I’m in Sydney – connecting with the surf, sun and some friends who’ve been travelling round Asia for the last year.

Inbetween sitting on the beach reading books and unsuccessfully battling the Pacific Ocean, I visited the Sydney Powerhouse museum’s Marc Newson exhibition, which showcases the product design career of the London-based Australian.

Based on my limited knowledge of his work, I’d not really been a fan – but the exhibition changed my mind on that and also stirred up some strange emotions about interaction design and practice.

It was revealing to see the chairs, couches, watches, cars and various other objects he’s designed up-close and first-hand; rather than as artfully composed photographs in a glossy design journal. Notably, his later furniture design – the Orgone chair particularly – a topological tour de force; quicksilver curves creating a palpable, tense and perhaps a little threatening enclosed space within itself.

A couple of fawning video interviews with Newson and design-pundits (including the nauseatingly shallow Alice Rawsthorn) dotted around the exhibit did little to shed light on his design philosophy or working practice, other than to identify the cultural influences in his work (Kubrick/2001, Surf/Skate culture, Verner Panton) but did show him to be a designer who’s philosophy is evolving (in fits and starts – riffs on ecological and social responsibility seem at odds with the bespoke Miu-Miu luggage in the boot of his concept-car designs) and who’s work is becoming at once more ambitious/complex, more elegant/simple and more personal.

I really enjoyed the show – I walked out with a changed opinion of Newson’s work, but also with a dark cloud over my head.

It’s the personality of his design – the sheer style he can imbue in each piece that stirred feelings of professional jealousy.

Put aside just for the moment a couple of massive factors – his sheer talent and dogged determination to create something innovative and desirable (I wouldn’t wish for a moment to compare myself to Newson – I’ve never met his little finger, but I dare say I’d have an inferiority complex to the amount of design-mojo in it) and consider what he can do that I/We can’t seem to.

He gets to create a finished thing – a chair, a watch, a car, a bicycle. Ergonomic factors, technical constraints and opportunities combine with design vision to forge an object – that is built, shipped and sold to happy people around the world. Happy people negotiate a dialogue with that object – initially one of desire, then one of use.

That dialogue, that experience is real and satisfying – for the designer and the person experiencing the designers work – far more satisfying than that of the digital/interactive. Despite or perhaps because of the higher degree of connection between the designer and the user.

That’s what I’m jealous of. Making real stuff. Stuff that the basic use and negotiation of – is so instinctive, so second-nature, that the enjoyment of it’s higher qualities is effortless.

But then again, confronted by the ‘ended-ness’ of product – shiny, shrinkwrapped, shelf-stacked straitjacket, do I really feel jealous?

The constraining cathedral of concrete completedness – contrasted against the open-ended, emergent exuberant bazaar of like-it-or-not-open-source-user-centred-user-sabotaged interconnected interactive upside-down, inside-out there-is-no-product-only-process digital design.

Yup. I’m Jealous.