Approaching sirens are the soundtrack of Hackney Road in East London, where designer Benjamin Hubert has set up shop with his agency, Layer. Today, the police are arriving to sort out the whys and wherefores of a collision between a bicycle courier for the app Deliveroo and an Uber: disruptive technologies disrupting the constant flow of traffic through one of the city’s most attractive neighborhoods for tech startups.

Inside the sparsely decorated studio, Layer’s curving, sculptural work holds sway. Hubert-designed chairs for Fritz Hansen are dotted around the breakout area. Prototypes and finished products line walls covered in Layer-designed acoustic dividers—you can’t hear the studio’s seemingly constantly running 3D printers. Hubert is sanguine about the noise that comes with the location.“We were always going to be East London,” he says. “It makes us a desirable location to work in and not just a place of business.” Downstairs was recently taken over by a deejay company and before that there was a place called Hackspace. “You’d look out back and people were making full-scale dinosaurs one day and a Doctor Who TARDIS the next,” he recalls.

It will surprise some to find the 23 staffers of one of the U.K.’s most acclaimed design agencies housed in an off-the-shelf office space in an anonymous warehouse building. But Hubert is far more practical than he is showy. This is a space to work in, not be seen in—a philosophy neatly illustrated by Hubert renaming the agency Layer four years ago just as his brand, BenjaminHubert LTD, was making a splash.

“When your name is over the door, people come to you for your personal sense of style and taste, which is pretty one-dimensional,” he says. “It makes it difficult to get interesting briefs sometimes. It’s just, ‘Do another thing that you like.’”

Layer instead concentrates on what Hubert terms “human-centered design,” which means fewer furniture commissions and more problem-solving projects. This reluctance to simply churn out new chairs led to one of Layer’s simplest yet most celebrated pieces, a donation collection box for U.K. cancer charity Maggie’s. “I said to them, ‘You can probably find some really good chairs on the market,’” he recalls. “I asked what else was a problem. Then we arrived at the charity collection box. We talked to them about digital solutions, but the thing that worked for them as a business was a nicer analog tool.”

“Design can be quite self-indulgent, and I think it’s better to take a step back from the ego. Why not use some of my skills and talent to tackle things that really need it?”
–Benjamin Hubert, designer

Similarly, Layer’s fleet-wide look at Airbus’s economy class may focus on seating, but the studio is considering the whole passenger experience in its work. “We shadowed users through the airport and into the aircraft, capturing all the frustrations you get in economy class,” Hubert says. “Then we worked on new technologies to create a seating experience that could capture data to improve your comfort level. We created prototypes that use a mesh seat—rather than foam—which allows you to vary the tension and shape. We also used lighter materials, thus saving fuel for the airline.”

Ethics and impact rank high on the list of what makes Layer say yes to a job, but Hubert, like his tech-startup neighbors, strongly believes that the financial imperative has to sit alongside those factors. He also sees this as the point where many studios get it wrong in terms of securing an independent longevity.

“I think there are not enough design entrepreneurs in the world,” says Hubert. “If somebody asks me, that’s how I would kind of describe myself. Maybe there are better pure designers, and better entrepreneurs, certainly. But having a blend of those things is critical.”