Designer Dakota Jackson received the Boston Architectural College Lifetime Achievement Award on 10 April, 2010 in Boston’s South End before a packed audience of designers and design enthusiasts. The award was presented by B.A.C. President, Ted Landsmark. As part of the ceremony Jackson spoke passionately about many diverse aspects of design including architecture, furniture design, interiors, landscape, lighting, and light. Throughout the talk he peppered his points with anecdotes of his own life and experience.
This interview, prompted by some of the thoughts and ideas expressed in the talk, focuses primarily on his work.
G H D
Let’s start with you. You mentioned mainstream and avant-garde a number of times in your Boston talk. Is Dakota Jackson currently part of the avant-garde? Is the avant-garde where the future resides for you?
D J
The avant-garde refers to subcultures, someone emerging from a counter culture. Designers are always looking to the next steps, to settle into a methodology, something they can call their own. They’re trying to find their own direction. They’re also thinking about what will work in the marketplace. I have to say that I march to a different rhythm in that I maintain my own aesthetic and ideology. I’m concerned with what I want to create and not what’s necessarily mainstream.
G H D
How do you distinguish between the goals, values, ideals of Dakota Jackson, the individual, and Dakota Jackson, the firm? Isn’t it true that you wanted to be an industrialist and create a community?
D J
I have to say that since the 1970’s the company and I have been pretty much one and the same. The company is an industrial community and it’s one of collaboration. It has changed its form since I started out in that it now has an international scope.
G H D
How does your notion of light influence your design thinking and work?
D J
Light is the universal medium which externalizes an internal experience. I look for inspiration through things like sound, magic, a sense of the infinite. I transform the internal into something external. It’s the notion of trespass, or going beyond oneself. The end product of this process is the consumable, an object, like a piece of furniture, which users make into their own, which they come to possess and onto which they place their own values and importance. They personalize the thing which started out as an idea, a seed. There’s something marvelous in the completion of that whole circle.
G H D
I appreciate your alluding to magic, not only because this goes back to your early life experience, but because it’s been a constant in your work up to this day.
D J
Magic is about a desire to connect to larger forces and the practice incorporates a number of illusionary devices: the illusion of spontaneity, of infinite possibility, of power, of normalcy, and in design—at times—the illusion of function. ♦
Visit Dakota Jackson’s web site.
