Interview with Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec

The brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec have been working together for nine years. They count many well-known companies among their clients, including Vitra, Cappellini, Issey Miyake, Magis, and Ligne Roset. Their designs are part of the permanent collections of museums such as the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, or the Design Museum in Lisbon. This year they impressed the red dot jury with their “worknest”, a swivel chair with a markedly homelike design.

Mr. Ronan and Mr. Erwan Bouroullec, what intention was there behind the Worknest, and what was your inspiration?
We feel that the office world is too often seen as a mechanical world, with obvious references to robots and technology. We feel that this approach is not adapted to the reality of the office world – a place for people who work. Our idea was to create an object that was very ergonomic, very technical and soft at the same time. Because a chair is designed to support a human body, it needs to be formally adapted to the body. And we prefer a chair that resembles a body or an animal, to a chair that looks like a machine. In the Worknest, the mechanics necessary for comfort are hidden under a textile skin that softens both the visual and the effective contact with the occupant.

How do you work together? And do you feel that being brothers is an advantage for working together?
In fact, design is much like cooking. The alchemy is too complex to highlight some scientific and systematic rules for a project or between us. There are no rules, nor assignment. Some ideas may come very fast and spontaneously on one side or another. Some others require much thought, so the process takes longer. There is no secret recipe. At the very beginning of a project, there is a common reflection on the concept and use, then a debate. Later on, brainstorming can happen at any moment. On the one hand, we are brothers who grew up with the same background and share the same deep relationship with shape and colour. We have a common understanding about many general things. Yet there are five years of age difference between us. We can have quite different points of view. During our projects, we always reach the same opinion, but it is not always evident from the beginning. It needs a long process of discussion and agreement.

To what extent do other disciplines influence your work?
We are very interested in many art forms: graphics, photography, cinema, music, contemporary art. We are greedy for creation in general. However, it is also true that we do not have time to visit exhibitions or to follow everything. We live quite far from the creative scene, even though we usually see new things emerging through the press. We are quite diffusely nourished by information we get from everywhere. We do not feel inspiration as ever being direct. It is always far more complex. Observation can be considered as our main external influence. We try to accurately observe people’s behaviours in everyday life and to understand common practices and needs. In fact, we have a deep interest, and even a passion for the small details of life, the way people consider objects, the way they use them etc. As for artworks that may influence us in a diffuse way, it is true that we appreciate very much artists like Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly or Frank Stella, for example. But we never felt their influence as being direct.