Form and Function: Mark Newson and the Art of Product Design

This week, the Lockheed Lounge by Australian designer Marc Newson has retained its title as the world’s most expensive design object, after fetching £2,434,500 in a sale at auction house Phillips in London.

Newson’s aluminium and fiberglass chaise longue, designed in 1990, was first brought to fame when Madonna reclined in it in the video for her 1993 single “Rain”. The origins of the chair, however, date back to 1986, when Newson showed an early version of it at Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley Gallery.

“I was designing furniture as sculpture at the beginning of my career,” Newson says. Since his beginnings in the early 1980s, when he first started creating sculptural furniture pieces by hand-welding metal, Newson has gone on to design pretty much everything for some of the biggest brands around the world: now a designer for Apple, he still runs his London studio.

Newson’s product design spans fashion, technology and furniture—a deliberately broad array of areas that, ultimately, aligns with his fervent desire to bring style to everyday consumer products.

And working across industries gives Newson a finer appreciation of the creative and technical processes involved in creating vastly different products. “Frankly speaking, the design industry is really pathetic in terms of how it approaches manufacturing and how it brings things to market,” Newson has said in the past, highlighting the fashion industry’s strictly adhered to seasonal schedules as an example of efficient execution.

Newson’s obsession with high quality tools permeates through his simple, but elegant and unobtrusive designs: whether it’s a pen or a pair of glasses.

His latest design? You may have heard of something called the Apple Watch. Available to customers as of last week, the Watch is Apple’s first new product category since the first iPad was introduced more than 4 years ago. Available in Sport, regular and “Edition” editions (the latter ranges in price from $10,000-20,000), the Watch is a triumph of both form and function.

Below, we revisit some of Newson’s most iconic designs, for some of the world’s most iconic brands.