Jasper Morrison

Jasper Morrison is one of today’s most influential industrial designers. Born in London, he is renowned for his elegant and quietly humorous style. He has designed everything from a tray-table to a tram system.

Born in London in 1959, Morrison grew up there and in New York, when his advertising executive father was posted in the US. He studied design at Kingston Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. In 1986, a year after graduating from the RCA, Morrison opened his Office for Design in London, and in 200 he opened a second studio in Paris and proceeded to divide his working life between there and London.

He cites his early inspirations as his grandfather’s study – a light, bright room furnished in the modernist style and an Eileen Gray exhibition he saw at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. During his student years, Morrison became interested in the work of modernist pioneers – such as Buckminster Fuller, Gerald Summers, Jean Prouvé and Le Corbusier – that he discovered in the second-hand books he bought and sold to raise extra cash and later turned into A World Without Words. Another inspiration was the flamboyant furniture he saw at the Memphis movement’s first exhibition in Milan in 1981. Morrison later described the experience as: “Just fantastic. Here was proof that none of the old design rules mattered any more.”