The Studio

An obsession
for the feeling.

Almost everything a person touches in a day was designed by someone. Very little of it was designed with that person's actual experience of being alive as the point.

Decisions

The edge is not symmetrical. It was right on paper and wrong in the hand.
The first version of the app was finished, and then built again from nothing. It looked professional. It did not feel like holding anything.
The app has no navigation buttons. You move with your thumb, and the thing you came for keeps the whole screen.
Every action answers with a sound and a small knock against your fingertip. So the hand believes it has touched something solid.
The software comes apart. Any single piece can be replaced without disturbing the others, so what breaks in five years can be mended instead of thrown out.
Timing and consistency decide a meal. The recipe only decides the ingredients. That is not something you can read. You have to stand there while it happens.
The explanations came off this website. What is left is the work, and the decisions behind it.

Method

Slowly, and from the inside.

One

Live with the question

Before anything is drawn we spend real time inside the experience — cooking the meals, keeping the ritual, wearing the garment, living in the room. Research conducted at a distance produces design that stays at a distance.

Field notes, photographs, timings, complaints, small joys. The unglamorous record of what actually happens.

Two

Make it real early

A rough thing you can genuinely use teaches more in a week than a beautiful rendering teaches in a month. We prototype in the material, at full size, as early as we can bear to.

Three

Refine until it disappears

The finished version of a good design is not noticed. It fits so closely to the person that it stops being an object and becomes part of how they move through a day.

This is the longest stage and the one most often skipped. It is where the work is.

Who the work is for

Mostly one life. The app, the house, the week, the clothes, the food began as the studio's own problems, and were built because nobody else was going to. Some of the work is for other people.

The work is published as it matures, so that other people can build on it rather than repeat it. All of it moves at the speed the material allows.