Robert was the teacher who taught Kegan and I to love the technical side of manufacturing processes. In his studio, we designed Egg Pants and the Smoking Gun. Needless to say, he was hugely influential in the development of Design Glut. We decided to interview him about what it's like to be both a designer and an educator, and how the two paths inform each other.



Robert Langhorn
robertlanghorn.com

What is your advice for students making that leap from design student to design professional?

I think it's incredibly hard. You have to be lucky, gregarious and tenacious.

An ability to network is critical. You can't be a wallflower. You have to be out there, going to the events, parties etc. You've got to be ballsy and you've got to put your face in front of people and not be afraid of rejection. And you do have to have a personality. There are very few designers that I know who are quiet, who get by solely on talent. It's unfortunate, but there it is.

You also have to be flexible. Clients are often not easy people to deal with. They'll tell you one thing one day, and you'll show them something and you think you know what they're talking about. You come back the next day and they say, "That was not what I was talking about." And, well, okay, you're back to the drawing board. It's not that they're wrong, either. If you're taking on that kind of work, work that's not self-generated and self-funded, then that's part of the relationship and you have to deal with that.

What's interesting to me now, and I've been doing a lot of thinking about this, is that there are too many designers. When I started, about twenty years ago, it wasn't a profession that was terribly sexy. There were certain people who you admired but they weren't really in the public eye. Over the last twenty years, it's snowballed, and the media has taken up design wholesale. It's this very fashionable thing that everybody talks about. Now everybody wants to be a designer. A lot of work I see these days makes me wonder if designers are setting their sights on end-users, or if they're just designing to fit in with what's happening this season.



How did you get into teaching?

I'd just completed my undergraduate degree, and at that time I was very interested in Japanese youth culture and the effect of post-war American occupation on Japanese architecture and design. Japan is incredibly expensive, so I had to find a means of getting out there. There is a program, the JET program, which takes young graduates and places them in Japanese high schools as English teachers. I got into the program and did a two-month intensive teaching course which was the scariest thing I ever did in my life.

I am naturally a very shy person. I don't take to standing in front of people and talking. I still find it a little bit difficult, even today. For this teaching course, they did teaching theory in the morning and then they'd just throw you in front of students in the afternoon. From the first day. So I had to teach a group of twenty people how to speak English after three hours of teaching practice.

What has teaching design taught you as a designer, and has it affected your approach in your own design work?

The main thing I like about teaching is it keeps you frosty as a designer. I think you can get too stuck in your own ways, and it's nice to know that there's going to be at least a couple of opportunities a week where you can go into a room full of people (in my case it's usually about fifteen individuals) with very different perspectives.

That's what's nice about studio class: it's a middle ground, a meeting of minds. I have a certain agenda in class, but then I have to try to tailor that to meet individual needs.



Have you discovered methods for pushing students to generate ideas?

I think it's different for everybody. There is no formula.

So it's more about what it takes to push people on their different paths?

It's the final year of undergraduate. It's not school anymore. I see the final year as a transition into professional practice. You've had three years to acquire a reasonably broad skill-set, and now it's time to ask yourself what's going on in your head, how that interfaces with the outside world and how do you marry that with those technical skills you've learned over the past three years.

What do you think is the hardest lesson for students to grasp, as they're
making that transition?

Balancing individual creative needs whilst fulfilling the design brief or the client requirements. Students often try too hard to please. When you get out into the world of work, it's good to have the attitude of trying to surprise the client. If they don't bite, then you can always go back to Plan B, which is supplying them with what they want.

Do you think it's beneficial for teachers to also be practicing in the
industry?

You should be practicing, but there has to be a balance, I think. You have to be committed to teaching. There are people who teach because they feel that they're doing something altruistic. But they're not really teaching, they're doing it because it's good for their profile. On the other hand, you also have people who are teaching because that's all they can do. Which is equally as bad.

There certainly has to be an altruistic element, because you're not getting paid that much so you have to get something outside of that. At the same time, you've got to teach. You've got to be able to teach. That's an acquired skill. Especially at college level where you don't need to have trained as a teacher to get a position. You don't necessarily need to train, but I think it really helps.



As someone who came from Europe, what do you see as the big difference between American and European approaches to design?

Here we go, this is the big question. I have to say that I was horrified when I first arrived here. I came to New York in 2003. I was looking for the design scene, and there wasn't very much going on. They had things like First Stop [founded by Klaus Rosburg], which was an open-studio event and sort of a precursor to Brooklyn Designs.

It seemed to me like it was either cottage industry or hard, industrial design. There wasn't much of a middle ground. Designers who I've spoken to who do work for large companies say it's very, very safe here in the US. If you're working for a large company they won't take on projects that are experimental.

As a culture, what worries me, and I think it's the same in Europe now, is that design has become extremely fashionable. It's about fashion as opposed to something deeper. And it's, there's just... I hate to use the word, but there's a glut. A glut of design.

Oh, we like that, we're definitely going to use that!

There's a glut in the market. I look at the blogs and I just feel... nauseous. There's so much stuff. And filtering it all... After a while, you just don't care. I can walk around ICFF, and, if I'm lucky, I'll see a couple of things that make me really happy.

This is what my perception is. This is not what someone else might see. It's a really difficult thing to talk about, because individuals need to create, and what they create is personal. When looking at something, I often say to myself... I don't like this, but somebody's obviously felt that it was necessary to make it. I think that's just part of the human condition. How do you deal with the world on a day-to-day basis? Some people write, some paint or sculpt and others make objects as a means of externalizing their thoughts and feelings.



I'm very much in the latter category. I was an average student at school, but never really engaged. I never understood why I had to do things like mathematics. I'm not good at mathematics. And not because I'm stupid, but because nobody told me why it was important. And this might be another reason why I teach. I didn't get excited about my education until I got into art school. Suddenly all of those things came into play: mathematics, physics... I became interested in everything, because everything was relevant. It had a context.

It's fascinating to hear you say that, because in the early years of college I sat through several classes about manufacturing techniques and didn't absorb a thing... I couldn't understand for the life of me why I had to learn about the machines and the engineering end of things. It wasn't until your class until I felt like someone finally told me WHY it was important. I suddenly thought it was really interesting!

It's fine to learn technique, but it's useless without actually doing something with it. It's like when you try to learn complex computer programs. It's quite abstract unless you've got something meaningful you want to use it for. You'll never learn one of those CAD programs by sitting and watching an instructor. You have to have a reason to use the tool.