John Miller - interview
While many have gone from working in a practice to teaching, John Miller went the other way round. He talks to Emily Martin about his passion for making, and the design students he has nurtured.
Words by Emily Martin
I don't come from a creative background. I didn't particularly enjoy my school life, and that's putting it quite politely. The thing that really was my salvation was the art room and the school workshops.' John Miller, founding director of Cornwall-based manufacturer MARK (or to use its lesser-known full name, Made And Realised in Kernow), is recalling the key steps that led him to furniture design. The journey for him started at school and growing up in Orpington, in south-east London. Miller says he gravitated towards art and design subjects and discovered a love for 'making' and using his hands.
'The key thing for me was my art teacher lending me a book, Design For The Real World, by Victor Papanek,' he says. 'That is what really introduced me to the idea of a designer as an influencer and somebody who can make decisions that can impact positive change. After that it really was a straight line.' In 1991 Miller graduated from Leeds Polytechnic after studying 3D design and specialising in furniture design. His study time had led him to discover his early design heroes, who included Alvar Aalto and in particular, Aalto's wood steam-bending techniques.
The Studio sofa, designed by John Miller and Anna Hart for MARK, was launched at the Clerkenwell Design Week.
Miller says the Eighties and Nineties saw and 'explosion' in design and that it was a very exciting time for designers. 'Design was actually being applied to things that it had never been applied to before. Or things were being designed for a second time,' he says. 'Before, someone would have built a bank and, then it would remain as a bank. And now was the idea of redesigning the bank, or redesigning the interiors of the bank; I don't think it had happened before.'
Yet Miller was dissatisfied with the design ideologies and describes a 'clashing of styles' with the mixing of hi-tech culture and postmodernist style. 'Possibly we have got more into a consensus now, but having gone down such a linear route I had become quite frustrated be the state of affairs,' he says.
Mycroft by MARK
'A lot of design seemed to be quite froufrou and shallow and I was quite motivated by ideological values and was looking for something worthwhile to put my abilities into.' In 1993 Miller started on an MA at London Guildhall University in design research for disability. After earning his MA he started Design Strength, a consultancy where he did several design projects for people with disabilities and put a bed design, designed during his MA studies, into production. Believing that he didn't have the confidence to grow the business, Miller also found himself feeling isolated and took on a part-time teaching, initially on the masters course he had graduated from. 'I loved the interaction with the students and I loved having colleagues,' he says. 'I think that when you are designing and making in a workshop all day, it is fantastic to be in a collegial atmosphere, and I loved inhabiting other people's projects as well.'
It's evident when Miller speaks that his enthusiasm for workshop working are happy times for him. And looking at his hands, which are engrained with dirt with slightly blackened fingernails, they speak of continuing workshop adventures at MARK.
The bed designed by John Miller when he was a student, and sold through his first company Design Strength.
Miller completed a PGCE in 1997 and was offered the role of course leader at London Guildhall University for its BA in furniture design and technology. 'Initially I did it part-time while keeping my business going for a year, but then it became a fulltime commitment. And I loved it. I just loved that job,' says Miller. 'Running a course is the best job because in a way it's like running a business: you can be entrepreneurial, your students are your team, the projects you write are creative and you can decide which people from industry to bring in.'
Starting out with only 15 students, Miller says timing had a lot to do with the success of the course, which went on to invite more than 30 students each year, believing that little was understood about a furniture design profession: 'There wasn't a huge amount of opportunity and it was quite elite with furniture designers typically all being male and white. Nevertheless there was this whole TV-make-over interest in design and we were soon finding our resources being stretched.'
Isos exhibited in the UK and Italy
Adopting what he calls a 'Bauhaus ethos' to the course, Miller was keen to establish and promote as one of its leading principles a connection between furniture design education and manufacture. In 2002 Miller set up Furniture Works at what then had become London Metropolitan University and left his role as course leader.
'Buildings that were veneer warehouses were now design studios, so Furniture Works was to really open to this new emerging furniture design industry and saying "We've got all these facilities and heritage, come and talk to us",' he says. Promoting the idea that this would benefit the whole community, including staff and students who would also get involved with the different projects happening in the neighbourhood, Miller envisioned an 'urban factory'. With this in mind, before leaving the university and London for Cornwall, he ran a project by inviting a number of London-based designers (including Simon Pengelly, Wills+Watson, and Rose Cobb) to work with local London manufacturers. 'We created a loose collective, united under a single brand called Isos,' says Miller. 'We exhibited in Birmingham, London and Milan, and the project created a lot of energy, though it wasn't a commercial success.'
Miller accepted a job at as director of design at University College Falmouth and with his wife relocated to Cornwall. 'It was a positive and ambitious big step, not because I was fed-up or anything like that,' says Miller. 'But I found I was very much back into a core academic life and was introduced to the life of committees and a very full diary. I was no longer within my beloved furniture base.'
Without an established furniture design course at the university Miller set out to conduct some research: 'I spoke to anyone and everyone in Cornwall who had something to do with furniture!' Discovering a more craft-based furniture design industry in the county, Miller started to put a project together with the intention to build on the idea of Isos.
As a link between design education and manufacture, Miller, then leader of the furniture design and technology BA course at the London Metropolitan University, set up Furniture Works, with its showroom in Commercial Road
MARK was co-founded by Miller and his furniture designer business partner Anna Hart, who he met through networking in Cornwall. 'I started it as a part-time/sparetime thing. But it needed to have purpose, and due to the early success of the business I made the decision in 2009 to leave the university and go for it full-time.' Now a successful contract furniture design and manufacturing company, MARK is still managed by Miller and Hart. 'We manufacture everything we do in the UK, either at our own factory in Cornwall, or with suppliers that are mostly close by,' he says.
'My passion for furniture then is the same now. It's the design discipline, and the furniture, which is the most intimate, tactile thing to connect us most directly with our environment. It's something you can't really achieve with any other design discipline.'
