I am attracted to raw materials, materials that decompose, probably because those materials are familiar to me.

Enzo Mari is a huge inspiration to me, he has spent a life time fighting against “pornographic window dressing” trying to liberate people from the shackles of advertising. I am really interested in his Autoprogettazione. I believe that if more people were involved in the making process then they could understand a piece of furniture, how it works structurally using the minimum amount of material for maximum function, and not be deceived by the hundreds and thousands sprinkled on top. If the consumer has made the furniture then they will be able to fix it, and naturally they would have an emotional connection with it.

Having recently graduated how do you feel about participating in your first New Designers?

I’m very excited to see what other product and furniture students have discovered!

The Soapbox for Nihilists, the piece you’re exhibiting at New Designers, is a humorous reply to SCP's brief for BOXED. How did the idea originate?

The Boxed brief set to us by SCP was, ‘A simple aim of creating a smaller range of products that consumers could buy in store and leave with a box under their arm.’ In other words, design something for people to buy so that they won’t feel empty handed when leaving the shop. My immediate reaction was, ‘The snakes!’ They wanted to bait people into buying things by exploiting their weakness. I wanted to stand up against the brief. I thought about not what could fit in a box, but the box itself. Boxes themselves are always useful. I researched all different types of boxes and decided that a soap box was an appropriate for the point I wanted to make. A soap box is used by activists as a pedestal from which to protest.

The soap box is called the Soap Box for Nihilists. As Nihilists believe than life is meaningless they are therefore unlikely to have much to preach about. This set up a paradox which suggested that the empty box might end up being used for all sorts of things apart from its main purpose. This made a point about the autonomy of the consumer. It showed that I did not myself want to preach but to change people’s attitudes to their possessions more subtly. A nihilist might use the soap box to moo at some cows or to shout at the news on TV. Better still, they might sit on it as a stool, use it for a standing desk on their table, or as a place to put their books – all the time, appreciating its simplicity, durability and adaptability. I have also designed a Megaphone for Introverts, the associate of the soap box which will also be at New Designers.

Ladder of Life

How important do you think it is for designers to consider sustainability and the impact on the environment when creating new work?

I promote anti-consumerism more greatly than I do sustainability. If more people bought less, then fewer objects would go to waste. I think that few objects well-made in a material appropriate to their function is more sustainable in the long run. I think that sustainability in design does need to be considered especially in packaging, but there is a danger of a sort of fashionable superficial environmentalism, which actually just becomes an excuse for more consumerism.

What are the challenges facing design educators right now?

I think that novelty is a big challenge. Students are exposed to thousands of images a day, all the while designers are trying to come up with new things to gain reputation, thus creating over-designed objects that do little to serve the interests of the consumer.

If you had to pick one tool and one material that you couldn’t live without, what would it be?

The tool would be a sewing machine and the material would have to be wood.

Want to discover inspiring work by Poppy and hundreds like her? Head over to the New Designers website to scoop up your tickets to Week 2.

Walking Stick spade