Interview

COGGINS: Take Muji, for example. Here’s a company that’s democratized design, and you’ve worked with them a lot. Can you describe some of your projects with Muji? Do you like your working relationship with them?

GRCIC: I’ve been working with them for about eight years. I have to laugh a little bit, because after eight years, I still find it really challenging. By no means would I claim to fully understand what Muji is. [laughs] Muji’s so special. It’s a beautiful company, considering that it’s been three decades that they’ve been doing what they do, with a philosophy that stands behind the brand—which is no brand. They are difficult to work with because even though from the outside it seems very clear what Muji is, the reality is that there’s no formula. It’s not so simple to ask, “What is Muji and how do we make a product become Muji?” Muji has so many different facets. This idea of paring things down to their most essential components works on a number of levels—it’s definitely an element that exists in Japanese culture, but even Japanese Muji culture could never define fully what Muji is. The interesting challenge for us is designing without designing. It’s really a design project. They work to create products that, in the end, don’t look designed, that look very unobtrusive and natural.

COGGINS: Right.

GRCIC: But of course it is so difficult to do that. Every year we do so many projects with them. We have a contract with Muji, which means we constantly work for them, have an exchange of ideas with them, and they use what they want to use. They don’t commission a specific thing. Sometimes we trigger a project with a concept that we make, and they take over. I like that. We stir certain things up, and in the end, they’re so good.

COGGINS: So you like balancing these two types of design: something for Hermès, which very much draws attention to itself and where you really see the designer at work; and then you have projects that you describe as unobtrusive, where you try to make the design invisible. Do you like to balance these two things?

GRCIC: Yes, absolutely. I like the balance—it’s nice that you call it a balance. Sometimes it’s actually . . . [laughs] an imbalance, but even that is nice, because these projects are so different, and they create interesting dynamics. Doing Muji probably feeds into totally different projects. But we also do other designs for big industries.

COGGINS: Like Krups, for instance, where you designed appliances like blenders and coffee makers . . .

GRCIC: Well, I wasn’t going to mention Krups. My example would have been a company like Magis or Plank, where we serve as industrial designers. We design products like chairs for Magis and Plank, but they carry a very strong signature. It’s definitely an industrial product that goes through the whole process of the development. But through all that process it retains its own authorship, its own company stamp, quite strongly, and that’s what the companies want. Specifically, the furniture industry works in a different way. We always know the name of the designer who makes the furniture. When you design for Krups, for example, it remains a more anonymous product.

COGGINS: Right.

GRCIC: But the furniture world is at its strongest when the personality of the designer—the signature—is most apparent.

COGGINS: We’re talking in such serious design terms, but your work has a reputation for having a sly humor. Can you talk about the space that humor has in design?

GRCIC: Well . . . [both laugh] I liked the serious nature of the conversation we were just having. I’m grateful for your questions because I think that design is something quite serious. Design is a serious thing—it’s not just fun. It demands concentration, and it’s about responsibility. At the same time, for me, the hard reality is sometimes so comical because it’s about life, isn’t it? Everyday life, and how all of us struggle with life, and in this material world we struggle to come to terms with objects—something we have to sit down on, or open a latch on, or all of these essential kinds of things. I’ve always been fascinated by observing the relationship between human beings and objects. And, really, how do we come to terms with them? How intelligent are we? Is there a category of objects that are helpful and accommodating and accessible? Because there are objects that are totally the opposite and they are here to make you look like a fool, or they make you uncomfortable. I guess there is a certain form of humor in my work. It’s not that I just want to be funny. It’s not something I do deliberately. But when you accept the world with all its perfections and imperfections, and tragic and comic sides, then somehow this humorous aspect is part of it.

COGGINS: So humor comes out in the process. I read that you’ve said you like to incorporate the feeling that you’re not an expert in your work—not in all of your pieces, anyway.

GRCIC: Yes. Like I said, design is something quite serious, therefore I think design should be done by designers, because only designers have certain kinds of skills. Skills, for me, mean a way of thinking, but they also mean very real talents in terms of craftsmanship and experience and so on. So that probably makes us experts, but in the end we should never be experts in an absolute sense. There’s always something we don’t know. This is our advantage working with companies that are experts in their own particular fields. They ask us from the outside to collaborate because they need the input of somebody who has skills and experience but who doesn’t know everything—and that’s exactly where we can think more freely and probably come up with something that’s totally ridiculous. [laughs] But sometimes that’s where the breakthrough lies. The absolute expert knows what works and what doesn’t too well already. So we have to be professionally unprofessional.

COGGINS: Right.

GRCIC: We make mistakes, and sometimes we simply don’t know, and we overestimate what we can do, or we underestimate the difficulties. I think something very human happens there. Imagine a world of perfect objects: It would be terrible. We’d be bored, and it would be soulless. But if you think about what certain people collect, the objects that people care for, they’re not necessarily the perfect, or the best functioning objects. Very often they’re old things that are broken or things that matter because something has happened that involves them. You get attached to these kinds of things, you create a bond, as maybe you do with your bicycle or a favorite chair that wobbles.

COGGINS: I wanted to ask you about your career in a large sense. What’s changed since you started working? This could be anything from an increasingly design-savvy public to the increasing use of computers.

GRCIC: Uh . . . [pauses, laughs] I think that . . .

COGGINS: These are serious questions, Konstantin! [both laugh]