In this Culturalee Innovators feature, we speak with renowned designer Bill Amberg about his Bill Amberg Studio activation at Park Royal Design District during London Design Festival. As one of London’s most dynamic hubs for innovative design, Park Royal provided the perfect backdrop for Amberg’s collaboration with emerging design talent from Kingston University.
He shares how this initiative opens young designers’ eyes to new materials, processes, and people, giving them the chance to engage with wider audiences and envision new possibilities within the world of design and manufacture.
Park Royal Design District is one of the creative hubs for innovative design in London at the moment, and I’m really glad to be part of it. Working with Kingston is an opportunity to let these young designers, many of whom are just entering the world of design and manufacture, see what’s possible. It opens their eyes to new materials, processes, and people, and I hope that by exhibiting in the studio as part of LDF, they get to meet audiences they might not otherwise reach.
It’s a great opportunity for them, and also for us. We’re able to give back some of the skills, love, talent and technologies that we’ve honed over the years, tools they can now take forward in their own careers. It’s also a way of introducing them to leather, and what an extraordinary material it is. It’s a by-product, it’s incredibly versatile, robust, biodegradable and sustainable. When students begin to understand its potential, both from a material and ethical point of view, it opens up all sorts of possibilities for reuse and creative application.
As a studio, we’ve been mixing up the different materials and techniques available to leather-working for the entire time of our existence. We might take something from bookbinding and put it into cabinetry, or something from saddlery and use it in upholstery. These are all ways of utilising an extraordinary material and giving it a new opportunity, a new breadth, a new dynamism, and introducing it to a new audience.
Working with Kingston has been about really showing the students what’s possible – how you can take a material that was perhaps originally designed for shoe soles, and use it to produce a piece of furniture. A big part of it was just showing them leathers they’d never seen before. There is so much variety in leather, just as much as there is in wood, for instance, and there are so many techniques available that allow you to use the material in all sorts of different ways. I think just introducing them to that range was enough to open them up to the possibilities, and that’s super exciting.
The Leathersellers’ Foundation have been brilliant in collecting surplus leathers and waste from factories, and making them available to students. I introduced a lot of vegetable-tanned and moulding leathers to the group at Kingston, and that proved to be really inspirational. I don’t think they’d even considered using that sort of material before and now, all of them are making really beautiful objects out of something that would otherwise have gone to waste. It’s a perfect opportunity to reuse, recycle and repurpose materials in a way that feels both exciting and responsible.
Find out more about Bill Amberg Studio here.
