Marc Newson

“Marc Newson designs everything!” That’s how the BBC documentary ‘Marc Newson – Urban Spaceman’ described the Australian designer who works for Louis Vuitton, Ford, Qantas, Apple and many more. On his website you can find everything, from pens over furniture to planes and rockets.

How does this work? How can a single person work on so many projects?

And Newson did not even study Product Design! He studied jewelry at the Sydney College of the Arts and graduated 1984. He quickly became famous with his Lockheed Lounge, a piece of furniture made out of metal, which was never intended to be comfortable, but to please the eye in a more sculptural way. It is now the most expensive object created by a living designer ever sold at an auction.

Since then he worked on so many projects for so many companies, that it would be too time consuming to go any further. But there is an overall scheme to most of his designs – space. Watching the moon landing in 1969 he felt a form of optimism that made him create and explore. To a point where he is designing the cabin for an Astrium Spaceplane, which makes his dream of space tourism come a bit closer.

But my question is, how does he do it? From my own experiences I know how much time goes into the design process of a product. Research, idea development and evaluation, prototyping, testing, and starting all of this over and over again, takes so much time – and these are small scale products. For bigger projects like cars and planes various teams are needed to work over several years, to complete a design. Modern military and airline design projects are of such a large scale that every design aspect is tackled by different teams and then brought together. How can one person design a car, a small jet-powered airplane, a boat, an entire cabin interior of the Qantas A380 fleet and the interior of a rocket?

I was trying to find out more about the team behind Marc Newson. In the BBC documentary mentioned above, a team wasn’t mentioned and even after some researching I couldn’t find out any more. You could argue that Newson works on so many projects with so many people, that it is just easier to simplify it on the person/brand Marc Newson. This is understandable and probably justifiable, because Marc Newson definitely is the head of design and the origin of the overall concept. But not to mention a team in a whole documentary or website keeps me wondering, how does this work?

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