EO

Have you always loved working with your hands?

MN

I grew up in a single parent household and spent a lot of time with my grandparents. Because my mother was pretty young when she had me, my uncle, who was probably six or seven years younger than my mother, was just a teenager. By the time I was seven or eight and became interested in making things, he was already plotting up cars and messing around with building things in the garage. In Australia, the garage is sort of an important place, it’s not just a place to park cars, but often a kind of makeshift workshop. My grandfather was always there fixing stuff as well. He was kind of obsessive about it. His motto was, “If you want to do something properly, do it yourself.” I grew up around these two figures, my grandfather and my uncle, making and building things in the garage.

In Australia, we used to have these things, in the US I think they’re called soap boxes, that are vehicles we made by attaching four wheels to a frame with a rope tied in the front. We rolled them down hills. I was obsessed with making these things. At one point my grandfather worked in a department store and would come back with wheels from lawnmowers and other shit like that. I’d graft them onto these really poorly made vehicles I’d constructed. That was my earliest memory of making stuff, of being exposed to tools. I’m not talking elaborate tools. I’m talking hammers, nails, saws, basic stuff. I was young, but I developed a serious appetite for making things. That impulse was also self-serving in the sense that we weren’t massively wealthy. If I wanted something, I had to build it. I wasn’t going to get it any other way. I guess that’s sort of my entry into the world of design, although I didn’t know that it was called design.

For me, it was all about finding solutions from a very early age. Whereas my other friends’ parents could afford to go and buy them anything, mine couldn’t. I had to make what I wanted and cobble things together. It was a practical and immediate solution. Interestingly, design for me now is exactly that. It’s still problem solving. A client might come to me and say “Well, we’ve got this thing, we want you to do it.” Imagine it’s Louis Vuitton and they’re making suitcases. Well, except they already know how to make suitcases really well. And there’s a million people at Louis Vuitton who can do what I do, but for some reason they come to me.

EO

The few different series you do with LV is amazing.

MN

Thanks. I do a lot for them—the cabinet luggage, the normal luggage—that’s mostly just mass production. Well, luxury mass production. [Laughs.] Which really is mass production. They don’t like to call it that, but that’s what it is...

EO

What’s your relationship to language? I’ve watched videos of you describing your work and you have such a compelling way of describing things.

MN

That’s a really interesting observation. You are probably the first and only person that’s ever said that to me. I’ve never considered myself a person that’s particularly good with language. I have to confess: as a kid, I didn’t read that much. My childhood was mostly about making things with my hands. While other kids were reading, I was tinkering, or building, or figuring things out. Or doing the opposite of making: dissecting things, or pulling things to pieces.

When I was young, my uncle very proudly gave me a Timex wristwatch. I remember it intensely. It was very cool because it had a black dial. In those days, watches were often pretty generic and all had white dials. I thought it was really cool to have a black dial watch because it looked like a diving watch. The first thing I did when I got it was pull it to pieces, which horrified everyone. [Laughs.] I ripped it to pieces and rebuilt it into a different casing, which I made out of a piece of plexiglass.

EO

[Laughs.]

MN

Anyways, it’s not that I disliked reading, but I wasn’t great at school. I didn’t excel at anything except art, which was the only thing that felt close to what I wanted to do. When I was growing up in Australia there wasn’t even a subject that was like design. There was something called technical drawing, which is about as close as it got. Technical drawing was really, really dry, and just involved learning how to draw very precisely which, actually, in retrospect, I would’ve loved. I didn’t do it, though, because you could either do that or you make art. I do find that as I have gotten older, language has become more and more important, especially when writing.

EO

Are you writing prior to sculpting? How do your ideas come to you?

MN

Yeah, I do write notes to myself, and I’ve always had a sketchbook. I generally tend to go through one sketchbook every year. For me, drawing involves a combination of words and doodling. Occasionally, maybe more so previously, I would physically design things. Now, it’s much more text based. It’s manual. It’s writing stuff down…I love using pens.

EO

When did you feel that you had developed a personal and consistent visual language?

MN

That’s a good question. It’s really hard for me to say. I’d like to think that it only becomes clearer and clearer. Early in my career, I thought a lot about formulating my own design language that was legible as a form to me. It’s funny you refer to style as a “language.” I make and design things, yes, but I think in words. It’s always been really important to me that I establish a visual language that’s not only recognizable by my audience, but also me, because it’s helpful when I’m joining the dots between all my different work.

If you see design as a kind of a problem solving exercise, which I do, then all of the things that you’ve done in the past, all of these design cues that you’ve created, are all sort of steps. It’s like populating a kind of a map. Gradually, the map becomes more and more populated with ideas, design cues, and little idiosyncrasies. Each time you work it becomes easier because you populate more of the map. And so when you ask yourself, “How would I address that?,” or, ”How would I solve that?,” or, “How would I approach that?,” you can refer back to something that you’ve done before. It may be that I’m thinking about a Louis Vuitton bag and I refer back to something I did with Nike, for example. Most people might think, “What do sneakers have to do with luggage?” But then you realize, “Well, actually, they have got a lot to do with each other because they’re both touching the ground all of the time.”

EO

You have to think a lot about durability in both cases.

MN

Totally. The experience I had working with Nike really helped me, it populated a part of the map that I often revisit. It’s almost like you’re making a dictionary for yourself by building your own vocabulary. Sometimes it’s almost like I’ve got the dictionary and I’m flipping through it. Not literally, of course, but conceptually or philosophically, for sure.

EO

When you were in school you did a project called “Seating for Six” in 1986. Your most acclaimed piece from the collection is titled LC1. It’s a fiberglass chaise lounge covered in aluminum plating. Were you referencing the chaise in the portrait of Juliette Récamier by David?

MN

Kind of. It’s a really loose reference. I never studied the history of art and design as such. When I finished high school, I couldn’t think of anything worse than going back into an environment where I had to study. I hated exams and the pressure of school. If I was going to do some kind of tertiary education, it was going to have to be something like art school, which seemed like a freer environment. I could have gone to design school, but design school was really tough and, quite honestly, I’m not sure I would’ve been accepted.

But I did get into the art school that I chose to apply to, the Sydney College of the Arts, and decided to attend. Going to school gave me the freedom that I needed to express myself. I really learned a lot about twentieth-century art history, and a little bit about older art history. Jacques Louis David, the artist you’re referring to, was just a kind of an image that I saw in an art textbook. There was something about it, or him, that stuck in my head, and so the lounge I designed is connected to him in that way.

EO

The name also seems loosely based on Le Corbusier’s LC4.

MN

Yes, and a lounge chair. To be 100% honest, I was really obsessed with Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Lina Bo Bardi, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charlotte Perriand, Frances Knoll, and Alvar Aalto. When I was at art school, I was particularly drawn to architects who designed furniture. I didn’t know that Le Corbusier called one of his things, LC4. It’s quite a funny coincidence.

EO

You made that chair when you were around 22 years old?

MN

Yeah, in 1985. At the time, I had an idea of what I wanted it to look like, but I didn’t have the means or the expertise to make it look like that. So it ended up looking, well, like it did. [Laughs.] You have to remember that this was smack dab the middle of postmodernism, so you had the Michael Graves’s and Aldo Rossi’s and Philip Johnson’s of the world doing these crazy, big, and elaborate postmodern buildings while also designing furniture and objects. LC1, and the five other objects that I designed, had very obvious postmodern references. The first one, LC1 lounge chaise, even had a sort of scroll on the back.

EO

It’s almost like you needed to make it, to experience it, and to live with it as an object in order to realize it.

MN

Yes. I think it was Michelangelo that suggested the sculpture exists within the block of marble and all you, the sculptor, are doing is...

EO

…finding it.

MN

Yes, it’s there and you’re just kind of helping it be. It was very much a case of having to let it materialize, standing back, and going, “Hmm, yeah.” It was almost like it sculpted itself.

EO

I love the rubber rise feet you included in the second edition. Where did they come from?

MN

The feet were the result of very pragmatic decisions at the time. I had this visualization of the object being a kind of metallic blob.

EO

You’ve mentioned using mercury, right?

MN

Exactly. When I was at art school, I had some mercury and poured it into my hand. Probably highly toxic, but it kind of rolls around in your hand like a blob. It’s really beautiful. I thought, “Wow, how can I make a seamless metal or aluminum object that resembles this?” Of course, I couldn’t. I could now, but at the time I had absolutely no idea how you would do that. So I thought, “Well, the only way I could do this is by making small pieces and riveting them together.” It ended up taking on an extremely aviation-like quality, which was absolutely not my intention, but rather the result of my means to the end.

EO

The complete title, Lockheed Lounge, alludes to that character. The LC1 lounge chaise looks like an extension of the aviation universe but executed as a design object, and both are nods to the American aviation engineer and businessman, Allan Lockheed.

MN

Yes, but it was only after the fact that I came to that conclusion. Again, my intention was to make this really smooth, beautiful, seamless object, but I couldn’t, so I had to make it out of small bits. When I stood back I realized “Wow, it looks like an airplane,” so that’s where I got the name Lockheed Lounge. It came into my head one day, and it rhymed.

EO

[Laughs.]

MN

But to answer your question about LC1: I got to a point near the feet where I couldn’t hammer the aluminum around the fiberglass shell because the shape was too complicated. I went and bought this rubberized paint, which was a roofing material, and used it to paint the fiberglass feet black. It’s hysterical because I’ve had many museums over the years ask me, “What’s that material? We can’t find it.” I always say, “Good luck, I found it in a hardware store in Australia in the 1980s.”

EO

“Seating for Six” included the Boat Chair, the Insect Chair, the LC1, and the Cone chair. Despite the title, there were only five chairs. What was the fifth?

MN

The Throne Chair, which was a foam version of the LC1. It wasn’t a very exciting piece. I had an idea to do this exhibition, and I became fixated on the title, “Seating for Six,” but that was before I had the final pieces. I backed myself into a corner. Because the show was at Roslyn Oxley, which was, and still is, considered the best gallery in Sydney, I thought I needed to make several pieces for the show to seriously call it an “exhibition.” I ended up making five pieces but it was really only ever about one piece, which would eventually become the Lockheed Lounge. I spent a lot of time on the other pieces, but all of those were secondary. And, in the end, I only sold one piece, LC1.

EO

What did getting an exhibition mean at the time?

MN

Well, after I’d finished art school, I was really unsure if I wanted to pursue a career in design. As I mentioned, I hadn’t studied design, but I’d spent most of my time in art school, at least the last two years, making furniture. Still, since I had come out of art school, I thought of myself as an artist and so I worked in the way that an artist works: by making things and having exhibitions.

I thought I needed to take the next step, so I applied for a grant scheme for young artists sponsored by the Australian state. I think it was called the Craft Council. Everyone said “You’re crazy. Don’t bother trying. You’re too young. You need to be a bit more established.” To everyone’s complete surprise, including mine, I actually got the grant. In order to apply for the grant, you needed to state a purpose. My stated purpose was to have an exhibition. I said, “I want to do this exhibition. I need this amount of money.” I think I asked for 10,000 Australian dollars which was a ton of money for me at the time. I couldn’t believe it when I got the money. I spent every last bit of it, of course, on putting together “Seating for Six.” While I was really lucky to have gotten the money, I still had to find a gallery. Luckily I was able to, but the rub was that the gallery said to me,“Look, we’ve got this slot because some artists canceled. It’s in eight weeks. If you can get it together by then you can do it.” I said, “okay,” and that was that.

I literally worked night and day for those eight weeks and managed to produce all five pieces. I don’t quite know how I did it. I sort of devoted a week and a half to two weeks to each piece. I had a lot of help from various people. Commercially, it was a disaster. I spent all the money and sold one piece. But I sort of ticked all the boxes and the Art Gallery of South Australia bought LC1, which was a big deal at the time.

EO

And then you moved to Tokyo and worked for IDÉE?

MN

I did.

EO

What was that about?

MN

Well, Roslyn Oxley showed “Seating for Six” in 1986. When it closed I was left thinking, “What am I going to do?” There was really no clear path in terms of what direction I should go. I decided that I really enjoyed making furniture. Not office furniture, but something like half sculpture, half furniture, furniture. I had traveled to Japan once in 1983, very briefly to visit family, and I loved it. I thought it was the most fantastically crazy, wild place. Since that moment, I had wanted to go back. In 1987, I did.

Very coincidentally, I met a Japanese guy who had a furniture company called IDÉE. They mostly bought and sold old antique pieces, but also made new things. They had just started working with Philip Starck, who was a big name then. He had just done the Paramount Hotel with Ian Schrager, which was fantastic. But I met this guy, Teruo Kurosaki, in Tokyo under very hysterical, strange circumstances, and he offered me a job. He told me that he was not going to pay me much, but he offered to have some of my designs made to see if he could sell them. Between 1987 and 1990, I traveled back and forth between Tokyo and Sydney while working with him, and eventually ended up staying in Tokyo. He was very fond of me and paid for the production of a bunch of my early pieces. When I say production, I’m talking about a handful of pieces here and a handful of pieces there. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to put together exhibitions. I had a few, I got a bit more press, and it all just started to fall into place. As I got a bit more notoriety, I was able to make the jump to working in Europe, which had always been my dream. At that time, Milan was the hotbed for design. Everyone wanted to work there for the really well known Italian companies, which is what I ended up doing.

EO

I feel like the Embryo Chair and the Super Guppy Lamp could not be more realized as objects. They seem to fully embody your aesthetic and sensibility.

MN

I first made the Embryo Chair in Sydney in the late ’80s when I was working between there and Tokyo. That was my first foray into designing something that could be mass produced. It was fabricated from polyurethane and covered in neoprene fabric. It was a bit of a nod to some of the experiences I’d had with contemporary culture in Australia, which is largely based around surfing, especially by the coastline in Sydney. The Super Guppy Lamp, which I did when I was in Tokyo, was very much influenced by my experiences in art school. While I was studying I’d been exposed to Marcel Duchamp and his concept of the ready made.

I was looking at the street lamps in Tokyo, which were really beautiful, and thought, “How would I design a street lamp? Would it be like that?” The Japanese had, in fact, done it, so I based my design on the Japanese street lamp. It was my attempt at a ready made. And not just in the Duchampian tradition, but also as a kind of readymade reference, an idea that Achille Castiglioni experimented with. He did this fantastic design called Toio that has a car lamp on the end of what looks like a fishing line, but it’s metal. It’s a beautiful object.

EO

It reminds me of the lamp from Pixar that jumps on the ‘I.’ A lot of your objects have an animated quality.

MN

Right, right, right. [Laughs.]

EO

How do you go about naming your designs? Your objects often look like the names you give them.

MN

I’ve always loved naming things. And you’re right. The Embryo Chair clearly looks kind of like an embryo. Super Guppy, I just love that name. I thought it was hysterical. It’s the name of an airplane, actually.

EO

I didn’t know that.

MN

Yeah, and it’s a ridiculous looking plane. It’s basically a pregnant 757.

EO

I can tell that you implicated movement in its design. Even though it’s still, it seems to be moving.

MN

It’s really interesting to have that feedback because yes, now that I look at it, it is kind of dancing.

EO

Or even taking off. When you lift it, it kind of bends over.

MN

Well, there was that literal aircraft reference. You have got to check out that plane. It’s a plane that transports other planes inside of it. It got called the Super Guppy because it looks like that fish with the bulging eyes. I’ve always loved the idea that there can be a playful or lighthearted element to my work. I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to say my work is necessarily witty, but I like the idea that it might be.

EO

It’s 100%, undeniably witty.

MN

Sometimes people look at my work and giggle. I’ve always liked that quality in my work.

EO

I feel like your work is equal parts witty and silly.

MN

Yes, exactly. Those are two emotions or feelings that I’ve always been drawn to. I’m not quite sure why, but I think maybe it has to do with where I grew up. There’s a very healthy kind of irreverence for everything in Australia. For wanting things to be serious, but not too serious.

EO

Serious, but fun.

MN

Absolutely.

EO

There are a few more things I want to talk about.

MN

Go ahead.

EO

You said in an interview for the Harvard Business Review, “The people I have on my small team are technicians who help me. It sounds quite selfish, but my job is not necessarily to nurture younger designers. It’s about creating an environment in which I can enable myself, because at the end of the day, that’s what the clients want. I’ve experimented before with having other designers do things, but clients want to engage with me, and that has become one of the hallmarks of the way I work. In a sense, I’ve backed myself into a little bit of a corner, but that’s the way it is.” What do you think that you meant by that?

MN

Yes, that’s true. My studio, my professional practice, whatever you want to call it, has been the same size for more than 20 years—around 12 and 16 people. I’ve always wanted to keep it like that. There have been many opportunities for it to grow much, much, bigger. But I’ve always been conscious about doing the work myself. I don’t want to find myself in a position where I’m a manager or administrator. In big architectural and design studios, the person in charge of the company still gets the jobs and meets with the clients. They’re there at the beginning, and they’re there at the end. All the fun stuff in the middle, though, that’s being done by other people. I appreciate why that happens. When you want to take on bigger jobs, there’s a moment where you need other people to help. But I’ve always felt that there’s a part of me that works like an artist, and I’ve never been able to divorce that from myself. So yes, maybe I am a bit of a control freak, but I want to do the stuff in the middle.

EO

I think that part of what makes your work so magnetic is that it often seems intimate and hand sculpted. Your hand is so present in all of the things you make, as if you’ve literally sculpted it.

MN

That’s great to hear, because it’s how I want to work. I won’t say that it hasn’t been difficult, because everything tends to grow, and grow, and grow. I just don’t want to find myself running a studio full of people, you know?

EO

Yeah.

MN

Working with my studio is much different than if you went to Damien Hirst’s studio, for example.

EO

Or Jeff Koons’s.

MN

Yeah, Jeff Koons, and most contemporary artists like Murakami, right? There’s an army of people doing stuff and building out their worlds. It’s not that they live in service of them, it’s just that they’re technicians, really. Of course, I can’t say that none of the people in my office aren’t designing stuff. They are. They do come up with ideas, for sure. But, by and large…

EO

…you’re interpreting those ideas and turning them into designs

MN

100%. That’s the part that I’m good at, and that’s the part that I enjoy. And I want to preserve that for myself.

EO

You started a watch company, Ikepod. If I were to write the biography of your life, I feel like that moment completely foreshadows your later work with Apple.

MN

Yeah, it did—without me having any idea that it would. I ended up starting that company with Oliver Ike by accident in 1994. I first met him through the furniture world. He was in Switzerland selling chairs that I designed for an Italian company, Moroso. We got to talking about watches. He’s Swiss, such a cliche. [Laughs.] I said, “I really want to make this watch.” He said, “Well, I can help with production. We can make a batch of them, like one hundred pieces.” One thing led to another…

EO

The first watch you made was the Seaslug?

MN

Yeah. It was never my intention to have a watch company and, as a consequence, I was never fully invested. I was fully invested in designing the watches, but unfortunately managing and operating the company…

EO

…felt too much like admin work. It wasn’t creative enough to keep you interested.

MN

100%. And all of a sudden you’ve got this kind of thing on your hands, which is...

EO

…weirdly, like a time bomb. [Laughs.]

MN

Exactly. It became a commercial enterprise, like running a fashion label. The vast majority of people that do so don’t succeed. It’s really difficult.

EO

What did it feel like when, although Ikepod didn’t pan out, your watch designs evolved into the Apple Watch? Was it like, “Oh, okay. Fuck, this seriously paid off…”

MN

Well, yeah, it was like that. The watch band for example, that’s on every Apple Watch, I designed that way back in 1994. It went from being like the least mass produced watch band in history to the most mass produced watch band in history. Obviously, that felt really good. Jony Ive and I have been great friends since long before he got me involved at Apple. He had thought about watches for a very long time as well, even separate from the context of Apple.

EO

Did he present the Apple Watch as urgent?

MN

Well, the watch has always been, and should continue to be, an incredibly relevant object.

EO

They said watches almost died with phones. [Laughs.]

MN

Exactly. There was a generation of young people who came of age just before the Apple Watch was released who didn’t really know what a watch was. They didn’t wear watches. It almost became forgotten as a product type. And then, with the Apple Watch, it was back in full force.

EO

You made Large pod watch in the 1980s before you started working with Oliver Ike. It was designed with a band to fit over clothing, correct?

MN

Yeah. The pod was completely oversized. One of the reasons it was so big was that I actually couldn’t fabricate it any smaller because of the way that it had these rotating discs. Beyond that, though, I liked the idea that it was big because it became very pop and kind of funny, almost like a fashion statement.

EO

When do you know to trust yourself to carry through with a design as a trope or theme? I have my AirPods Max right here, and the buttons remind me of the buttons from your watch designs. Why did you trust this design language? It seems like you understood the watch conceptually. And then once the design language is formalized there’s this commercial shift into fashion. Aside from being witty, your work is very commercial and fashionable. It's intuitive and smart in that way, but also classy and polished.

MN

There is a whole category of my products that are wearable but exist somewhere between fashion and industrial design. That, for me, is the sweet spot.

EO

Yes, that’s exactly where you live.

MN

It came from when I was studying jewelry and sculpture at the University of Sydney.

EO

You often use the word sculptural when describing objects. Why?

MN

I think that tendency springs from my understanding of art and design as distinct disciplines. I think that what actually makes you a designer is a nuanced understanding of the functionality of art. That’s why you can’t have this massive studio like Koons. People like him are building things that represent other objects and symbols, that signal to different cultures and histories. I’ve always felt that to be a really good designer, or a relevant designer, you’ve got to have an understanding and an appreciation for all aspects of culture: fashion, architecture, art, music, and film, for instance. All of those things for me are really, really important. There are so many designers or architects that I know that have huge issues with the fashion world, for example.

As with other aspects of pop culture, certain designers don’t embrace fashion in any way, shape or form. I’m thinking, “How can that be, this is what surrounds you, right?” You can’t go, “That’s relevant, this works, but that’s not relevant.” No, I say, “All of this is relevant and we can learn a lot from all kinds of things.” Again, fashion is a really interesting case. Design is typically very slow in the way that it progresses. It’s a bit like architecture, in that sense. It takes years to really see change. Fashion, on the other hand, is like, ‘Bang!’ Shows happen several times a year. There’s a lot to be said for the dynamism of fashion, and that’s not to mention music, film, or any other artistic mediums. I think it’s really important to be aware of and to embrace all of these things, all of these aspects of contemporary pop culture.

EO

I feel like they’re all related, if not the same thing.

MN

They are completely linked. When I was younger, only a few decades ago, the idea of these things sort of cross-pollinating, of having something to do with one another, was not a very easy idea for people to grasp.

EO

I understand. I consider myself a generalist, and that’s been my problem in life. I feel like we lived in a specialist’s world up until some years ago, like 2018 maybe.

MN

Yes. I’m kind of a generalist in what I do. Although I design lots of different things…

EO

…you’re applying the language and framework that you’ve developed to every project, regardless of the object.

MN

Yeah. And working like that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily worse at designing one product category as compared to another. I think there’s a perception that to be a generalist you can’t be great at it all. In the world of design, however, I think it’s not only beneficial to be a generalist, but necessary. Otherwise, how can you embrace the full gamut of the fantastic influences out there?