Projects
Writing
Information
- Introduction
- The Capacity of Form
- Designed Form as Furniture
- The Relational Field of Form
- The Reconciliation of Form and Function
- Complex Form in Harmonization
- Restraint and Richness
Complex Form in Harmonization: Continued - Discerning Proportion
- Reflection on Contemporary Design
2023-2025
- What is Design?
- Problematic Design of Contemporary Era
- The Timeless Good Design
- Reflection on the Role of Design in our Historic Moment
-2023
This era is marked by an unprecedented abundance of information. From new materials to evolving manufacturing methods, from the formal possibilities enabled by these developments to the expanding categories of thought and the systemic frameworks offered by contemporary art and design, the present moment presents an extraordinary multiplicity of options. Yet when such richness lies before us, it may be necessary to ask with caution what is absent within this abundance, and how people in the field of design might continue to pursue a meaningful path forward.
Compared to previous centuries, technological progress has accelerated across many dimensions of human civilization, and design has been deeply shaped by this expansion. Within design and manufacturing, many older technologies have undergone a high degree of refinement. Applications such as plywood and veneer construction, although invented in the last century, have today reached remarkable levels of precision, stability, and systematic development. In Michigan, contract furniture companies such as Herman Miller and associated manufacturers like Davidson Plyforms demonstrate some of the most advanced uses of molded plywood. The pursuit of consistency, standardization, and control in production has reached a highly sophisticated level. Processes once considered difficult or unstable, such as three-dimensional plywood forming from flat sheets, have become reliably achievable. Similar refinement can be observed in techniques such as tube bending and numerous other industrial processes, all of which increasingly prioritize stability, repeatability, and systemic optimization.
At the same time, the emergence of new materials has further expanded the field of design. Bioplastics, recycled materials derived from post-consumer waste, and other experimental materials have entered the mainstream and established a strong foundation for future material exploration. Research into materials has also become increasingly institutionalized. Material ConneXion in New York, for example, maintains a database of more than ten thousand material samples and related studies, offering architects, industrial designers, and other practitioners access to an enormous range of possibilities. Through the study of industrial materials and the availability of such material databases, design is not only offered a greater variety of material choices, but is also increasingly encouraged toward material-driven approaches.
As material research and industrial production continue to expand, sustainability has become one of the most urgent and necessary concerns within design practice. This shift is both understandable and important. Design cannot be separated from questions of sourcing, processing, transportation, lifecycle, waste, and environmental impact. A material choice is no longer only a question of appearance, performance, or cost; it also carries ethical and ecological implications. In this sense, sustainability has helped design become more accountable to the systems that make objects possible.
Yet sustainability becomes more complicated when it is considered through scale. At an industrial scale, sustainable design depends on infrastructure, supply chains, manufacturing capacity, regulation, distribution, and long-term adoption. A material or process may be environmentally promising, but if it cannot move beyond the scale of a prototype, an educational project, or individual studio experiment, its broader environmental effect may remain limited. This does not make such work meaningless. It can still raise questions, test possibilities, and shift awareness. But it does suggest that sustainability in design is not only a matter of intention. It is also a matter of scale, implementation, and the systems through which an idea becomes active in the world.
This distinction creates a more careful question. The issue is not whether sustainability should matter; it should. The question is whether sustainability, when treated as the primary framework through which design is judged, can sometimes obscure other forms of design responsibility. A project may claim environmental value while remaining unresolved in form, use, care, or cultural meaning. Another project may not announce sustainability as its main subject, yet may still embody forms of care through durability, repairability, material respect, long-term use, and the depth of attention given to making.
For this reason, I am interested in returning to auteurism as another primary concern within design. By auteurism, I do not mean self-expression detached from responsibility. I mean the designer’s capacity to hold a position: to make decisions with care, judgment, continuity, and consequence. Auteurism includes the human presence within design—how a designer should choose what to value, what to preserve, what to question, and how to work with material, production, and use over time. In this sense, sustainability is not rejected, but absorbed into a broader field of care. It becomes one part of a designer’s self-aware responsibility rather than the only measure of design value.
If the technological dimension of the present design field is defined by expansion, the conceptual dimension of it is perhaps marked by stagnation. From the perspective of ideas, we appear to inhabit a post-industrial and pre-AI era. Since the Industrial Revolution, a series of major design ideologies and movements have emerged, from modernism and the Arts and Crafts Movement to postmodernism and its later manifestations. Artificial intelligence may eventually reshape society as profoundly as previous technological revolutions. Within design, however, its influence has not yet consolidated into a coherent movement or ideology. Before new design positions have had time to mature into recognizable frameworks, contemporary design appears to evolve less through radical breaks than through the gradual reinterpretation of existing ideas.
Although the present may appear stylistically diverse, much contemporary design still seems to oscillate within the long shadow of modernism and postmodernism. Spirits of minimalism, functionalism, De Stijl, mid-century modernism, Memphis, radical design, deconstructivism, and Droog continue to echo through contemporary practice. Designers remain deeply shaped by these movements and their inherited vocabularies. Even Droog, one of the more recent postmodern tendencies that still feels close to the present, already belongs to the late twentieth century. From within the present moment, it is difficult to know which ideas will later appear truly unprecedented. What can be observed, however, is that many current works remain shaped by inherited vocabularies, even as new technological and material conditions begin to emerge.
One explanation for this condition, as my graduate mentor Scott Klinker has persuasively suggested, lies in the speed and breadth of information exchange made possible by the internet, global transportation systems, and the infrastructure of globalization. Today, people around the world are exposed almost instantly to images, ideas, and knowledge from all over the planet. Under such conditions, locally emerging concepts or early-stage movements are quickly influenced by broader global discourse before they have time to consolidate into more distinct positions. This may lead to two outcomes. In one case, a movement in formation becomes diluted by external influence, loses its urgency, and gradually disappears before reaching maturity. In another, culturally specific and regionally grounded practices begin to gain broader visibility precisely because the contemporary moment has become more capable of recognizing plural voices.
This second tendency is equally important. Localized movements with strong cultural foundations are increasingly entering wider design consciousness, not because they are newly born, but because they are now more legible to a broader audience. The American Studio Craft Movement, represented by figures such as Wendell Castle, and strands of Contemporary African Design, represented by designers such as Nifemi marcus-bello and Jomo Tariku, are long-established practices with deep cultural roots and strong local recognition. What has changed is not their existence, but the conditions of visibility surrounding them. The contemporary moment, in its greater openness, allows such practices to be seen more clearly.
This development also suggests that the boundaries between art, design, and craft are gradually being reconfigured. Some furniture that has been long understood primarily through craft traditions start to be increasingly recognized as a site of design thinking, while design objects are increasingly capable of carrying artistic and cultural meaning beyond conventional utility. In this sense, history behaves like a pendulum. Art, design, and craft have moved at different times from unity to separation and toward renewed convergence, as though cycling through recurring phases. Yet the present moment still appears, in many ways, to be one of fragmentation. Design is often dominated by objective criteria such as sustainability, structural logic, and function. Craft frequently remains focused on process, storytelling, and technical innovation. Art, meanwhile, often positions itself through narrative, critique, and social commentary, operating as a very different kind of intellectual vehicle from the object-based traditions of the past. The three fields continue to overlap, but they also often appear strangely disconnected from one another.
It is within these conditions that the need for integrated thinking becomes increasingly urgent. Much of mainstream design still remains centered on materials, technological application, and the continued repetition of inherited doctrines. These are all important elements of design. The problem, however, arises when they pretend to be sufficient in themselves, when the field loses the capacity to move beyond them. Contemporary design, at its broadest level, often appears less engaged with the kinds of influence that craft and art can bring—qualities that reintroduce human complexity, ambiguity, and interiority into designed things. In their absence, design risks becoming overly dependent on objective systems of justification.
What seems to diminish in such conditions is the designer’s adherence to their own philosophy. In its place emerge systems of thinking grounded in metrics and external validation: environmental criteria, structural performance, ergonomic optimization, and other forms of measurable logic. These are important, but they are not sufficient. Charles and Ray Eames, for instance, certainly cared about materials, ergonomics, and industrial reality, yet what they proposed was never reducible to technical problem-solving alone. Their work was also concerned with ways of living, with relationships between hosting and being hosted, and with a broader sense of what things ought to be. Such aspirations remain deeply human, and in that humanity lies a form of beauty.
At times, the designer must be willing to hold a position of their own. To put the matter somewhat starkly: if artificial intelligence were someday capable of solving every objective design problem—sustainability, structural performance, functional optimization—could one then conclude that design itself had declared its “death”? It will not and should not come to that. What machines cannot replace is the human capacity to invent forms that carry spirit, intention, and inner life. The soul of design, like the soul of art, lies in the distinctly human ability to inscribe thought, feeling, and conviction into things that did not previously exist. It is in such acts of invention that the distinction between the human and the nonhuman becomes most palpable.
Questions of this kind have emerged before, particularly during earlier periods of structural transformation. The Arts and Crafts Movement, for example, arose precisely in response to the conditions produced by industrialization. In every age of systemic change, certain forces become forms of liberation, while others harden into constraints. What matters is whether a culture remains capable of recognizing which conditions are becoming shackles, and which might still open a door.
This is an era on the verge of transformation, and our thought must move ahead of the age in which it is situated.