Jumbo, the design duo who’ve turned dumbing down into an art form

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Do you feel like you’ve seen it all before? Aren’t you desperate for something new? New York-based design studio Jumbo – founded by Justin Donnelly (44) and Monling Lee (41) in 2018 – are creating it right now for you. Their work is smart, witty, fresh and what they self-proclaim and celebrate as “dumb”. It’s also totally modern. 

The pair first crossed paths when they were studying architecture at the University of Maryland, but they didn’t bond until they started hanging out in New York, after being introduced by a mutual friend. “I remember we were both dissatisfied with our respective day jobs,” says Lee. “We went to the annual ICFF (the International Contemporary Furniture Fair), and we were surprised by all the similar things we liked, which were colourful and cute.” 

Finding in each other a kindred spirit they joined forces: “When we first started, we worked with an illustrator to create an emoji of every piece we had designed,” recalls Donnelly. “We won’t do anything that can’t be turned into an emoji. We want to make things as reductive as possible.” The vibrant sheen on a Jumbo object invites comparisons with pop artists more than their design peers (the chocolate, apple and molten cherry-style vases they made in 2019 have definite echoes of Jeff Koons), but they are also creating a new idea of what furniture can look like. Their tubular-steel chairs and matching lamps are chic and deliberately naive. Recent prototypes have included a leaning set of bookshelves that look like a supersized ice-cube tray, and a chair warped from a single piece of neoprene material that looks like deranged origami.

Food is a recurrent theme – the Fortune chair, produced by Heller, is based on the shape of a fortune cookie, and their Pool Pasta, debuted at the Standard Hotel in Miami for the city’s Art Basel event in 2022, consists of a series of inflatable pasta-shaped floats, all in a convincing durum wheat colour. No one needs to see a floating pink flamingo on social media ever again, but someone lounging on a piece of ravioli? That’s properly funny. And it might make you genuinely hungry.

“We are both obsessed with food,” says Donnelly. “It’s about making emotionally reflective design. It can trigger happiness and nostalgia. Even the colour or texture of a certain food can remind you of something and, again, it’s about making something as reductive as possible.” Current concepts include ornamental glass pieces that look like caramel in mid-pour, and butter melting in a frying pan.

A lot of research and development goes into the Jumbo product. “We created a series of tubular-steel pieces before we were even established as a studio,” says Lee. “The first prototype was made with piping that weighed a ton, which is usually used for boilers in basements. It was painstaking.” For what became the Neotenic Collection (a chair and lamp that appear as though tied in a knot) they explored materials that “we could make super-glossy and mimic the depth of colour of automobile body paint”.

The couple see New York City as part of the Jumbo DNA. “The city is full of trash,” says Donnelly. “It’s part of the culture. It contaminates you and seeps into your psyche. We started to see beauty in that. The Dumb Chair and Dumber Bench that we first made for Alexander Wang stores are both based on the mattress toppers that you see abandoned outside apartment buildings.” Both of those black-sprayed high-density rubberised-foam designs feel punk. They are calculatedly unsophisticated – the kind of thing that might end up distressed and held together with duct tape in an East Village dive bar. As usual, there’s more to the designs than initially meets the eye. “We experimented with the density of foam to get the right squish,” says Lee. “Where the foam buckles, that crystallises the kinetic qualities.”

One of the things that makes Jumbo so current is that the work is as much about memes as emojis. And while their hyper-reductive pieces look like they could have been rendered by AI, they don’t use it much at all. Their 2023 wooden Foldont chair deals directly with their feelings about the technology. It has a digital simplicity, and looks like it should fold with ease, but no elements move, and it weighs more than 50lbs. It’s a heavy, physical statement. “We wanted to make a real meme chair,” says Lee. “It’s very easy to understand by the way it looks and what it’s called. The emoji and name bring an immediate emotional association”

Their output is often socio-political, but it’s also always humorous. The 2023 Snow Fence Chair looks like it has been made out of the lightweight flexible material that was omnipresent in New York to segregate outdoor dining patios during the pandemic, but has somehow been frozen into a powder-coated steel. Then there is the Barricade Chair, first shown at the Emma Scully Gallery in 2022. At first glance, it could be a piece of pop-yellow street furniture; a bench suitable for a new city park, but the yellow bars of the barricades recall news footage of the 2020 BLM civil uprising, the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol building, and the demonstrations against the repeal of abortion rights in the States. What is standard-issue barricading, aligned with dystopian times, has been memed into a piece of expensive furniture. “I’ve been fascinated by Jumbo’s work for quite a while,” says Emma Scully. “Justin and Monling masterfully navigate the complex interplay between completed pieces and their digital representations – one of the most pressing conceptual challenges in contemporary design. Their work feels like a rendering brought to life, seamlessly blurring the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds.”

Other designers have worked in the medium of the meme before, notably Gaetano Pesce, who created two versions of the Manhattan skyline in sofa form in 1980. The pair are fans of the late Italian radical. “It’s harder to put a Pesce chair in your house than some chairs,” says Donnelly. “We don’t create things with a view to luxurious homes. I am bored with high-end interior design.”

Likewise, they are inspired by the works of Swiss designer Ubald Klug, whose 1973 curved Terrazza sofa was based on the concept of a layered mountain range, which has been compared repeatedly online to a poop emoji. Both Donnelly and Lee find it amusing. “A large part of our practice is architecture that doesn’t go on the Jumbo website,” says Donnelly, “and that includes a large wastewater treatment plant in Washington DC. But you know… talking about a building that processes shit seems weird next to what we are doing with Jumbo.”

Donnelly and Lee demonstrate a confidence that could put them among the most influential designers of their generation. And while they aren’t making much that’s obviously commercial at present, they mean business. “We take ourselves so seriously, it’s ludicrous,” says Donnelly. “When we talk about dumbness, it’s a philosophical position. We think of it as a virtue. I am so sorry they made a Barbie movie of Barbie, because Ken was a reference of ours for years. He’s so dumb. We think there is an inherent desire associated with things that are glossy and slick. We are often called maximalists, which we don’t like. We are part of a narrative arc of minimalism – an offshoot where we are thickening the line and making things childlike.” 

Of course, this goes way beyond aesthetics: “We aren’t just running around making colourful stuff we like, it’s about getting away from tectonics [an artistic construction] and complexity, and creating squished forms that have an emotional effect,” says Donnelly. “We are about the science of effect.” And, as is apparent, taking all those cultural references and doing something surprising and totally new with them.