The seeds for Brian Alexander’s approach to industrial design were planted early, whether by genetics or circumstance. He was born into a farm family in rural Illinois. His father came from a family with a technical bent, so the farm’s machine shop was more than a practical feature. Brian’s mother was an illustrator, whose second-floor studio was filled with drawing tables and Rapidograph pens.
Brian acknowledges that in some ways the farm was “bleak,” but at the same time it nurtured resourcefulness and a sense of possibility. When you’re on a farm and the equipment must keep running, “everyone was involved, everyone was expected to think and problem-solve. What you didn’t know, you had to figure out,” Brian says. “We had time, space, and not a ton of means.”
Art became a path into the world; Brian gained college entrance on the strength of his portfolio. From the start, though, he has not recognized a line between fine art, craft, and industrial design. Jeff Reuschel, a colleague during Brian’s tenure in product design at Haworth, explained that “We had some industrial designers who were very good sculptors, and we had some who were good at electrical systems. Brian could do both; his work with engineers was good because he was right with them.” That fits with his formative experiences, when Brian “made a crazy number of things. I had intimacy with the materials.”
“Brian’s aperture is open all the way. He can attain a level of expertise on anything he wants,” Jeff adds. At the same time, though, “What puts him in a different category is humility. His mind is open all the time. He doesn’t own his ideas like most designers; he will readily accept and metabolize ideas that come from all different places.”
A colleague at Herman Miller, Gary Smith, describes Brian’s approach as “hyper-developed observationalism. He observes what is conscious and unconscious. He decides to see what the rest of us decide to pass over. Ninety-nine percent of us would see a keyboard; Brian would see which keys have not been used. He’s looking for the truth of the experience, the truth of the interactions.”
This blend of curiosity, humility, and sense of possibility has informed a varied career. Following his corporate stints, Brian has led an independent studio that has changed names and identities over 25 years, as one thing led to another: “Everything has its own gravity and at the same time is completely intertwined,” he says. Beyond product design, he has worked in public art, film, video, sound, and performance. He holds 28 patents and has works in the permanent collections of MOMA NY, Cooper Hewitt, and the Smithsonian Design Museum.
