design process. Are you advocating exclusion of all forms of representation or just drawing? How do the disadvantages of drawing compare to its advantages? Without using drawings, how do you manage to communicate ideas (especially when collaborating with companies)? And what impact does this have on your own work process?
MSz: I am certainly not against putting pen to paper to sketch out ideas. “Draw no more” is neither an order nor a constraint I would ever impose on myself, nor is it an ideological stance. On the contrary, it is an invitation to open up to the outside world and avoid a sclerotic “self-centred” mind-set. The idea of “abandoning drawing” gradually developed through contexts that were both personal and historical (the late 1990s), culminating in a text I wrote about designing a drinking glass for Perrier (1996).5 It arose from a recognition that well before ever being drawn, every object conforms to a definition, that every object has a function, that usage is the sole determining factor in the definition of what an object is and that usage is not something you can draw.
Not drawing creates an objective distance between
5 Up until then, the brand’s defining image had been the skittle-shaped Perrier bottle itself. Indeed, skittles were the owner and designer’s original inspiration for the bottle in the nineteenth century. Given the task of designing the first-ever glass for Perrier, I felt it had to be halfway between the historical bottle and a glass. Any marriage could be defined as the union of two entities sharing the same spirit but not necessarily bearing any physical resemblance to one another. This seemed to apply to the present situation, so I began by researching the bottle’s history and analysing its form. It had a small base but one wide enough to keep the bottle standing upright. A rounded body contained the sparkling water and terminated in a narrow neck. My glass therefore had to be designed along similar lines: a thick base to avoid breakage when hitting the surface of tables and bar counters, a hollow volume to hold the water and a shape to facilitate the user’s grip on the glass.