Creative career stories: Designer, Jay Osgerby
Jay Osgerby designs everything from interior spaces to the objects which fill them. Having tried all kinds of different creative specialisms while still in education, Jay set up his East London studio with partner Edward Barber in 1996. Since then, Barber Osgerby have been working across architecture, interiors, sculpture, product and exhibitions to push the boundaries of design. This is Jay’s story…
What I do
I’m a designer. Everything that you have around you or carry with you is designed by someone like me.
The difference between an artist and a designer is that an artist can do their art on their own in an attic before presenting it. Designers can’t work like that. We are creative collaborators - and that’s the fun of it. You get to meet lots of people and learn from them each day.
Someone can come to us and describe an idea they have with words, and it is our job to turn those words into something that doesn’t just look fantastic but works well. It’s like a jam sandwich. The entrepreneur is one slice of bread, we are the jam in the middle, and the manufacturer is the other slice of bread. It is our job to stick it all together and make it taste good.
I work on everything from industrial design - technology, computers, audio - right through to things like furniture, lighting and packaging design. The variety within my work is madly good. It’s one of those rare jobs that lets you get involved in all sorts of different businesses.
You have to get bored
I grew up in the countryside, and it was quite a small parochial upbringing. Looking back, one of the benefits of country life in the 70s was that there wasn’t much to do. You have to get bored to get creative. You go through the thresholds of boredom, and your brain just can’t hack it, so it starts getting creative. Whether you hit it with a hammer and break it, or you put stuff together and make it - construction and destruction come through boredom.
Don’t be too decisive
I didn’t feel like my creative education was particularly good at school. There wasn’t any imagination behind doing art. It was basically: find something in a magazine and then copy it. However, I also studied Design & Technology. It was still a little frustrating as it was so prescribed and you had to just do as you were told (which, I guess, is school as a whole), but I enjoyed it. I liked learning how to make something out of something else, and I thought this could be a great job.
“If I had known exactly what I wanted to do, then I might not have gone to do a foundation year at university, and this turned out to be a critical moment for me.”
- Jay Osgerby
In Oxfordshire, where I went to school, some kids who were good at technical drawing were lined up to work at Cowley, where they made a lot of British cars in the 70s. I was taken on a trip there and shown around the offices of the craftsmen. This was before computers, so everything was drawn by hand. The office was full of men wearing long brown coats and chain-smoking. It wasn’t very glamorous; in fact, the vibe was pretty dire.
My dad helped me get some work experience with an architect, but it was pretty dull too. These negative experiences were good, however, as they stopped me from being too decisive too young. If I had known exactly what I wanted to do, then I might not have gone to do a foundation year at university, and this turned out to be a critical moment for me.
What is a foundation course?
A foundation course is a one-year course where you get to try a bit of everything before you make up your mind about what creative discipline you want to go into. I only found out about foundation courses because my neighbour, who was a potter, told me about them. I did my foundation year at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brooks University) and I absolutely loved it!
My creative education
I decided to go on and study Product Design. After looking around at a few courses in Brighton and Manchester, I decided on Ravensbourne University in London, where I went on to study for three years.
After I graduated, I started helping out a friend of mine who was opening bars and restaurants in Oxford. I enjoyed the process of getting an empty building site, designing it, building it, continuing right through to getting the coffee machine on and seeing people come in and go “Wow - this is great!”. While furniture and product design are interesting, you can’t change the way a person feels in the way that you can by changing spaces. I thought: I’ll have a bit of that.
I went on to study for a Master's degree in Architecture and Interior Design at the Royal College of Art. By the time I was finished studying, I had done a real mixture of things; fine art in foundation, industrial design and furniture design in my degree and architecture and interiors during my Master’s.
Starting Barber Osgerby
I met my business partner, Edward Barber, while studying for my Master’s. He was a student just like me, and we were both in our early 20s. We graduated into a recession and were lucky enough to get a job designing a bar through a mutual friend. That one job led to everything. People went into the bar, liked what they saw and asked who designed it. We got hired for another project, started designing furniture too, and everything sprang from that.
This isn’t an uncommon story. You can start in architecture and interiors on your own or with a very small team. With a combination of small jobs and teaching at the college where I’d studied, I managed to get moving. It’s hard to do anything, so you might as well work at something that is yours in the end. It might be a lot of effort, and you might be completely skint for a while, but you can look at what you made and say “I did that. I made that. I love that.”
“I think generally, any form of neurodiversity is no longer a barrier, especially in the creative world - it’s a superpower.”
- Jay Osgerby
Neurodiversity is a superpower
I’m dyslexic, and so is my son. He is one of the most creative people I have ever known. We have the craziest conversations, which are very disjointed but so much fun.
Dyslexic minds are connected in completely different ways. We get very tangential ideas and concepts out of nowhere; we are not linear thinkers, and that is a real benefit when it comes to the creative arts. Being wired differently, like dyslexic or ADHD brains are is a real benefit for coming up with really unusual solutions to problems. I think generally, any form of neurodiversity is no longer a barrier, especially in the creative world - it’s a superpower.