Scott Jarvie has made a name as an exciting product and furniture designer, with an eye for surprising details – and an appreciation of how beautifully designed products can excite people every day.
“I have always been interested in design. As a child I was always building and making things,” Scott says, crediting his father’s career as an engineer and his mother’s passion for art and graphic design as major early influences on how he saw the world.
Studies at college in Glasgow, then Napier University in Edinburgh, led to a focus on using design to solve problems – how products and furniture interact with people, and can improve their lives, even in small, subtle ways.
In 2008 Scott showed three incredibly inventive pieces of furniture at an exhibition in Milan called Salone Satellite, the Clutch, Wire and One Cut chairs. The Clutch chair consists of 10,000 disposable drinking straws, “inspired by the directional strength of the xylem in trees”, while the One Cut chair consists of a single piece of laminated plywood that has been cut by a water jet then bent.
“Efficient use of materials and approaching design with a sustainable mindset have always been central to my approach,” he adds, noting that this approach still continues in his designs today.
The Clutch chair – which had a companion light, also made from bundled drinking straws – was selected by Zaha Hadid as her Curator’s Choice at Noise Festival 2008.
For Scott, developing any design requires finding “what lies at the heart of the project”.
“I think that sketching and drawing are hugely valuable but I feel the most important element is thinking,” he says, adding that allowing enough time is crucial to properly addressing any project’s challenges. “It is only then that the solutions present themselves.”
His work in recent years has included his own furniture brand Delupo, the Edrington Group which owns The Macallan and Highland Park whiskies, and premium hi-fi company Linn.
However, a humble – yet beautiful designed – dish drainer created for Lakeland is one of the designs he feels most proud of, as “we were able to embed a great deal of innovative functionality in a simple moulded product”.
“Design is what makes us human,” Scott adds. “It is the activity that best defines our species. I don’t think the world would have developed the way it has if cavemen had been accountants.”
Scott was selected by V&A Dundee for the Northern Lights show at the London Design Festival 2016, where he presented a Safe Cabinet which exposes its rotating locking mechanism on its front, and he is also providing mentoring for the winning designer of Scotland’s first Baby Box.
“The V&A Dundee project is something that I have been greatly excited about from the outset,” he adds. “The team behind the project have galvanised the design industry, energised not only the local community in Dundee but the whole country, and started to communicate the value of design in a modern vibrant Scottish economy… and all this before the building is complete!”
For Scott’s commitment to excellence in design, his incredible creativity, and his passion for making ordinary households items – from dish drainers to chairs – extraordinary, we are proud to include him as a V&A Dundee Design Champion.
To find out more, please see Scott’s website.
The V&A Dundee Design Champions are inspirational designers creating high-quality work and helping to enhance people’s lives, or champions of the power of design to improve the world.
We will announce 50 Design Champions in the run-up to the museum opening on Saturday 15 September 2018.
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V&A Dundee’s Design Champions project is working with Dezeen as its media partner.
Dezeen is the world’s most popular and influential architecture and design magazine, with an audience of 2.5 million unique visitors each month.
