The world doesn’t need more objects. I make objects anyway.
If you take this work seriously, you’ve held both thoughts at once: still drawn to material, proportion, light and structure — while suspecting that one more launch just adds to the pile.
I ran a design brand for years. Fairs, launches, limited editions, press. Some of what we made I still stand behind. Some of it was image first and object second, and I knew it at the time. So this isn’t a lecture. It’s what I’ve worked out since.
Keep the doubt. It asks a better question than “what style should I work in.” It asks: what deserves to be produced?
The easy answer is to blame industry — romanticise the handmade, cast the factory as the villain. That’s lazy. Industrial production is what makes stable, affordable, repairable everyday objects possible at all. Rejecting it is theatre.
The real problem is narrower and harder: low-value production. Material, energy, tooling, freight and human skill spent on objects that are short-lived, interchangeable, and designed mostly to generate an image — a launch, a post, an exhibition slot. A handmade object can be low-value. A limited edition can be waste with better lighting. The label doesn’t decide. The judgment behind the object does.
The other easy answer is the eco-story: recycled material, a line about the planet, guilt resolved. It isn’t resolved. The honest version of responsibility happens before production, in questions that rarely make it into brand copy. Does this product justify being developed at all? Is the structure necessary, or is the complexity only making an effect? Will this detail quietly double the scrap rate? Was the shipping volume designed, or discovered afterwards? Will the object outlast its own novelty?
Every one of those questions is worth more than the word “eco-friendly,” and every one of them is a design decision. Which means you’re not the person who should feel guilty about making things. You’re the person best placed to raise the value of what gets made.
What “deserves” means, concretely
“Higher-value” is easy to say and easy to fake, so here are the tests I actually use on my own projects. Would I still make this if I couldn’t photograph it? Will anyone keep it past its novelty — use it, repair it, move house with it? Is the complexity in the object doing structural work, or generating an image? None of this is a formula. It’s a filter, and it’s embarrassingly hard to pass. Most ideas don’t. That’s the point.
And I’ll name the trap honestly, because pretending it isn’t there is how slogans get written: the economics push the other way. A studio lives on launches. Press runs on novelty. The feed pays for the new, not the good. Telling designers to simply make less is telling them to make less rent. The only workable answer I’ve found is to change what counts as output: one object developed slowly and documented honestly — its dead ends included — carries further than three launched on adrenaline. The making becomes the story, and the story doesn’t expire at the next fair. Slower, yes. But it compounds, and launches don’t.
“Fewer, better things” has become a slogan, and slogans are cheap. The working version is harder: every act of production should correspond to a higher-value object. Not fewer as an aesthetic of restraint — fewer as the consequence of asking, every single time, whether this thing has earned its existence.
I hold my own work to that question. I apply it to other people’s projects too. The ones worth doing tend to have an answer ready.