Super Normal Design #Jasper Morrison

The work of Jasper Morrison, a British designer close to the work of British architects such as Tony Fretton, Caruso St. John or Sergison Bates, was initially an answer to the flamboyant postmodern style of designers such as the Italian Memphis group and so, absolutely indifferent to the needs of everyday life. Morrison, on his side, propose an exhaustive formal depuration that summarises the formal evolution of common objects. A display of his referents, combining anonymous objects and work from renowned authors such as Buckminster Fuller, is compiled in the publication A World without Words.

The most exciting thing for me is how people live and what they live with, and the influence objects have on everyday atmosphere. Jasper Morrison, Looking for Atmosphere, 1999

In 1988 he designed for a Berlin exhibition a room that was called Some New Items for the House, which included plywood walls, chairs and a table with plain and apparently banal shapes. Some other objects early designed by Morrison show his predilection for mass-produced elements instead of singular pieces, e.g. the Flowerpot Table, a glass circular table top on a stack of ceramic pots. In time, Morrison has worked for a wide series of firms, without being stuck to a fixed visual style or a limited palette of materials, which has given birth to such different objects as the Air Chair for Magis, made of gas-injection moulded polypropylene, the Palma cast-iron cookware or the Hannover tram system.

Together with Naoto Fukasawa, his partner at Muji, he has developed the concept Super Normal, shown at the homonymous exhibition and defined as the quality of those objects that we perform in such a natural way that its use is almost instinctive and are part of our ordinary life without being noticed.