Norman Potter

Norman Potter (17 April 1923 – 22 November 1995) was a cabinetmaker, political dissident, poet and author of What is a Designer?^[1][2]

Life[]

By trade, Potter was a cabinetmaker and designer, a minimalist decades before the term became fashionable. He was a Christian anarchist and was imprisoned several times for his political actions.^[1] In 1949, he set up a workshop at Corsham in Wiltshire that produced modern furniture. In the late 1950s, Potter attained a full-time position teaching design at the Royal College of Art. In 1964, Potter, along with several colleagues, established a Construction School at the in Bristol. Potter sustained his political activism through this period, joining the student revolts of 1968. It was also in 1968 that Potter wrote What is a designer. A little over twenty years later, he followed up with Models & Constructs in 1990. Potter died of a heart attack in 1995 while bicycling in Falmouth.^[3]

Books by Potter[]

"The first thing to learn about the deep structure of modern design is that it is relation-seeking and pleasurably so."

— Norman Potter, What is a designer, p.9

• What is a designer: things, places, messages. London: Hyphen Press, 2002. (ISBN 978-0-907259-16-9)
• Models & Constructs: margin notes to a design culture. London: Hyphen Press, 1990. (ISBN 978-0-907259-04-6)

In the late 1960s Potter taught at Chesterfield College of Art and Design and had a great effect on their Environmental Design where he showed that the ability to write reports and be creative with a typewriter was just as important as drawing and design.

Notes[]