For Toronto designer Jamie Wolfond, a hands-on approach is the only way to go | Canada Voices

After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013, Toronto-born designer Jamie Wolfond moved to New York and started homeware brand Good Thing. In 2018, he sold Good Thing to West Elm, moved back to Toronto and opened Jamie Wolfond Studio in the Junction.

The space is where Wolfond and his team develop new ideas through hands-on experiments that often lead to playful, unexpected places. It’s also home to the gallery space, 8×7, which is exhibiting Tape until Feb. 21, a show featuring nine designers working with adhesive tape.

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During the DesignTO festival in January, I sat down with Wolfond to talk about his physical approach to research, making objects for the digital age and Canada’s design future.

What was the impetus behind starting your own company?

I graduated from school, and I was going to be very famous and successful instantly – until that wasn’t exactly how it worked out. I wanted to license designs to brands. I managed to get some traction doing that, but those opportunities [ultimately] didn’t work out for many reasons I couldn’t have understood. But I identified one, which was that in New York, there weren’t a lot of brands that worked with designers in the way I wanted to work with brands.

And what was that way you wanted to work with brands?

That model is one where a brand works with a lot of different designers who each bring a different perspective to their work. I think the reason it’s so sexy is that those designers are there for their authorship. They’re asked to bring a point of view.

Can you describe the studio’s hands-on approach to design, and how that methodology developed?

I was lucky to go to a school where the program was uniquely hands-on. Then I got turned on to Dutch design and ended up doing a few internships in the Netherlands, the second one being for Bertjan Pot, whose studio was a model for how I wanted to work. You’ll sit down to try and solve a chair, and you may not do that, but you may realize that something you’ve done has an application somewhere else. The physical approach to design means doing a lot of experiments to discover things that you wouldn’t discover otherwise. If we can picture an idea in its entirety without trying it, it’s usually not worth doing in the first place.

You’ve mentioned previously that many designers today create things more for digital consumption. How do you weigh that against other considerations like solving problems or functionality or craft?

One of the first things that I got into production with a major European brand was a lamp for Muuto. I made it for a show here in Toronto. I knew [the lamp] would be experienced by people who couldn’t go to the show. That doesn’t mean I thought, “oh, I’m going to make a thing for pictures.” Even though it’s in production with a brand, I don’t know that it exists primarily for physical consumption.

The lamp continues to get a lot of Instagram coverage, and it was recently picked up by an account that communicated it in a way I didn’t like. It elicited a lot of responses – one from the most famous Canadian designer. He was upset by how inefficient the light was because of the amount of labour it took to make.

This is something about digital consumption that has changed the way brands operate, in a way that designers from a different era maybe don’t understand. I don’t think 1,000 of those lights will ever be sold. I don’t think that’s the intention.

When it comes to the design community in Toronto, what are we good at? What would you like to see more of?

For a city of this size, we should be prouder of ourselves and look less externally for creative role models. I’ll plug the 8×7 gallery by saying that I don’t want to do too many of our own shows – I want people to come up with things they want to show. I want people to be able to mess up and for it not to be too expensive or risky. Working with Dutch designers and seeing how easy it appears to be to get a grant from the government there makes it clear what we’re working against here. I wanted to put that space together so that there’s at least one lily pad someone can jump to.

This interview has been condensed and edited.