Jack Moore - Product Designer

“A major high street retailer wishes to market a multipurpose, modern style, small coffee table aimed at the first time buyer. The product could include some storage space” - was the design brief given to me in my GCSE Design & Technology class. However the ideas of “multipurpose” and “could include some storage space” didn’t exactly appeal to me. I had to find a way of building the coffee table I wanted to, yet at the same time convince both my teacher and the exam board that I’d done what was asked of me. 

    

This isn’t how I’ve carried on in my short product design career, in fact I've learnt to embrace any brief given to me, but back then I was less mature and a bit more restless to just make “cool stuff”!

    

What I loved the look of at the time was the juxtaposition between the often hard, geometric lines of metal and the very smooth, organic shapes of wood. So I decided to design a table using both of these materials. In essence a cube frame made from metal with a big slab or two of wood on top. In a roundabout way this pretty much sums up the design process for the table, however note the handy “multipurpose” shelf thrown in underneath to keep Mr Tull happy!

    

It’s the sourcing of materials and construction process that is more interesting about this table.

    

I cut and brazed together the metal frame in the school workshop then painstakingly filed and sprayed it up. The wood was sourced from a local timber yard - a small story in itself. The tiny yard about a half an hours drive from my house in the middle of nowhere, and was recommended to me by a family friend. The very friendly staff (all two of them) were obviously not used to visits from 15 year olds looking for bits of wood to make coffee tables from! As we looked around all the kiln dried pieces of wood they had in their main barn the guy could tell that it wasn’t quite what I was looking for, so suggested we go check out a pile behind the sawmill.

    

There we discovered a huge pile of oak, possibly 8ft high. The massive pieces of wood were exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. My dad, the guy from the yard and I proceeded to search through this massive pile with the forklift truck for the next 30 minutes or so and until we found two really nice looking pieces of timber. My dad and I then loaded these pieces into the car and headed over to the timber yard office to find the cost of this small adventure.

  

I turned to my dad asking him how much he thought it would cost us? Both of us had no idea and were a little worried that we may find ourselves with an unintentionally large bill on our hands! To our surprise the owner of the timber yard turned to us to say we could have it all for free! The massive pile of wood that we had looked through was their off-cuts. None of the wood was useful to anyone except as firewood.

    

It appeared that I was the only person who actually wanted this wood and it soon transpired that I often design and make things from stuff people don’t want.