Designer without a label

Thomas Heatherwick's studio is currently the British design world's site of absolute zero - somewhere very cool indeed, the potential of which is not yet fully understood. If it is cool, it is precisely because it is unintentionally so. Heatherwick and his associates do not make compact disc racks and stackable lighting, neither do they design spaces that would sit happily in the pages of Wallpaper*. Their current projects range from Christmas decorations for Boots the Chemist to the development of the world's first all-glass bridge.

Indeed, if anything definite can be said about Thomas Heatherwick and his team, it is that they don't design anything in particular, but that they might design anything in general, so long as they are allowed to approach the project in their own skewed way.

"It is all about seeing the potential," Heatherwick explains, which in his language means never developing a trademark style, or doing the same kind of job twice; "I feel really lucky - you do have to fight not to do the same thing again and again."

Most Londoners' experience of Heatherwick's work will have been in travelling past Harvey Nichols, for whom he created a giant serpentine structure which writhed through the window displays and up the front of the building during London Fashion Week three years ago. But Heatherwick himself genuinely seems to have no sense of hierarchy in his design interests. When we meet at his studio he has been sitting in a traffic jam for 30 minutes and talks to me excitedly about the mysteries of the structure of gridlock and his admiration for the cyclists who whizzed past his window.

He is a powerful and involved talker; far from seeming like a wide-eyed nut job, he gives the impression of being a man with an intimate access to beauty in the world that other people don't bother to see; if he ever considered a career change he would probably find remarkable success in starting a fashionable religious cult.

Given his formal interest in traffic jams and the urban-development nature of some of his current projects, including a new public square in Newcastle and a street-light scheme in Birmingham, it would be natural to assume that Heatherwick's aesthetics tended towards a kind of concrete and steel brutalism.

Actually, he has the kind of taste more commonly associated with eight-year-old girls than laddish 30-year-old designer types. Heatherwick's constructions tend to be pretty and sparkly and mysterious, full of colour and nice squiggly patterns.

For the square in Newcastle he created a new paving surface covered in smooth glass splinters and embedded with fibre-optic cables, so that the whole space is carpeted in glittery blue. He describes an exhibition structure in Glasgow, which he wrapped in 100 kilometres of clingfilm, as looking like "Barbie's hair". He is fantastically un-grown up, which is perhaps what makes his work so exciting.

His most recent project has been to design the V&A's brand.new show, which opens this week. There is the excited light of challenge in his eyes in approaching this modish subject matter. "People come to an exhibition on branding with a lot of expectations, and I felt that it was absolutely essential not to live up to those expectations but to take another slant," he says mischievously. In other words, he refuses to submit to the kind of slick, self-conscious stylishness usually employed when creating a design exhibition.

Heatherwick decided that modern exhibitions couldn't expect people to feel automatically committed to the subject matter; the visitors needed to be seduced by the show before they were expected to read walls of facts and figures. "I always feel a funny guilt in an exhibition because there are all the things that you should read," he says. So rather than greeting the audience with a valley of reading matter, he created a kind of visual foreword.