I am reintroducing my Parisian of the Month interview series. For January, I’m happy to interview Wolfgang Joensson, a very talented and prolific product and industrial designer, and design teacher.
Where were you born and where did you grow up?
Right after the war, my German parents emigrated to South Africa, because my father was offered a position with the South African Railroad Company. I was born there, which probably has a lot to do with my preference for mild climates. When I was two, the family returned to Germany, settling in Hamburg in the northern part of the country, where I grew up. I have fond memories of spending most of my summer vacations in Bavaria, quite different from where we lived.
When did you discover you had a talent or appreciation for design? Was a sense of design instilled in you by your parents or present in your environment when were you growing up?
My father was an engineer and my mother an Arts and Crafts teacher, and as a Designer, that makes me a perfect mix. My mother always had us doing craft projects, but I also drew a lot during my childhood and my youth. Anything, but particularly cars, products and floor plans for houses. Up until my mid-teens I wanted to be a pop singer and study mathematics. I am very grateful that my father, looking at my drawings and being a well-read engineer, introduced me to the English term ‘Industrial Design’. With that, I immediately bought a sketchbook and presumptuously wrote ‘Industrial Design 1’ on the cover. And that was basically the start of my career. Being a designer requires a heightened sense of esthetics, as being an artist or architect does. I was fortunate that my parents, who were very urban and open minded, with modern tastes in furniture, were incredibly supportive. That helped to pave my way through what, for every creative person, is a long and winding road towards becoming a designer.
What were some of your early design influences and discoveries?
At home, we discussed virtually everything, and I was encouraged to develop my own sense of quality, beauty and what is good, desirable, essential or redundant. This shaped me fundamentally. Because Denmark was right next door, I was able to travel often enough and it was there that I discovered Scandinavian design, particularly Bang and Olufsen. I was fascinated by the nonchalant, sober and yet playful expression I observed. A family and subsequent student trips to Italy had me falling in love with the country, its food, its people and their sense of architecture, beauty and design. And in Germany, BRAUN was very present and visible in those days. An early goal of mine as a student was to be able to design like that.
You have lived in many places including Hamburg, Stuttgart, London, Montreux, and Los Angeles. When and why did you move to Paris?
It was in 2002. I was working as a professor in Northern Switzerland, in a little village between Basel and Zürich at the time. Very different from the Geneva lake where I had been living the previous twelve years. I made some very good friends there but, in the end, it was not my place. I wanted to move to a big city, and considered Barcelona, Madrid, Milan and Paris. Since I had been teaching in Paris since the mid-nineties, I had some friends there and knew my way around. But I did not have any other professional or personal reason or relationship that influenced my decision to come here. Anyhow, I have never regretted it. Au contraire.
Your first career was in graphic design. Do you still do graphic design and what made you move from graphic design to industrial and product design?
In my first term in design school, to make some spending money I started taking small jobs in the advertising industry. I never learned graphic design, but a good graphic design friend showed me the ropes and introduced me to what was then called key-lining, the preparation of graphic design for print. All that is done on the computer today, but at the time, it was a fairly qualified and very well-paid occupation. I was flexible enough to do that parallel to my studies, and so I had a great life with a nice apartment, a car and lots of traveling. I learned so much in those advertising days! Precision, persuasion and perfection are my big take-aways from those experiences, and I benefit from it still today. Although I had been offered several times to stop studying and become a junior art director with great fringe benefits and education (it was the golden age of advertising), I always wanted to be a product designer and so I finished my studies. Today, I also do graphics, packaging and interface design, where my interest and early training in typography pays off. Of course, I am not a typographer, and I have too high respect for these people to call myself that, but I try to employ lettering, symbols, colors and space consciously, if only to avoid embarrassment when a professional typographer comes across my work.
You also teach design at universities around the world. What brought to teaching? Do the students differ much in the various countries you teach in, and if, yes, how so?
Whenever I do something, I try to do it consciously. And when I reflect on what I do, in my mind I formulate how I could describe this to someone else. It’s a great, disciplined way of working, and it has this side effect that you are just a few steps away from teaching. Inspired by my parents and teachers, I always wanted to share my knowledge. Though my father never taught in a formal setting, he was a great motivator and could explain virtually everything in the world to me. And during my studies, I realized how many things were missing in design education. It’s a fairly new profession. You might even say that, at least at the time, it was not very professional. I have yet to see an introductory book for young designers. Maybe I will find the time to write one myself one day.
So, it was a logical next step, in my young career, when I was recruited by an American design school at age thirty, to accept their invitation to become the chairman of their product design department. It was a fascinating time in my life. The campus was on the Geneva lake, my office was in a pretty château and we were very international, with 35 nations in the student body.
Now you know you cannot extrapolate from one student and draw conclusions about their compatriots. But I did observe Americans to be more playful, Germans be a bit more sincere, students from Latin countries very sensual in their approach, French extravagant and quirky, Scandinavians very socially conscious and Swiss extremely disciplined and conscientious. But all that may well have been a prejudice. I may have seen what I wanted or expected to see. And there were probably as many exceptions to those observations as real occurrences. But what it certainly did was make me aware of something I had until then not noticed, for simple lack of comparison: That I was indeed quite German. Having moved away from Germany in 1988 this has been watered down considerably over the years. I would now describe myself as a European, but thanks to the love of my life, I also have a very strong Southern Californian influence.
Does the environment and climate change play a big part when you currently design things on your own or when you are commissioned to design products?
Of course. You cannot ignore the challenges we and our planet face today when you create for tomorrow. That is why, in the nineties, I introduced a mandatory ecology class in the Product Design curriculum I was responsible for. We were probably the first to do that. I remember it was very difficult to get good teachers for that course. But that was not a reason not to do it. As a successful product designer, your ideas are literally sold by the millions. That’s a magnitude of environmental impact that you have to face and deal with. There are no simple answers for this challenge, but awareness is the first step every designer must take. A former boss and friend of mine has started the ‘Sustainable Design School’ in Nice, an excellent place to learn how to cope with this.
You recently published and illustrated a book, ‘Iconic Product Design’. Please tell us what sparked the idea for the book and also about the content.
There are products that have moved me, and I know that many people share my obsession with objects, perhaps without even knowing why. Humans like objects, maybe because they remind us of tools and how those allowed us to conquer the world. I wanted to curate a little collection of noteworthy designs and to show people how good design can be very long lasting and how inanimate objects can inspire emotions in all of us. The aspect of emotion in design is so important, and the German design, with all its amazing quality, has in the past sometimes fallen a bit short on creating an emotional bond with an object. French and Italian design often had the edge when it came to that. In any case, there are industrial design objects that we all remember and that is usually because of their visual quality and the response we had to their looks or their functionality. When we agree, those products have become iconic.
From the book Iconic Product Design- Le Creuset Dutch Oven- France, 1925
From the book Iconic Product Design-Opinel No. 10 Knife France 1897
From the book Iconic Product Design-Citroen 2CV France 1948
Do you think modern French design is influenced by its classic design periods from the past, and if yes, which of these periods are most prevalent in modern design?
Yes, it has! And I am not only thinking of the obvious example, Philippe Starck’s Louis Ghost chair. That is a wonderful witty interpretation and an essential ergonomic improvement of the source material, that is a Louis XVI piece of furniture. I am not sure if that period influenced a lot of other modern design products, but I see Art Nouveau and Hector Guimard’s genius influencing some modern furniture and there is no doubt that Alphonse Mucha had a strong impact on graphics design since the Sixties. Art Deco is a period I love, and I see a mirroring of some of its principles over the last decades.
What are your favorite French design products?
When I dine at home, I sit on a Philippe Starck chair. I love LIP watches, Pierre Paulin’s furniture and of course a whole panoply of cooking related gadgets and tools. Emmanuel Nardin has created beautiful Hifi speakers and related products for Devialet and Patrick Jouin has created some remarkable public restrooms.
If there’s one designer living or dead, you could invite to dinner who would it be and what restaurant would you take them to?
I am careful with this one. At a function, I once had the chance to sit next to one of my most admired Italian product designers. He was a complete bore, and he knew it. Nowhere is it written that a great designer also has to be an interesting person. I’d be happy to dine with my Swiss business partner Lutz Gebhardt any time, he’s never boring, or some of my former bosses or colleagues at frogdesign, Hartmut Esslinger, Werner Scholpp or Tom Schönherr. Also, many of my former students. Some of them have become famous designers, some have become good friends, and some both. Rather than dining with a famous designer I think that I would be more interested in dining with an inspiring poet, a successful businessman, a great musician, an experienced adventurer or someone else like that. But come to think of it, I would like to dine with Charles and Ray Eames. I love their work, their work attitude and their perspective on humanity, which is what interests me most in other people. The older one gets, the more one becomes conscious of the fact that our lives do not go on forever. So, you’re looking at how to spend the next decades and you decide that you do not want to waste your time anymore and only spend it with people you like and respect.
If you were on a desert island and could only have three objects, what would they be?
I’m for survival, so it would have to be a knife, a lens and a rope. As much as I like objects, I am very much aware that most objects are non-essential, superfluous, redundant. There is no object more important than human contact, what we do for our society, for our loved ones, for our neighbor. I know some people who live in a design museum. When you start your studies, you are curious, you want to surround yourself with design if not create it yourself. But though I am a very ambitious designer, my home looks probably fairly normal and not like a design magazine. What’s important for me is a big table and comfortable chairs so I can have my friends and loved ones over and cook for them, eat and drink together. That’s worth a lot more than any rare or expensive design object. The same goes for art. On our walls are paintings from friends or from my mother and from artists whom I have met and have had discussions with about their art.
What do you prefer about Paris?
It never ceases to amaze me: the architecture, the climate, the spirit, the language, the food, the arts, the people. I am a city person and Paris has all the stimulation for my senses. It’s wonderful douceur de vie mixed with a touch of the abrasiveness of an urban metropole. Particularly in these times of the pandemic I long for the scintillating life that I know Paris for to come back. But even in its austere moments, the city, with all its elegant grandeur offers you historic insights, a humane future outlook, all the Mediterranean beauties, botanically and meteorologically, the promise of metropolitan buzz and southern sleepiness, technical marvels, architectural artifacts and the smells and the sights of a life deeply rooted in basics instincts.
I can hardly imagine not living in Paris.
From the book Iconic Product Design-BIC Lighter France 1973
From the book Iconic Product Design-BIC Cristal Pen France 1950
From the book Iconic Product Design-FLOS Ara Lamp Italy 1988
From the book Iconic Product Design-LIP Dark Master France 1973
Click here to purchase a copy of Iconic Product Design
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