Morrison may occasionally apply a woodgrain finish to a plastic object out of a sense of slight devilment, but what AWWW tells you is that he set up his stall in the 1980s, decided what he was going to do, and then quietly carried on doing it. His work than had an astringent quality: it was the grapefruit sorbet that cleansed the palate of greasy PoMo deposits. When he started, the fashion was the way over-the-top style called Memphis. His style was so different, so resolutely non-signature, so un-look-at-me, that everybody looked. Actually he did give his approach a name, too, at first: Utilism. These days, the name Morrison is enough. Everyone knows what it stands for. And no, he says, he still does not have his signature displayed on any product.
"Memphis was a lucky break for me because it was so different from anything I would ever have wanted to do," he says. "It was a natural thing to react against. I could only do what I do anyway - it was just fortunate for me that it was such a juicy opposite. That whole period was really so overdone. So it was my good luck that what I was doing was seen as refreshing. If there'd already been ten years of that sort of thing, I'd have been in trouble."
The studio, on the top floor of a Clerkenwell converted factory complex stuffed with architecture, design and media types, is big, light and very spacious. It's roughly divided into three: a slightly messy workshoppy and kitchen bit (Jasper sighs resignedly on finding there is no milk to put in the tea) - the main studio section where the staff - four or six of them, depending on circumstances - sit at computers placed on beefy timber tables, and then Jasper's own office at one end. All the spaces flow into each other, with storage forming the divisions. Music plays: today it has a mid-Seventies bluesy feel to it. Jasper's dressed in scruffy light trousers and a zip-up black top and smokes an unfamiliar brand of cigarettes that looks as if it was picked up on a trip somewhere, probably for the sake of the packaging graphics.
We sit on his Magis gas-injection plastic chairs - prototypes for additions to the range are scattered around. As is a collection of toasters - Jasper's moving into electrical goods. He's also designing a bicycle - his second-ever vehicle, after the trams for Hanover. A utility car project was in the offing for a while, but went away again. The clients for these new projects cannot be named. Morrison recounts all this dispassionately: it seems that, for him, no one project is any more or less important than another. But there's one thing he likes doing above all: designing for mass production. He's a designer, not a craftsman, he says. One-off commissions are of little interest. Chairs popping off a production line every three seconds are much more like it.
He's teaching again, now, at the Royal College. Now that furniture and product design are treated as one discipline there, he's a lot happier. And besides, Ron Arad asked him. That's the Ron Arad with whom he shared the inaugural and somewhat damp-squibbish Perrier-Jouet design prize. He can't find much to say about that prize, but he shows me the trophy: a big hinged wooden box with a giant fake bottle of champagne in it, on a plinth. He raises an eyebrow eloquently, and drops the hideous object back in the box. There's nothing more to say, really.
Morrison is Morrison: so understated as to be almost silent. The Prime Minister of Tamil Nadu is not going to take over. A World Without Words is as relevant today as ever. So - is he going to continue returning to it, tinkering with it ever so slightly, taking out X and putting in Y? The response is pure Morrison. "It depends how many new formats emerge. If digital formats survive, this may be the end of the line. Having said that, it's very easy to make changes now..."
"A World Without Words" is at the Design Museum from May 11 to June 30.
