The Dwell 24: Andu Masebo

"I don’t want the object I’m designing to be the loudest in the room," says London designer Andu Masebo over the phone. "I don't want it to say, ‘Look at me, I’m clever.’ I want it to be a reason for someone to access the story behind it." Masebo, who studied ceramics at Central Saint Martins and product design at the Royal College of Art before working as a carpenter and metalwork fabricator for a decade, elaborates: "A lot of the time when I’m making an object, I’m trying to shorten the gap between the person that makes [it] and the person that lives with it, with an idea that if you know a bit more about why something is the way it is, or who made it, then maybe the person who owns the thing will have a stronger connection to the object and be less quick to throw it away."

In many of Masebo’s stripped-back, functional objects, the influence of his home city’s manufacturing industries is evident. His Tubular Chair, one of 13 pieces selected by design initiative Atelier100 for its debut collection encouraging local design and production, was fabricated from bent car exhausts paired with a recycled rubber seat. For his asymmetrical Spare Part Side Table—two rounded ash surfaces connected by curved and capped lacquered steel—Masebo sent metal tubes he found in his Hoxton workshop to local car bodywork sprayers and asked them to paint the tubes in whatever colors they were using.

"I guess my work is a kind of an uneasy relationship between objects and the making of them," says the designer, "in the sense that I don’t fetishize acts of making or the maker, but I think it’s an important part of how the object comes to be."

Read the full Q&A with Andu Masebo below.

Hometown: London.

Describe what you make in 140 characters... Objects of furniture and functional narrative based products. I make simple things that hopefully reach towards something more complex.

What’s the last thing you designed? The last thing I designed was a clothes rail. It’s a tricky thing to design in that it needs to be quiet enough to let the clothes do the speaking yet be interesting enough to justify it being made in the first place.

Do you have a daily creative ritual? Drawing as much as I can.

How do you procrastinate? I probably spend a little too much time scrolling through Instagram.

What everyday object would you like to redesign? Why? I think bins could do with a bit of a shake up.

Who are your heroes (in design, in life, in both)? Enzo Mari, in both.

What skill would you most like to learn? It’s not so much of a skill, but I wish I understood color better.

What is your most treasured possession? I have an unopened box of discontinued British Airways champagne flutes. They were designed to have the same slender opening but without the stem so they have a lower center of gravity.

What’s your earliest memory of an encounter with design? Re-designing the 1998 Arsenal football kit.

What contemporary design trend do you despise? Convenience.

Finish this statement: All design should... Be true to its own intentions.

What’s in your dream house? A library.

How can the design world be more inclusive? I think it’s already pretty inclusive but I guess designers could be less protective of their position. I often find when I share ideas or bring people along with me, I benefit just as much as they do.

What do you wish non-designers understood about the design industry? I wish there was more understanding of the people making the things we live with.

You can learn more about Andu Masebo on Instagram.

View the 2023 Dwell 24!

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