TB:  I was more influenced by what was happening in the streets, but I was also affected by the get-up-and-go attitude of the YBAs. A friend, Sarah Staton, had a mobile guerilla shop called SupaStore that showed artists' multiples. She had seen some things that I had made for my RCA degree show and asked me to contribute. SupaStore convinced me that you don't need much to get started — your space can be anywhere as long as you have an interesting idea and a good mailing list. That attitude influenced me the most.

TB:  The Rough-and-Ready series arose from a personal feeling. I had just left college and was out on my own. I had no money, but I had a fantastic workshop in the back streets of London. The design magazines I opened and the showrooms I visited all had very slickly produced, glossy plastic Italian furniture. I just couldn't relate to it — even if I could have afforded it, I didn't want to mess with it. I started to make furniture that visualized how I wanted to live. My objects could be eloquent and beautiful, but in no way were they precious.

TB:  Rough-and-Ready was never meant to be a manufacturing project. The economics didn't add up. If I got some wood, a nice blanket, some straps, and some nuts and bolts — about $30 worth of materials — I could make four chairs a day and sell them for about $60 each, meaning a shop would sell each piece for $150 to $200. They didn't look like they were worth that much, so that approach wasn't going to work. Then I thought, I've used shareware and open-source software, and it seemed like a really beautiful idea from the '60s and '70s — this way of sharing things. We now live in a time when information is the most important thing — that's what I wanted to say with this collection.

If you need a chair, you can go to a showroom and buy one — be a consumer — but that shouldn't be an automatic decision; you should have the choice of making a chair yourself, and making a good, ergonomic chair isn't easy. I have knowledge of how you can use a little material to make a strong chair. It's nice being able to share that information and to give people a choice.

TB:  I designed the tranSglass collection with my wife, Emma Woffenden. She studied glassmaking at the RCA and had machines for cutting and polishing glass in her workshop. We drank a lot of wine and had a lot of empty bottles, and we began cutting the bottles without any drawings or plans. It was a hands-on project using discarded materials. We made a set of prototypes that still serve as models for unlimited editions.

tranSglass is also a humanitarian project. The collection is now produced in a workshop that we established in Guatemala City, where we trained a number of young people to cut and polish glass and to maintain the machines. The situation in which the objects are made and the power of production are equally important to the fact that the products are recycled.

We worked together with Aid to Artisans to develop that workshop, and we now have 23 people employed. That's 23 families whose lives have changed. These are people who would have otherwise been living off rubbish piles collecting refuse to wash and try to sell.

We made deals with bars, restaurants, and hotels to keep the clean empty bottles for us. A truck collects the bottles instead of people gathering them at the dump, so people have no reason to live there. They now have good jobs, their children go to school, and if they're ill, they can go see a doctor. This is what production can mean; it can change things locally with a product that's available globally.

TB:  The inspiration was twofold. One was that, after the birth of my daughter, I felt a need to restate my way of living. You spend more time at home during a baby's first year, and so I wanted to create a loving space around her, like a nest.

I also became interested in design history, particularly the period before the Industrial Revolution. Having gone through art schools in Holland and London, I was educated in a very modernist tradition. That automatically precludes ornament, and the reason isn't being questioned at the moment. We live in a world that gets more and more neutral and bland everyday — that's not an environment I want to inhabit.

TB:  When I began my practice, I hand-embroidered chairs as a way of developing my sensibility and attitude toward decoration, and I also felt strongly that things should not be made in the same way that they have been for years.

Now, it's amazing that machines and factories are run by computers, which allows for a completely different manufacturing process. For example, a silver royal table centerpiece in the Victoria and Albert Museum may have taken a skilled craftsperson a year to make. Today, machines can make similar objects in half an hour — and they can be affordable.

New technology can be used to express new aesthetics, as with my paper Wednesday Light and my etched-metal Garland Light. There's no way you could hand-make the Garland Light — definitely not in any volume or at an affordable price. It's something of our time that would have been impossible to do ten years ago.

TB:  It's very important. It's good to experiment, but I always consider the functionality of my work. You should be able to sit on a chair, and if it's a desk chair, it should be comfortable for eight hours a day. Otherwise, it's just not a good desk chair.

TB:  Swarovski saw that people weren't buying crystal chandeliers — they had a bad image and hung in boring hotels and banks — so they commissioned different designers to reinvent the crystal chandelier. For me, that meant bringing back a sense of romance. I became obsessed with the materials — I've always liked working with glass, but crystal is even more brilliant. It's like sculpting with pure light.

We later made another crystal chandelier, Ice Branch, and created a large, permanent installation at the Swarovski Crystal Gallery in Innsbruck of a winter landscape made from crystal, representing narrative scenes loosely based on fairy tales, stories, and films.

TB:  My studio has a very organic feeling. It's an old factory building. Inside, we've built loft spaces. On the tables, there are computers, a soldering iron, and a pot of resin. Something might start as a computer drawing, get embroidered, and get resin poured over it to see what happens.

TB:  I was completely involved in the making of the book. I worked with Graphic Thought Facility's Paul Neale, a graphic designer I've known for a long time, and photographers Angela Moore and Annabel Elston. When we spoke seriously about making a book, I was certain that I wanted to work with these people.

It was Paul's idea to use the binding cloth on the outside of the cover. I did all of the art direction for the photography, both in the studio and in the nearby forest. I'm not the kind of designer that art directs from a distance.

I hope the book conveys a very positive image. I truly believe design is a cultural activity — it helps us shape the world the way we want it to be. I hope to create a more exciting and romantic world around me.

TB:  There are several things underway. We're doing a big project with Artecnica, working with different communities in South America to produce a range of kitchenware and tableware — clay pans in Columbia, leather goods in Argentina, and woodworks in Guatemala. We now have a policy that we will spend a quarter of our time working on humanitarian projects, which is something very important to me.

We're also doing our first architectural project — the design of two buildings for a spa in Shanghai. It's a combination of finding ecological ways of building and using crafts in the building process.

TB:  I think that I've achieved that dream now.