Two stories dominate design right now, and I don’t buy either of them.
The first says: keep the modernist project going. Clean, rational, industrial, honest. Let me be precise about what I’m claiming, because “modernism is dead” is not it. Industrial modernism works — it’s what makes stable, affordable, repeatable objects possible, and it isn’t going anywhere. What’s finished is modernism as a frontier. Bending steel tube was radical in 1925 because industry was new territory and designers were needed to claim it. A century later, industrial capability is the default condition of the material world. It advances on its own, without designers. Another clean, rational object isn’t a contribution anymore. It’s a re-enactment.
The second story is the reaction: back to craft. Workshops, material experiments, gallery editions. I built my own brand inside this turn, so I know its failure mode from the inside. Craft becomes a mood board. Material becomes a surface effect. Process becomes the marketing copy. The objects drift away from use and toward being collectible images. I’ve watched it happen around me, and sometimes in my own work.
So one direction is finished as a frontier, and the other keeps sliding into nostalgia. What’s left?
What’s left is the space between, and it’s wide open. Stop treating industry and craft as camps. Treat them as one toolbox.
In practice that changes a few things. Industry stops being the enemy and becomes a palette — precision processes used for qualities other than uniformity. Craft stops being decoration and becomes capability — the workshop’s judgment used where machines have none, not where the brochure needs warmth. Material stops being a skin and becomes the argument: chosen for how it behaves in a process, not how it photographs after one. And quantity becomes a design decision. One piece, twelve, four hundred — each has its own logic. Don’t inherit the number from your sales channel.
Concretely, because this shouldn’t stay abstract: I’ve put hand-formed glass next to mirror-polished industrial steel and let the two temperaments argue. I’ve used PVD — a coating developed for drill bits — as a colour palette. I’ve had a pattern-maker spend a week carving a mould that will only ever cast one piece. In each case the industrial process wasn’t there to make things uniform, and the craft wasn’t there to make things warm. Each was used where it’s strongest, for a quality the other can’t reach.
And there’s a reason this territory is reachable now, rather than just nice to write about: industry itself has opened at the small end. The same ecosystem that was built for volume now quotes one piece, ten pieces, a custom colour at twenty-five kilos. The wall between workshop scale and industrial process is thinner than it has ever been. The space between the two stories isn’t a theory — it has suppliers, and they answer email on Tuesday.
None of this produces a recognisable style, which is probably why it gets less attention than machine minimalism or craft romanticism. What it produces is better: objects where how it was made and why it exists are the same answer.
That’s where I work now. Not back to the factory. Not back to the workshop. Forward, with both.