Tom Dixon, OBE, is arguably the UK’s most successful product designer, having turned his hand to everything from restaurants and hotels to teapots, lights, chairs, and candles for major manufacturers such as Cappellini and Vitra. A bass guitarist turned nightclub operator turned performance welder, when he started making rough-hewn “cut and shut” things he also realised he might do it professionally, regardless of having no formal training in design. He has been the creative director of Habitat, revived Artek, and has a number of his designs in the permanent collections of the V&A and MOMA.

Before you worked in design, you were a bass player in a band called Funkapolitan, which had a couple of years of success. You’ve said that realising you didn’t need a qualification to be in a band changed your mindset; you understood that you didn’t need a design qualification to design either. And you don’t. How has that notion shaped your work?

It’s a bit of a post-rationalisation, but if you inspect how the music business works – you learn your own instruments, make your own tunes, book your own gigs, make your own flyers, even press your own records sometimes – you’re creating your own mini business before it gets into the hands of corporations. It’s all the University of Life, but if you look back on the self-belief [it generated], you could think you could design without needing a design degree. Why? Because I’d done it once before with my mates in music. Look to other cultures – Japan, Thailand – and people are much less likely to do something they didn’t actually study to do at school. So I think I might not have done design if I hadn’t done music first.

Do you ever wish you’d have stayed in the band and made a career of that?

Ultimately, I broke my arm in a motorcycle accident and was replaced by a much better session player, who’s a friend of mine. He now plays for Pink Floyd. Being the second bassist in Pink Floyd could be good or bad. But rather than being an ageing rock star, I’d be an ageing designer any day.

When Dixonary, a retrospective of your work, was published, you said that you worried that it suggested you were at the end of your career when you still felt at the beginning…

Well, that’s the beauty of design, really – you can always react to new materials, new technologies. It’s something you apply to something else. It’s not something in itself. The more you know about improving things, engineering things, making them more sellable or less expensive to produce or more sustainable, the more there are new design challenges thrown at you – so there’s always an infinite set of possibilities. Design isn’t a sector, but a magic dust you can apply to anything – a chair, a restaurant, a windmill. And the more I find out about it, the more I want to apply it to other products. I’ve never done any electronics. I’ve only done one building. So there's a lot of potential out there and, for me, it’s always been about the next adventure.