![[12-CW&T.jpg]] *Dialectic Episode Che-Wei Wang & Taylor Levy (CW&T) - Iterating Together with Time - is available on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/4matdJ4VqtVACD4XhV8IzL?si=777c2de49a184d0b), [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/12-che-wei-wang-taylor-levy-cw-t-iterating-together-with-time/id1780282402?i=1000700540379), and [YouTube](https://youtu.be/zEtWP1X-HNc). [RSS feed here](https://anchor.fm/s/fda12bf8/podcast/rss). <iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/4matdJ4VqtVACD4XhV8IzL?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="152" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe> <iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *; fullscreen *; clipboard-write" frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;border-radius:10px;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/12-che-wei-wang-taylor-levy-cw-t-iterating-together-with-time/id1780282402?i=1000700540379"></iframe> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zEtWP1X-HNc?si=z7qaTYn4xXr4tXEA" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> # Description Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy are the founders of CW&T ([Website](https://cwandt.com/), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/charliewhiskeytango), [X](https://x.com/cwandt?lang), [TikTok](https://www.tiktok.com/@cwandt)), a Brooklyn-based studio creating products that exist somewhere between art, design, and engineering. The husband-and-wife team met at [NYU ITP](https://tisch.nyu.edu/itp) and shares a background across industrial design, architecture, computer science, film, including time at Pratt Institute and MIT. They won the [2022 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Product Design](https://www.cooperhewitt.org/event/designer-spotlight-cwt-10-20-2022/). They design and manufacture everyday objects including clocks, pens, tools, and other strange objects that challenge our relationship with time, attention, and materiality. Their most recognizable products include the [Pen Type-A](https://cwandt.com/products/pen-type-a?variant=42857379365020),[Pen Type-C](https://cwandt.com/products/pen-type-c?variant=44568256413852) (my favorite), [Time Since Launch](https://cwandt.com/products/time-since-launch?variant=19682206089275) (a one-time-use, 100-year timekeeper), and [Solid State Watch](https://cwandt.com/products/solid-state-watch?variant=34682948190364), a remix of the classic [Casio F-91W](https://www.casio.com/us/watches/casio/product.F-91W-1/). Our conversation explores their fascination with time, their commitment to creating heirloom-quality objects in a disposable world, and how they've built a sustainable creative practice on their own terms. We discuss their prototyping-centered approach, the tension between digital and physical creation, and how they navigate collaboration as partners in life and work. Throughout, Che-Wei and Taylor reveal a philosophy that treats making as its own reward—they create what fascinates them first, trusting that others will connect with their vision. In a world increasingly dominated by disposable products and digital experiences, CW&T offers a refreshing counterpoint: a workshop where physical objects are thoughtfully conceived, meticulously crafted, and built to accompany us through life's journeys. Their work invites us to reconsider our relationship with the objects we use daily and the passage of time itself, offering a refreshing counterpoint to our increasingly digital, ephemeral world. # Timestamps - (00:00): Time: a pattern across CW&T’s careers - (11:21): Time Since Launch: the idea of counting up instead of down, and creating personal epochs - (14:11): "Good design is long-lasting,” Durability of Electric Objects - (19:31): Balancing art, product, and design: CW&T's approach to creating strange (but useful) things - (23:51): First Word vs. Last Word Art: Michael Naimark's essay on innovation - (28:01): Death by consensus: Why Che-Wei left architecture, and the joy of creative collaboration - (32:52): Inspiration, Theory, and Self-Evidence - (38:40): Tools: iPhone world, what makes a great tool, and design that optimizes for joy - (44:21): The Hi-Tec-C pen cartridge and remixing what has come before - (48:01): Making physical objects: a case for prototyping and against rendering - (55:41): CW&T’s beloved products - (53:27): ITP, Electrified Objects, Software in Objects - (56:49): Dream Stem: Generative design, openness to new tools, AI's impact on the creative process, and intuition - (01:07:11): The value of friction, and what's lost and gained in the pursuit of efficiency - (01:09:46): CW&T the brand, contemplating CW&T's legacy and purpose - (01:15:24): Kickstarter, owning your audience, and what it would look like to start today - (01:19:35): Partners in life and work, the tension between merging identities and maintaining individuality - (01:25:02): Growth, explore vs. exploit, and learning, dream collaborators, and more resources - (1:33:56): Lighting round: great teachers, New York City focus & serendipity, creative inspirations, CW&T book, nature and green things, morphology and architecture, “form and force,” a gift for children or grandchildren, what to hang onto, - (01:52:07): Timelessness # Links & References * [Principles \- CW\&T](https://cwandt.com/pages/principles) * [On Life & Design With CW\&T](https://vimeo.com/1058090250) * [All Under One Roof With CW\&T | SSENSE](https://www.ssense.com/en-us/editorial/culture/all-under-one-roof-with-cwt) * [The Clock of the Long Now](https://longnow.org/clock/) * [Counting to a Billion – CW\&T](https://cwandt.com/products/counting-to-a-billion) * [Time \- David Whyte](https://davidwhyte.substack.com/p/time) * [Time Since Launch – CW\&T](https://cwandt.com/products/time-since-launch?variant=19682206089275) * [Defakto Eins Watch](https://www.defakto-watches.com/watches/eins/inkognito/3/) * [Dieter Rams' principle "good design is long-lasting"](https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/dieter-rams-10-timeless-commandments-for-good-design#:~:text=Good%20design%20is%20long%2Dlasting,down%20to%20the%20last%20detail.) * ["First Word Art, Last Word Art" by Michael Naimark](http://www.naimark.net/writing/firstword.html) * [The Wizard of Oz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Oz) * [Tommy by The Who](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK-sRSfiXLY) * [Solid State Watch – CW\&T](https://cwandt.com/products/solid-state-watch?variant=34682948190364) * [Parasite (2019)](https://letterboxd.com/film/parasite-2019/) * [Bach's "The Well-Tempered Clavier"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Tempered_Clavier) * [Víkingur Ólafsson on Rick Rubin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkC1KkCtHhg) * [Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)](https://letterboxd.com/film/eternal-sunshine-of-the-spotless-mind/) * ["Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees" \- biography on Robert Irwin](https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Forgetting-Name-Thing-Sees/dp/0520256093) * [Hi-Tec C Cartridge Pens](https://tokyopenshop.com/collections/hi-tec-c-coleto-series) * [Pen Type-A ® – CW\&T](https://cwandt.com/products/pen-type-a?variant=42857379365020) * [Super Clamp by Manfrotto](https://www.manfrotto.com/us-en/super-photo-clamp-without-stud-aluminium-035/) * [Dream Stem V1 – CW\&T](https://cwandt.com/products/dream-stem-v1) * [Che-Wei Wang (CW\&T) on The new role of the designer in generative design | TNW Conference 2018](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj4uIW7uUNo) * [AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Lee_Sedol) * [Pen Type-C – CW\&T](https://cwandt.com/products/pen-type-c?variant=44568256413852) * [“The Ones” (CW\&T’s favorite products)](https://theones.cwandt.com/) * [MIT Media Lab](https://www.media.mit.edu/) * [Interactive Telecommunications Program (NYU Tisch)](https://tisch.nyu.edu/itp) * [Inside Design at CW\&T by Jonathan Simcoe](https://jdsimcoe.com/inside-design-at-cwandt) * [Morphology Minor \- School of Architecture | Pratt Institute](https://www.pratt.edu/architecture/undergraduate-architecture/morphology-minor/#:~:text=As%20part%20of%20the%20Center,dynamic%20morphology) * [Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language: analysing, mapping and classifying the critical response](https://cityterritoryarchitecture.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40410-017-0073-1) * [Herzog & de Meuron](https://www.herzogdemeuron.com/) * [Haresh Lalvani](https://www.pratt.edu/people/haresh-lalvani/) \- Che-Wei's mentor * [The Overstory \- Richard Powers](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40180098-the-overstory) Dialectic with Jackson Dahl is available on all podcast platforms. [Join the ⁠telegram channel for Dialectic⁠](https://t.me/dialecticpod) [Follow ⁠Dialectic on Twitter⁠](https://x.com/dialecticpod) [Follow Dialectic on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/dialecticpod/) [Subscribe to Dialectic on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@Dialectic) # Transcript **Jackson:** Welcome back to Dialectic. Episode 12 is with Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy, aka, CW&T. CW&T are partners in life and in work and run a studio that creates some of my favorite physical products on the internet. Some of these are incredibly practical, like pens and tools, and others are more abstract or even artistic, most notably attempting to challenge our conceptions and relationship with time. It's worth clicking on some of the links in the description to get a better sense of the types of products they make. But some of my favorites are Pen Type-C, a titanium bookmark pen that I ended up taking with me everywhere; Time Since Launch, a vacuum sealed cylinder with a couple of AA batteries in it that will last about a hundred years, where you pull the pin and it starts counting up from zero. People use this for startups, for weddings, for new children. I actually officiated a wedding in the fall where we pulled a time since launch. And Solid State Watch, which is an amazing remix of the classic Casio F91W cast in resin that I wear most days. They also won the 2022 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for product design. This is a conversation about why they're so fascinated with time, how they think about creating durable products that last as long as they should, and what their process looks like—specifically with a framework built around prototyping. We also talk about CW&T:, the studio, the brand, and the partnership, and what it is like to collaborate with a life partner. I think any creative person has a lot to learn from this conversation, but perhaps, especially those like me, who work primarily in the digital world with bits, with media, with software. I find their approach to be especially compelling with that in mind. This was also my first two person interview and I'm really thrilled with how it came out. And so I hope you enjoy this conversation with Che-Wei and Taylor, aka CW&T. We're here, Che-Wei and Taylor, thank you so much for making time. **Che-Wei:** Thanks for having us. **Taylor:** Welcome to our bedroom. **Jackson:** Thank you so much. I was joking before we turned this on. The benefits of no video is the creative recording spaces you can find yourself in are especially fun. ## [00:02:16] Time: a pattern across CW&T’s careers **Jackson:** I want to start with probably an obvious thing and the thing that seems to be the recurring obsession of so much of both of your work, which is time. And you've been asked about time plenty, but you've said you're on a mission to change our relationship to time. There were a couple of quotes from I think maybe an Ssense interview that I really liked. Taylor, you had said, "Time is our common ground no matter who you are, how much money you have, where you live, what culture you have. All of us humans have time in common. Being on time for somebody is a way of respecting another person. It's a way to connect with the rest of the world that's respectful. There are not always easy opportunities to do that. Sharing time with someone is such a gift." And then Che-Wei, you had said, "It's as close to a universal language that we have. It isn't totally universal. There are people on different calendars, but it's very close." And so my first question is, what, if anything, have you learned about time or if in any way your relationship to time has changed over the course of, I guess now almost two decades thinking about it, making art projects about it, etc. **Che-Wei:** For me, it has definitely shifted twice. I have two distinct shifts in my thinking around how we should be with time. Around 2009 when we were both in school and I was doing a thesis project around timekeeping, my thinking then was I really wanted to just change timekeeping. I came from this place of, I think a lot of people feel like the time pressure. They're like, "I don't want to be surrounded by clocks," or "I don't want to wear a watch anymore because it feels constrained," or "I don't like the feeling of having to check the time all the time." And so that was also my feeling. And so at that point in my life, I was trying to come up with alternate forms of timekeeping. So like the 100 Year Clock, I made some software too that was about looking at your lifetime as a clock versus day to day and a few other things. Or like, "Counting to a Billion" is just a thing that counts to a billion. So just exploring different ways of timekeeping. But then a few years later we were at MIT and I did another thesis on timekeeping. And at that point it kind of in some way did a 180. After studying a bunch of stuff and reading a bunch of papers on how timing works in our brain and talking to some scientists around it, I realized, or my perspective shifted to think about time less as a thing that we try to push away and try to fight and try to remove ourselves from. The kind of "I don't want to have clocks in my life" feeling kind of flipped 180 and I was like, no, actually I want to be super precise with understanding what time is. This language that we all share, however arbitrary it is, it is linked to the way our solar system works. We divide it in an arbitrary increment, but we share it as a common language. And the perspective I had then, which I think I still follow, is that we, a lot of our anxiety or the pressure we feel around time comes from a mismatch of what we think is a time increment versus what it actually is. So an example is like, if I'm walking down the street and I'm talking to my friend and I say, "I'm gonna be there in five minutes," but actually it's not five minutes. It's like you're gonna be there in 10 minutes and you feel like you don't want to disappoint them and your timescale understanding is a little bit off. And so you're overestimating or underestimating. **Jackson:** 10 sounds really bad. Five doesn't sound so bad. **Che-Wei:** Yeah. So there, I think there's a lot of these things, but I think one of the main things that I learned is that, yeah, we just don't have a good internal clock. It's imprecise and it also fluctuates quite a bit based on your mood and based on your situation. And so a bunch of the work I was doing at that point was the opposite. How do you train, or how do you gain a closer, more intimate relationship with timekeeping so that you can live your time in a less anxious world. You have less concerns around time or you have a better understanding of time. And I think I'm still on that kick. I think all the projects that we work on are still kind of about that. Like "Super Local" is also just trying to understand the whole day. So it's making timekeeping devices that have maybe an alternate view, but all in service of trying to form a better and closer relationship to time versus trying to push it away. **Taylor:** I don't know if this necessarily relates to what we do, but I do notice this is a prominent thing in my head all the time and there's no project that really relates to this, but I think often about our kids and how they experience their school year, for example, and I think back to how I experienced the school year when I was their age, and I remember just how long it felt to go through a whole grade level of school. And now as we're watching them do it, it's like a completely different thing. It's so fast for us and I know that everybody always talks about this, but I think about this and I'm like, this is actually a really serious thing. How different our perception of long scales, like long scale to scale of, I'd say a year. That's what I mean by the type of long changes throughout the course of our lives. I know there's theories about this, but it's a pretty prominent thing in my brain these days. To know that someone you're so intimately connected to, such as your kids, are experiencing something so differently than you are, even just that, it's pretty wild. **Che-Wei:** Yeah. And we only get to do it once actually. Like going from slow years to faster years, we only get to go through that experience once, which is both for me exciting but also kind of sad. Like you can't redo that, you can't relive that feeling of time anymore. **Jackson:** It's real in a sense. Like we obviously know the closer you get to mass, the more time dilates and when you're a kid you've experienced less. There's some, it's easy to write it off as just perception but it perception kind of is real. Che-Wei, I think there's something you said or a lot of what you said too reminds me of this poem from a guy named David Whyte and he has a poem on time and there's this line I always think about. He says "I think I need more time, time needs more of me." Or "I think time slipping through my fingers. I'm slipping through the fingers of time." One of the things I most admire about, particularly maybe on the more artistic side of the spectrum of what you guys' work is, you're just constantly pushing it and playing with it and causing me and probably a lot of people to think more about it, which I really appreciate. **Che-Wei:** Cool. Yeah. That's our mission. Or I feel like that's like a slice of the world that I think needs some attention and we enjoy thinking about those things and offering different ways of thinking about it. **Jackson:** On that note, is the goal to have agency over time? Is the goal to make peace with time? Is it just to be more mindful of it? **Che-Wei:** I think it's all of those. **Taylor:** I think the goal maybe is to just, it's exercises in timekeeping, it's experiments, it's suggestions. It's let's take a closer look at this and build things in our world that we live within that are asking questions as opposed to things that are just, the 12-hour clock has been like that for so many years. **Che-Wei:** It hasn't really been addressed in terms of change. It has in playful ways. But I think it's more questions. It's like, what would it be like if it was like this? What could happen? But we don't really necessarily have a goal to change people's perception. I agree with you. I think what we do are kind of ask these questions. You reminded me of the Defakto Watch. So one of my favorite watches, which is not the one that I make or remake, it's like a 12-hour, single hour hand watch and it's like a beautiful question. It's like, yeah, why not? Why do you need the minute hand? Why do you need the second hand? I think for most people you don't need those things and you get to have this beautiful watch that just has a single hand and it changes. I love that watch so much because it does change your relationship to time in a really meaningful way just by having that on your wrist. And I think we want to do the same. It's like, what can we offer in terms of products or experiences so that we can have these little shifts? So people who are inclined or who appreciate it or want to change their relationship to time can include these things into their lives to then shift their relationship to time a little bit. **Taylor:** Yeah. Even if it's just calling attention to it. I think that's important for people. **Che-Wei:** I think the "why not" question is really how we approach things. Like, why can't we have a watch that's like this? Or why can't we make a product that's like this? We're not trying to become a giant corporation that sells a bajillion of these. And so we get to, I think, ask weird questions and make a living off of it because enough people hopefully align with this question that we're asking. The more we do it, I think partly it's like we get more confidence because we are repeating this question in different domains. And I think that we also see that other people are doing it too. So partly it's sort of like giving permission to other studios, young studios that are like, "Oh, I have weird questions I want to ask too, and I want to do that." And so I think that's also partly what we're doing. When I encountered the Defacto Watch I was in school and I was like, "What? You can make a weird watch and make a company out of it?" **Jackson:** Right. You have permission. **Che-Wei:** And I think, yeah, more and more we are finding that, I think partly because it's getting easier to make things as a small studio and I think it's a pretty cool era to live in where it's like, we can make these weird things that ask these weird questions and not be so focused on trying to make a buck off of the thing. ## [00:13:36] Time Since Launch: Counting up instead of down & creating personal epochs **Jackson:** When I think of asking questions, you're really just challenging the default or the assumed things that all of us are like, when was the last time you thought about a clock or the passage of time? One of my favorite examples of this, and I, what I assume is probably your most well-known product is Time Since Launch. And what's interesting to me about it is most of our relationship to time is sort of this feeling of it counting down. And it's interesting to me that that product is built around the premise of the inversion of counting up time since whatever the thing started. Is that something you recognize? Are there other patterns around counting up? **Taylor:** I mean, one of the impetus of that project was really to share all of these, like the era that we live in currently, those have all been decided by groups of people who are in power hundreds or thousands of years ago. And just the idea that you could, you as a single person or you in a group of two or more people can take this thing and create your own long scale epoch is really a beautiful thing. And why shouldn't we all have access to that? **Che-Wei:** It was originally designed to be in pairs, so it is very much about sharing an epoch, like sharing a time zone that only maybe you and a few people share. Yeah. And, but it's expensive, so it doesn't usually get sold in pairs or more. But yeah, that's sort of the origin of the idea is like we're not trying to count down to something. We're trying to pin a moment in time that you are sharing with a bunch of people. ## [00:15:20] "Good design is long-lasting,” Durability of Electric Objects **Jackson:** You, I think maybe Che-Wei or maybe both of you had said of the Dieter Rams principles, your favorite is "good design is long lasting," obviously in the theme of time too, and that's evident in many of the products you make. Usually they're mechanistic metal, titanium, very kind of intrinsically long lasting, both by the materials and also how they're designed. They're really simple, but you've also both worked with computers and code and electronics. Those things typically have far less linearness or far less durability. Maybe a little bit of that in Time Since Launch, even figuring out how to take a mechanized thing and make it durable. Is that something that's come up at all recently as you think about digital things and electrified things? **Che-Wei:** Yes. All the time. It's unfortunate that the electronic device world really doesn't think beyond 10 years, 20 years, like 50 years is sort of like the limit, the absolute limit. **Jackson:** And realistically for many of us, it's two. **Che-Wei:** Right. Exactly. I was looking at some old apps you guys made and they're cool, but it's like an app that's from 2015. We're constantly thinking about it and struggling with it because we have a bunch of new projects that we're working on that involve electronics and it's basically impossible to get any of the component manufacturers to guarantee their part for anywhere beyond 20 years. It's usually like a hundred thousand cycles or a million cycles of something if you push them because they do their own testing and so they're graphing their tests. And even if that tail, even if there's no drop, they'll just cut that chart off at a million cycles. Even though if you clearly kept going, that tail's probably really long. But nobody wants to guarantee it or even test it to its limit. So we're constantly pushing manufacturers to be like, "Hey, come on clearly if this graph kept going, this thing would last a thousand years. Can we get you to say that so that we can also claim it?" We're in this boat right now where it's like, okay, do we do our own testing, which we've done a little bit to be like, at least have the confidence that what we expect out of its lifetime, like let's say it's a hundred thousand cycles and we want to push it to a million we can like force it, kind of simulate it and see what happens when you run this thing for a million cycles. So we can do that kind of thing. But it's different from a manufacturer kind of guaranteeing it and saying, "This thing will last for a million cycles." So yeah, it's a little bit unfortunate that all the solid state electronic stuff will probably last way beyond what these manufacturers say they will last for. But none of them really want to guarantee it. **Taylor:** I would also say that, I don't really go for long lasting design. I more go for things should last how long they should last for. With products like some of our pens or blades, they are made out of machine metal. And the idea there is like, yeah, you shouldn't have to buy a new one for a really long time, a really, really long time after you buy one of these. But there's other things that we make that should have a lifetime. Solid State Watch, for example, is an example of that where we're very clear that this thing is actually going to become obsolete. **Jackson:** I've got a few seconds of drift, but that, I think that's the point. **Taylor:** Yeah. That is the point. And so I think as long as there's transparency, when the transaction happens, when you're deciding to take one of our things into your world, you just know that this is what the expectation is. And as long as you're okay with that, that's more what I'm after. **Jackson:** I like that a lot. ## [00:19:16] Balancing art, product, and design: CW&T's approach to creating strange (but useful) things **Jackson:** Maybe inside of that gets a little bit to the next thing I want to talk about, which is there seems to be three core adjacent, but maybe separate fields you guys play in: design, products, and art. And obviously plenty of the things you've made would easily satisfy all of those. Obviously there's a lot of media stuff, there's engineering too, but those feel like the big buckets. And you've even suggested the idea of using design as kind of an excuse to make art commercially and support yourself. But you obviously also, as you were maybe just alluding to make these incredible, utilitarian, simple, useful products too. I'd love to just hear you riff on maybe a little bit on how you think about those tradeoffs, especially early in the creative process. Maybe when you have to actually decide. This obviously gets into maybe what you were talking about too, which is the tradeoffs to make one thing and the guarantees around even being able to say that about one... an art installation for a museum is very different than a watch. **Che-Wei:** We don't really have a process for this. I think when we start a project, we don't really know where it's gonna end up. It may be an art piece, although you're more art. **Taylor:** Yeah. It's very rare that I'll design something that is useful. I just don't get that excited about stuff. Che-Wei's really good at that though. He gets really excited about stuff and he's very inspired by solving. He invents these solutions to things that you didn't even know could be a problem or even a thing. And that's your jam. **Che-Wei:** I think so. Yeah, but even when I design things, it's not clear to me at the very beginning whether it's gonna be a product or not. I guess maybe for most things actually. If it has utility, then I'm just usually just making it because I want the thing. And then the question is, do I want to make more to turn it into a product? For art projects, they are art projects from the beginning where we're like, "Oh, I have this idea, I want to execute it." And then we just do it. **Taylor:** But sometimes that turns into a product. It's hard sometimes for me at least, to sit down and to take the time and give myself permission to work on something that might kind of be on the line between an art thing and a product. But I'm getting better at doing that. Specifically the last few days. We'll see how it goes. **Che-Wei:** I think it's important to wander around. The art side I think for us is really like wandering around where it's like, "Oh, I want to learn about this new thing, or I want to try this process out." And I think art projects are a good venue for that. And then sometimes, and I think it's pretty rare actually that those become products. It's more just like there are certain times where we're designing and developing things where it's not clear whether, in my head it's like if nobody wants it, it's an art project. If a lot of people want it, it's a product. **Jackson:** I mean, Time Since Launch is definitely an art project. **Taylor:** It's an art project. **Jackson:** But I think you sold a lot of them. People seem to love buying them. **Che-Wei:** Yeah. **Taylor:** Solid State Watch also. That's an art project. For me, those are the most interesting projects. I also think that there's something to be said about using the whole structure of design to put art in people's hands. When you say like, if art projects are things that lots of people don't want, I think it's important to not stop there and figure out how you can shift your way of thinking creatively as an artist to how can this actually touch people? And I think it's possible. I think we do do it. **Che-Wei:** Yeah. But I don't think it's like our mission, we're not setting out to get art into people's hands. It's more just like we like weird stuff and it'd be really cool if we find other people that also like these weird things. That's definitely where we want to be as a studio as well. It's like working on weird projects that are sort of outside of the normal categories of how products fit into categories. I think Time Since Launch is a good example where it's like, it is not a clock, there isn't a place for this to fit in. And I think that's the feeling that makes it feel like an art project. You're just like, what is this thing? Is this actually useful or not? And some people find it really useful. Some people are like, "I don't get it." And I think we're okay with that. And I think the best cases of that are people who are like, "I don't get it." And then someone explains it and they're like, "Oh, that's cool. I get it." And I think, yeah, that's the territory you want to be in. ## [00:23:58] First Word vs. Last Word Art: Michael Naimark's essay on innovation **Jackson:** One of my favorite things I've read in the last few years is something you recommended, this essay, "First Word Art, Last Word Art," by Michael Naimark, I think his name is. There was a bit I wanted to read of you describing it. You had said, and in your relationship to it, you had said, "Whoever designed the first pen, did first word art, groundbreaking work. What we do when we're designing a pen is last word art. There's already an established genre called pens. The rules have been set and we are playing in that form and trying to come up with something a little bit better. Our practice is split. Sometimes we are trying to do first word art, or we don't even know how to categorize what we were doing, what you were just talking about. We love to be in that zone. At the same time, we also love to come up with stuff where there's already been an established genre and think we have an idea that's a little bit better." Have you found your energy or interest, maybe you were getting at this a little bit, Taylor, shifting at all on that spectrum, as of late or over the course of the process? **Che-Wei:** I think we go back and forth. Yeah. I think they are still like very distinct ways of approaching things. Earlier we were talking about questioning "why not?" I think that's definitely like last word type stuff where it's like, we know, I've used utility blades my whole life. But you get like a little spark in your head and you're like, "Yeah, why can't we make it like this?" It's not really that it's a better thing, it's more just like, why can't we have a version that's like this? And I think that kind of thinking happens quite a bit just from everyday life where we're just using other people's products and experiencing the world. So that's kind of on its own hamster wheel. We're constantly cycling through ideas and testing out, prototyping and doing all that. And then I think the first word stuff is, I think it's on its own track. And now that I'm thinking about it, that kind of stuff happens when we're away from studio. It's like we go on vacation or we're outside the studio experiencing something and we're like, "Oh, what about this? Has anyone even thought of this or done this?" And that kind of snowballs often into an art project or sometimes it's not an art project. Sometimes it's a new product in its own category. **Taylor:** When you reread that quote, I really like that article also, but I forgot that it's called "Last Word Art" and that was really jarring to me for whatever reason right now. Because I really don't think of it as the last word at all. And my brain just got stuck on that. It's like an alternative word, not a last word. It's like one... **Jackson:** It's sort of like starting the conversation or really participating in it or continuing it. But I can understand, and I don't think in the article he really is trying to say something final. One thing that I was thinking about, I'd be curious for you guys to take on, he gives these examples I think in the article of things that might have been both or had, maybe students suggest like "The Wizard of Oz" or "Tommy, the Rock Opera," these things that were like maybe the first word and the last word. Are there any objects or pieces of art or film or anything like that that resonate to you guys in that way of kind of filling both of those spaces? **Che-Wei:** Parasite. I think about it a lot. Yeah. It's in my head. It's like a perfect movie. It's really just meticulously thoughtful in every detail. And I think about it in terms of our work. I'm always just like, can we make something that's that thoughtful that every time you experience it, you reveal another thing about it that you didn't notice before that you're like, "Oh yeah, that makes sense because blank." Kind of like revealing layers of thoughtfulness from an object would be amazing. I don't know if it's possible, but that's what that movie felt like to me. I've only seen it once, but I've read about it afterwards and recalled what I watched and I was like, holy shit. He really did think about every detail. So I would love to have an object or a thing that has that much level of attention so that people can experience something like that through objects. **Taylor:** This is something that's been brewing in my head for a few months now. I recently started playing a lot of piano and I don't really have a background in it, so I'm not qualified to talk on the subject in any way, but I have been sort of obsessively playing pieces from Bach's "The Well-Tempered Clavier," and I think that that piece of work is first word and last word because it was intended both as a teaching tool, but it's also structurally just beautiful music. It's beautiful, it's emotional. And when you hear music from it, it makes sense. I think if you just pay attention a little bit and listen to what is happening, it makes sense in a way that you really connect with him and the thought process and sort of the structures that he's trying to convey in a way that's just so complete and generous. And I just think there's very few things that are out there that are like that, and it's so much music. It's amazing. **Jackson:** I was listening to, I think I'm remembering this correctly, but Rick Rubin was interviewing this pianist from Iceland, his last name's Ólafsson, I can't remember his first name. And he brought up Bach and specifically talked about how Bach was so modern. And how in part, due to the lack of maybe precise detail on exactly how to play every note, one, every rendition of Bach is different, but two, he's just like, "I hear that it's more modern than anything else I'm hearing today." Which feels like a really good encapsulation of what you were saying and very much what "how you described the kind of first word, last word dichotomy. That's cool. **Che-Wei:** Mm-hmm. **Jackson:** I think we should all be rewatching and rereading our favorite movies and novels. I rewatch "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" every three years. And I'm like, every time it's what you said, it's totally new and because I'm changing and peeling back the layers. ## [00:30:45] Scale, Ambition, and Death by Consensus: Why Che-Wei left architecture, and the joy of creative collaboration **Jackson:** One last question on the product and design thing. Another piece of that tension is maybe scale or ambition. I know you studied architecture, Che-Wei. Taylor, you studied film and CS maybe as two examples, and I know, I think you designed a house in Tokyo or maybe you both worked on it. A film, or a house as an example, are two levels of creative ambition that have a lot of trade-offs around, maybe scale isn't quite the precise word, ambition's maybe just time spent. **Taylor:** Right. **Jackson:** Those things at the very least, are not things you can go sell a lot of pens, or even Time Since Launches or whatever. So, and I know you do some other client work, consulting work, but is that something that is maybe out in the future that you're actually consciously compromising and doing less of those things so you can do more work? How do you think about that part of it? **Taylor:** I think the work that we do... I love movies. I don't love movies. I don't love the experience of watching them, mostly because I feel like it takes up so much time. But back when I was studying film, there were parts about this whole structure that was able to move a person through a story that was both visual and emotional and with all of the little language, the human relationship, everything that goes into it, to sort of take you from one place to another. I thought was this beautiful thing. But I think you can get that from reading books and I do think you can get that, but at a much more gratifying, less costly cycle, within the work that we do every day, which is we do make things and we're thinking about how it affects somebody emotionally and how it kind of takes you through your daily experience. So it's sort of itching that scratch in a lot of ways. **Jackson:** Also just to be clear, I gave you a movie example, but I'm more just curious about is there a bar that could be crossed for something that you would actually willfully spend most of your time on for a year, for five years, or do a 20-year project? **Che-Wei:** For me it's not a time constraint. One of the main reasons I left architecture or kind of stopped pursuing it so hard is because it involves so many people. It involves many people's desires. Everybody kind of has to agree and everybody is making compromises all the time. And I think unless you're like the top 0.1% superstar architect, and even then you're probably making a lot of compromises, the vision doesn't translate into the building. I think it's an exercise of compromise and I think what is so appealing to me about the kinds of projects we work on is that just Taylor and I get to jam on it and I find that super gratifying that we can move at that speed and also not compromise as much. I think there's plenty of compromises that we make all the time because I think design is a practice of compromises anyway, but we get to have more control over it. Any errors or mistakes we made are only ours. It's not like I want to cut everybody out of the process. I love working with people who work really well and are at the top of their game. That is incredibly enjoyable for me. But I think it's hard to have a super team as more and more people are involved. And architecture requires a lot of people to build a building. So that to me is what prevents me from pursuing really big projects. It requires lots of people. ## [00:34:51] Inspiration, Theory, and Self-Evidence **Jackson:** This next bit is a little ironic to discuss on a podcast, especially given that we've been basically talking about ideas behind your work for a while, but there's this excerpt from another interview you did talking about power and sort of nonrepresentational creativity. You had said, I think it's Taylor, "Seeing our kids grow up, I've been consciously observing them aware of those moments when they start to use a piece of technology. I remember with our oldest, P, when he could physically make marks on paper with a pencil for the first time, he was at a point where he could only do marks. It wasn't even in his head that you could draw something representational. It was this idea of expression distilled down. There are the constraints of your body, this pencil and this paper, and you're filling it in whatever ways you physically can making these very rudimentary choices. I love that as a moment." I think about it a lot. I've been reading this biography on Robert Irwin called "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees," and he's very interested in this idea of sort of radical presence. It's not about even what the painting is, it's about this sort of experience you have. There was also a line, I think Che-Wei had said about this temptation to start with a framework or an idea versus the actual thing in the work. In some sense, clearly, and maybe it's specific to me, but I find one of the things I find so interesting about what you guys do is that you're combining these two things. You're combining the substance and the objects and the almost self-evidence of these things. But then there's also a lot of theory and a lot of interesting ideas and even storytelling. I think you do a really good job of that too. Maybe the short answer is just, you don't have to overthink it, but is that something you're ever juggling with or thinking about? **Taylor:** I mean, I wouldn't say we think about it that much intentionally, but we know what keeps us going every day. And what keeps us going is, we do run a business and a lot of running a business is boring, it's work that we really don't like doing. I specifically don't like doing and I'm kind of a baby about it sometimes. And so part of our practice, it's more of like self-preservation and it's figuring out how I can take those things that are generally pretty boring and making them rewarding and interesting. Sometimes it's just, since I am my own boss, a lot of times things just don't get done. And it's not great for our business, but that's just sort of how it goes because I'm not interested in doing things. **Che-Wei:** I dunno if this answers your question, but the choices we make around what we choose to learn about or experience, I think just comes out of being curious. It makes me think of my students, over the course of however many years, just seeing how some students gravitate to looking for inspiration within their own domain. So it's like if you're an architecture student, you're constantly looking at other people's architectural designs to look for “inspiration”. And I find that  partly disturbing, but also just like I don't understand this practice. Like you're going to just end up designing the same things that everybody else is looking at. And I think we have interests that are quite broad. I love reading about science and art and other disciplines that maybe at first glance have nothing to do with what we're doing. But I think it does influence what we make and. I think it's not by design. We're just like interested in all these things and I think when you do that, it changes how you approach the world and how you end up designing things. And so yeah, I encourage my students to do that. Sometimes it's hard. But yeah, I think it's just the way we like to live and then we, we happen to be in this world where we design products. **Taylor:** I also think the capacity for curiosity is a measure that I like to check in with myself sometimes because it's an indication that things aren't going well in my head or just generally with me if I don't have the capacity to be interested in things outside of my everyday tasks of whatever it is I have to get done. And for me, that's a huge red flag that just means you need to take a step back and solve that immediately, because you can't fake it. And it's such an important part of who we are and how I actually feel good about myself. If I'm not in a state where I'm able to feel curious, then I'm just not feeling good and something is amiss. **Jackson:** How do you get out of a rut? Or are there patterns to getting out of the rut would be a better question. **Taylor:** I mean, I feel like I'm going through it a little bit. It happens in small bits, small cycles. I think part of it is just reorganizing and making sure that you spend a day to just suck it up and do all the things that need to get done. But taking time for yourself, leaving your office, spending time by yourself is something that really helps me. Going on long walks, something that really helps me. **Jackson:** Walks are so good. I've been talking and thinking about walks a lot recently. **Taylor:** Yeah. **Jackson:** The evergreen solution to almost everything. **Che-Wei:** Yeah. **Taylor:** Yeah. ## [00:40:39] Tools: iPhone world, what makes a great tool, and design that optimizes for joy **Jackson:** I want to talk a little bit about tools and process. We live in this iPhone world which in some sense is great. It's the ultimate object. It really can do so many things and it collapsed so many previous objects that we had, tools, different things. But it's also like we all have the same one and it doesn't necessarily have as much even life as it used to. **Taylor:** Mm-hmm. **Jackson:** And you guys make all kinds of weird little specific things both that you sell and in some cases that you don't sell that are incredibly specific. What makes a great tool broadly, and why are you interested in specific tools? **Che-Wei:** What makes a great tool? There's that saying: a good tool is the one that's there when you need it. I think I fully agree with that. Broadly, like our workshop is set up that way. It's small, but it's built in a way where basically everything is accessible within a few steps so that as soon as you need the tool, it's there. It's there when you want it, when you need it. **Taylor:** I think also a great tool is one that just makes you feel happier than you did before you were using it. **Jackson:** I don't know if a lot of people think about that when it comes to making tools. **Taylor:** Oh really? **Jackson:** I mean most of the world is full of mediocre objects. **Taylor:** Yeah. That's true. **Jackson:** If I had to guess, that's something that's maybe it's not always conscious, but that's something that's clearly running through the tools that you guys make. **Taylor:** Yeah. Even just thinking about my iPhone, that definitely doesn't make me happier every time I see it, but this watch makes me happy when I put it on every morning and I wear it every single day and it makes me just a little bit happy every morning. And I know that's sort of superficial for a watch to make you happy, but I feel it. **Che-Wei:** Yeah, you can derive joy from products. **Taylor:** Yeah. It definitely doesn't do the inverse, that's good. So... **Che-Wei:** I wonder what else? I don't ask of this of other people's tools, but I think of our tools that we design and make, we want it to do the thing that it's supposed to do really well. Like part of what we try to do is always simplify it so that it can do the thing really well. iPhones, I think are the opposite, trying to cram as much functionality into a small device, and I think they do a pretty decent job, it actually does that well. I think there are many other tools that don't do that well. **Jackson:** Its incentives have changed too over time. The iPhone of today is not necessarily the iPhone of 2012. **Che-Wei:** For sure. And it's very hard to do in the physical world, cramming mechanisms to make something do a whole bunch of things—it just never works. Actually, I don't know of a good example. So I feel like in the physical tool world or physical device world, it really wants to just do one thing really well. And I think it also means that it kind of aligns with so many of the things that we try to do. Like it makes it last longer if it has fewer moving parts so it physically lasts longer. It kind of checks all the boxes. So I think that's how we like to design our stuff. **Taylor:** We have a project that's hopefully in the works, it's in the works, that is a banana phone. See, you're laughing. Good. But really the idea behind it is we wanted to make a phone for our kids. We're pretty against having them have a phone for as long as possible, but we like this idea. I initially liked the idea that the phone was just a single button thing and they could just call me on it. And so it just made me smile that he would have to put this banana in his backpack every day and what are you doing? "I'm calling my mom." That was calling his mom again. Like, he has this banana in his ear. I just think that won't be the best phone, but it'll just bring joy and it won't do the inverse. **Jackson:** There's something very beautiful about something where you know exactly what it is for. There's this, I think it's from Steve Jobs or maybe some guy worked with him. He's like, great objects should explain themselves. The banana part might be confusing, but ## [00:44:56] The Hi-Tec-C pen cartridge and remixing what has come before **Jackson:** another part of this is, and this goes back again to first word art, maybe, and last word art, but you've explored sort of remixing and building on existing things that you appreciate, but refining them. I think probably this is most notable with pens and specifically this one cartridge that you seem to be obsessed with, the Hi-Tec-C. This cartridge is used in all of your three pens. And I went back and watched the first Kickstarter video for Pen Type A and you have this specific line, you say "An amazing stainless steel holder for this cartridge because that's what it deserves," which is just amazing. And so I was curious if there are any other areas that you've thought about or observed of like there's something cool in the world that I really love it for what it is, but there might be a way to build a container for it, or if you wanted to extend this question, you could even say there's an amazing thing, but it hasn't had the right story told about it or the right brand put around it. Is that an area of interest? **Taylor:** Yeah. **Che-Wei:** Well, Solid State Watch. **Jackson:** Yeah, that's such a good one. I've had many F-91s. **Taylor:** Yeah, it's a celebration of the F-91 watch movement and how it's this piece of technology that works incredibly well that's gone unchanged since the eighties. It's amazing. **Che-Wei:** I think there are many. Definitely not all of them turn into even prototypes, but we think about it a lot. **Taylor:** I think also this isn't gonna be relevant at all necessarily, but there's some electronic parts, like these little transistors that I just really like and I like how they look and I like how they work because I know how they work and I just like using them. Little things like that that have kind of percolated. **Che-Wei:** Like plenty of Ikea products where I'm just like, man, if they just tweak this a little bit, it'd be so much better. And just marginally more expensive. I think I could fill a whole book about that. It's just all the time. I think we could just look around this room and I could probably pick out a whole bunch. I think it's like, just observing the world and noticing things. That was my assignment for my students last week—it's exactly this. It's like find 10 things in the world, in real life, and come up with a way to improve it and then take two of those and actually improve it. But like, little things like that cover plate on the plug. It's like, why is it like that? Why can't we make a better version of that? Why does that have to look like that? **Jackson:** I love the component example too, because especially in technology, we have this sort of default notion, maybe in contrast to other parts of design or fashion, where history and linearness is appreciated. Technology's like, just always make it incrementally new. And so I'm really enamored by the idea, maybe inspired by the Solid State Watch of like, take a component, this component. They actually did it really well, and now I'm gonna use it as a building block, versus making the component new. ## [00:48:12] Making physical objects: a case for prototyping and against rendering **Jackson:** I think that's powerful. Prototyping seems to be the sort of through line of your entire process or at least the sort of engine of it. I guess a couple of questions in this category. What have you learned from prototyping as sort of like, almost like a way of life? It seems like much of your disposition around life and certainly creation is prototyping. What makes for good prototyping tools? Maybe as an extension of that, would you have any advice for those of us who are certainly many people living digitally centric lives, doing more in the physical world, doing more prototyping, using their hands more? I know I realize that's an open-ended question. **Taylor:** Yeah. We prototype a lot. I think it really depends what your goals are, but for a very long time we don't use renderings in our studio. **Jackson:** Which is extremely rare, I would presume, for the type of work you do. **Che-Wei:** Depends. I think most students are taught to produce renderings as a way to communicate ideas, which I think in any other studio environment is really important. But because we're so small and we have a workshop... **Taylor:** Even for communicating an idea, I think a rendering communicates a false idea. I love it whenever I go to a school like an architecture crit or a design crit, and I don't see those polished renderings and I see the sketches of what the story is, the body of the work and not this... I like a rendering, it does so little. **Che-Wei:** We never produce renderings for ourselves. We just go straight to prototyping. And the thinking happens in prototyping. And I would say even the CAD tool, working in CAD is just working in CAD to get to the prototype. So I think the way we work, I'm just trying to minimize all the process, all the steps it takes to get to the physical thing. Both the amount of time I spend on my computer, the way our workshop's set up, everything is to just get us to the physical prototype because that's it, that's the thing that's gonna prove or disprove your idea. And based on that, I want to just make that cycle as fast and efficient as possible so that we can keep evolving an idea into something that we're really happy with. Prototyping is it, everything happens in the prototype. And different kinds of prototypes too. We'll have look-like prototypes or functional prototypes. Sometimes there's separate things. Sometimes they're the same thing. But everything is in the prototype. **Jackson:** My sense is, and maybe I'm just projecting, people who are otherwise creative in other mediums and especially digital mediums, there's this sort of sense that making physical stuff is like a boogeyman behind a wall or something. Do you have any, and maybe the answer is just that it is really hard and you need a lot of tools and things, but obviously you teach, is there any guidance or wisdom for, or even encouragement for people who are maybe spending most of their lives digitally, at least from a creative standpoint? Do you have any guidance for taking that incremental nudge into using their hands more? **Taylor:** I think it's not as hard as people think it is to make physical things. It is hard to make physical things. Don't think that you're gonna become a billionaire from making physical things because it's expensive to make physical things. But because of CNC technology, there's not the same setup cost to make a physical thing as there were 10 years ago. There's plenty of shops all over the world that are happy to take your work on. And it's not like to CAM something isn't the most expensive thing anymore and to set up your job if you want to make something out of metal, it's actually not that cost prohibitive. Even if you want to make just a few of them. Even when we were in grad school, Che-Wei was sending out parts. He was getting them made in China and he was paying like 40 bucks a prototype for these things and that was like 15 years ago. **Che-Wei:** Yeah, I would say similar. It's relatively easy to make prototypes. I think the hard part is making something that's ready to be manufactured. I think that's a whole other ball game. And the whole point of the prototyping process, I think is to keep exploring and building up your knowledge to get to a manufacturing level. I think the hurdle or maybe the part that's misunderstood is, people who want to get into hardware design that are just like, "Oh, I'm gonna design this thing and get it manufactured." And there's like a whole chunk of work in between having the idea to making it manufacturable that they're missing. And sometimes it's like a couple prototypes, sometimes it's literally hundreds of prototypes and you kind of have to be ready to go either way. We also struggle with that, or I dunno if it's a struggle, but we just accept it as part of the problem. It's like sometimes we start a project and we're like, "Oh, I think we're gonna launch this in two months." And then two and a half years later, we're still tweaking stuff. And we've accepted that as being part of the process. And I think for people who want to get into it, you kind of have to also understand that, this thing takes time and iterations. And if you're lucky, maybe if everything works out properly, it could be relatively quick, but it could also just drag on forever and you have to be willing to accept that. **Jackson:** Seems like prototyping is sort of like the opposite of a shortcut with both those other things, rendering and getting straight to manufacturing. It's like, "I want it, I want it." **Che-Wei:** Yeah. No shortcuts, unfortunately. ## [00:54:02] CW&T’s beloved products **Jackson:** We maybe got at this a little bit with the remixing theme, but are there any products that you just love so much that you either wish you designed or you think there's nothing left to say there? That really stand out? **Che-Wei:** One is a spatula. It's a handmade, Spatula. **Jackson:** One of one. **Che-Wei:** It's a blacksmith-made one and we were gifted it because I begged for it, but it's the best thing we have in the house. I think I was telling someone else the other day that if there was a fire, that's the thing I would grab and leave the house with, partly because it's a one-of-one and we've used it so much. So there's like a lot of history and love that we've embedded in it. But there are also other ones, thinking of things that I wish I designed, the Super Clamp by Manfrotto. They make camera gear. They have a clamp for clamping against pipes essentially for camera gear, lighting and tripods and stuff like that. And just the way it's quite thoughtful the way they've designed it so that it's compatible with itself and a whole world of accessories that now many companies kind of bought into. And I love stuff like that. That's not the only example, products where sort of like last word. They solve the problem and they're like, "This is it. It works really well." So then a whole bunch of other, third party companies are like, "Yeah, we're gonna build on top of that system because that system works so well." I don't think we've ever designed anything like that, but there's many examples where I'm like, "Oh, I wish I could come up with something like that." That then is kind of accepted as an industry standard. **Taylor:** I can never think of things that I like that much. **Jackson:** High bar. **Taylor:** Yeah. ## [00:55:55] ITP, Electrified Objects, Software in Objects **Jackson:** You both, I think when you met at ITP, this sort of unique program merging design and technology and software and all these things. We talked a little bit about software and electronics at the beginning. Taylor, you've said you love software. You've talked about how much you love it. It's so powerful. It's accessible, it's flexible. Back to the earlier point about hardware being a little harder to get into. And it seems that we're getting to a point now where even around 3D printing and other types of prototyping stuff, the accessibility, the cost of chips, all of these, the ability to put sort of technology into things, even creating software now, cheaper and faster if not free. Do you think that, and maybe even you mentioned this briefly, there's maybe more to come as you see all this happening. Is there an inclination to put more, to electrify more of the things or have them be kind of more attuned to this sort of digital connected internet world we're living in? Or do you think you'll still kind of do plenty of stuff that's just purely analog? **Taylor:** We definitely don't want to make things that have software in them. The reason I like software is because you can get on your computer, you can model things like model ideas really quickly and solve problems really quickly. And it's predictable. And if you mess up, it's like, if it's broken, it's your fault. It's definitely your fault. I like software for that reason, but I don't like software in products in the sense that it makes a thing be able to do all the things that software can do. That said, I am really interested in electrifying our projects, but not with programmable microcontrollers necessarily, but purpose-built parts that work a very specific way and making those things visible and part of the actual structure of the thing itself. That's something that interests me. **Che-Wei:** Yeah, I agree. There's no reason to make your toothbrush wifi enabled. I think it's an artifact of components just becoming so cheap that you can embed them. And I think there's just, because you can embed chips in things, it doesn't mean you should. I would go, all of this stuff like wifi enabled fridges, bluetooth enabled blank, I think it's kind of problematic because it makes those devices not work properly without connection. Sometimes I think that reduces its longevity and it's a real problem. I think it's actually quite bad that we do that. But I still love electronics. I think there's a place for it and it's useful for certain things, but I think we have to be careful generally about embedding too many things just because we can do it. ## [00:58:48] Dream Stem: Generative design, openness to new tools, AI's impact on the creative process, and intuition **Jackson:** Che-Wei, you gave a talk, I think in 2018 on generative design which was, I think you were really thoughtful and in some ways kind of saw what was coming, but while listening to it back seven years later, it's just crazy to think about how table stakes, much of it is now, at least in terms of how people are thinking about creativity in the world. There's, I can't remember if it's, it might actually be from a separate interview, you had said "A bunch of things are gonna converge in the next five or 10 years. AI driven design is going to replace CAD, be integrated with everything from CAMing, machining and laying out electronic boards. At a certain point the ability to design, and take something to production will be in the hands of many more people. That's going to blow everyone's practice. Small ones like ours, big companies, all of them." There's two components to this that I love to talk about. One is generative design specifically. You have this, I think you call it the Dream Stem, which is this weird organic bicycle handle that looks like it was designed by an alien, which is sort of the generative piece. There's a couple lines from that that I thought were really interesting and you're talking about sort of like the way that we make aesthetic value judgments and the ways that machines might do that. You said "We have an image or an idea of when an antenna wants to be, and that's why we're so restrained from sort of designing the optimal antenna in theories. Back to the generative design piece." And you also have this line that you said "translating intuition into clicks on a screen," which is maybe like the defining design or creative process of the last 20 years for a lot of people sitting at a screen. Sitting here in 2025, obviously many creative people are technology inclined. I think a lot of creative people and a lot of artists are really terrified. They feel like they're losing the humanity. We feel like you can press a button, you can generate something. I'd love to hear, I mean now we're also staring kind of down the barrel of human machine kind of collaboration. You even said "designers will become conductors rather than composers, directors rather than actors, and air traffic controllers rather than pilots." And yet you're also two of the people, at least in my experience of the world, who are like most in the nitty gritty. Like really being for lack of a better word, human in your design. Are you feeling, how do you feel in this moment? **Che-Wei:** I'm pretty excited. I am not averse to using any of those tools. In fact, every time I see a new thing, I at least try it because I think it's interesting. But I don't think we're there yet. It's still quite far, but I think you can see it because of the way other things are ahead. Like software for example, like writing code, we write code too, but actually nobody writes code, we're just copy pasting code everybody. And so that shift is probably a few years ahead of how we do hardware design. So if you need to design something on the computer, there are some early stuff where you're just describing stuff and you get a 3D model, it's not that great yet, but you can see it's gonna happen. I'm just excited for it all because it does mean that it changes the way we think about the process of design. It becomes less cumbersome so that your ideas can flow smoother. So again, just compressing the time and effort between an idea and prototype or an idea and manufacture just becomes shorter and easier. And I'm excited for it because it just means way more people can design weirder stuff. We're so, our world is made up with stuff that's designed for the masses and for the average, which I think is a pretty boring world. And so I'm just excited that we get to design more weird things and if more people do it, it means we get to do it more. And if these tools allow us to make more of them faster, that means we get to put out more ideas, which is super exciting for me. **Taylor:** I think also, you brought up the word intuition a little bit, and that's something we talk about a lot. Intuition is something we value a lot in our studio, and I trust my intuition and I trust Che-Wei's intuition and I need him to trust my intuition for the day to go smoothly. I think it's one of the things we value most and I just want to make sure, this is something, I'm not sure where my intuition comes from. I'm not sure where Che-Wei's comes from, but I know I trust that it's something that I've been developing for my entire life and I trust that whatever I've been curious in has fed into my ability to make intuitive choices today. There's lots of experiences that have contributed to this, and we talk about this a lot with our kids. We want to make sure that they're able to experience the world in a way that makes them unique and makes them able to make creative choices that aren't like, "Oh, you do X, Y, Z and then you get to this." The ability to just pay attention to the world, to take in things, to cross-reference information, to cross-reference different subject matters. I'm sure AI will be able to do this in some sense, but I do think that there are human ways that we are, that we will be different from the machines in some way, but maybe I'm wrong about that. I actually don't really think it's a right or a wrong thing, our machines are us and I do feel strongly about that. But I do think about and worry a little bit about how our kids are gonna be in the world. **Che-Wei:** I'm not so worried. They're gonna be great. **Jackson:** Something I think about that I think ties to both of your answers is this, you got it a little bit, which is, I think some people are worried that everything's just gonna be completely systemized and mechanized and there's gonna be no entropy or emergence or anything. If anything, I think the generative design stuff is indicative of the fact that, or I dunno if you've ever read about Lee Sedol playing AlphaGo and it's like there are the couple of moves that happened in this kind of famous game of Go where one that, there's a few, that the AI made and one that Lee made that were like, defied the bounds of, no one had ever made a move like that, so that's really interesting. I guess the part, and this certainly gets to where we're growing and maybe your kids is like, how we relate, I mean, it's an ego thing too, like how tight our grip is on even the idea itself. Like your handlebar was like, not in some sense totally your idea. You set it up, you pressed go, you set it up. On the other hand, it did it without you. And I think to your point also, like we're probably experiencing this most right now with software, where many of the serious software engineers I know are like, "I'm vibe coding. It's doing its thing." And so that's maybe the, if I were to try to double click anywhere, I'd be curious for how you might relate to, would you release a product that you didn't set up but didn't design? **Che-Wei:** Yeah, a hundred percent. I think for the Dream Stem though, it feels like you didn't design it, but that's kind of just the way it's supposed to be. **Taylor:** It's almost like final word... **Che-Wei:** No, hold on. No, definitely not. I mean, just like image generation too. If you're prompting to get image generated, you're not gonna pick the first image, right? You do that process over and over. So this goes back to being like a director. You're not creating the image, but you are definitely making a selection and you're exploring the gradient world to just be like "That's the one I want." "That direction I wanna go down there." You're kind of navigating that space and who knows if maybe that space that you have to explore is gonna get smaller and smaller as the tools get better. **Jackson:** It could get wider though too. **Che-Wei:** It could get wider. Maybe we want it wider even, I think that's the work, that's the input that we provide to get to the thing we want. Or even, it's not even like trying to get to the thing you want. It's sort of like exploring. It shows you a thing and you're like, "I want to go that way." Or "I'm interested in this path more than that path." And coming up with a Dream Stand was the same. It was very slow because I had to generate each one and it took like five hours, but it was the same process. It generated, I had to generate a whole bunch of things. And from that I had to tweak the parameters to be like, "Okay, I don't want it to be that blobby. I want it to be more like this." That's what I mean, I think the time and space that you have to explore is maybe gonna become more specific and quicker. But I think that will kind of maybe always be there as long as that type of interaction is how we interact with these tools. That may change. I think it will change, the way we interact with them is the big shifts that are gonna happen. I think we're on this kick right now where it's like, it shows you a bunch of stuff. You copy paste or tell it where to go. That kind of interaction will probably change, but for now, for the next five, 10 years, that's how we're gonna be dealing with it. And I would love to design a product that way. It'd be really fun. But I think the tools are not there yet. **Jackson:** I also think the proof of work is shifting to a different part of the process in a way. In a sense, you could, my sense is that your children on a relative basis are gonna be more equipped, even just from an ideological standpoint to prototype their way through lots of options, and have a point of view. My hope would be at least to your point, would be that even if this speeds us up, on the sort of going through all the frames, it leads to that much more... **Che-Wei:** Right. ## [01:09:09] The value of friction, and what's lost and gained in the pursuit of efficiency **Che-Wei:** Yeah, but also in that same framework, as we essentially decrease the amount of friction to arrive at these ideas, I think we also lose things. So in prototyping the way we do now, it's quite arduous. You have to print stuff... **Taylor:** Machine stuff, so hard in 3D printing. **Che-Wei:** It's so hard. **Taylor:** CADing things, walking down to the basement, all these things. Taking, cleaning your print bed. **Che-Wei:** Oh my god. So hard. God, so much work. But all of those things in prototyping, sometimes you have to turn a 3D print to get it to what you need it to be or sand it or whatever. All these things that we consider as frictions that we want to remove that potentially... interaction with the machine learning model will remove that friction that we sometimes think is not good is actually productive. And I think that's sort of where we maybe have to be careful. It's like, how much do you want to shortcut that process without losing all of that? Or maybe short cutting it is so beneficial that it's sort of like when I was in school, we had to, not everybody had to do this, but you had to make your own graphite before you got to draw on the paper because that meant something. And I think probably very, very, very few people do that now. Very few people even sharpen their pencils to draw. And so something was lost there, but maybe it wasn't enough to discount all the benefit we got from going straight to CAD. Or maybe there's other ways to insert the friction or insert that type of thinking process back into the way we make things. I don't know how it's gonna go, but something will be lost. I don't know what it is yet. **Jackson:** Technology's really good at reducing friction and so there may be a little bit of an 'where am I gonna intentionally add it back or maintain it?' **Taylor:** I sometimes spend way more time than I should be spending editing photos, and I shouldn't be using my time for that, but I do like doing it, and I think I like doing it because I'm doing this very rote, methodological thing that gives my brain space to think about other things. I can't listen to a podcast or even music when I photo edit, but I'm thinking still and I really value those moments, but it's a complete waste of my time otherwise. **Che-Wei:** It's not, apparently. **Jackson:** We only get so many things to care about. And that's worth all the time in a sense. **Che-Wei:** Yeah. ## [01:11:45] CW&T the brand, contemplating CW&T's legacy and purpose **Jackson:** You've built, obviously you are CW&T in some sense, but you also built this brand thing in the world, CW&T. And much of that is the objects and the art and the product, but a lot of that too is brand and storytelling. And you send out the weekly newsletters, you make cool videos and all types of things like that. I also think it's interesting that like the defining thing to me about stories is time. And it's like we keep coming back in the loop here. Maybe this is something you've thought about a lot, maybe it's something you haven't thought about much. What is the brand, CW&T, what story are you telling? **Taylor:** Good question. **Che-Wei:** What is the story? I was talking to a friend the other day about what happens to CW&T when we die? Like when we retire because that's the same, right? Die or retire? To die and retire is the same thing. It's the same. And in my head I'm like, "Yeah, I would like it to keep going." Because it is its own thing. We started it, but it has its own life. And I would love to see, I wouldn't get to see it, but I like the idea that it can continue beyond, like we've set something up that can continue. You're like, we should just shut it down. Like there's no more. **Taylor:** It is us. But, and then it's sort of a question, could we do this? It's always been a question for me and Che-Wei, we have these things that we would like to do in this world. Is it possible to do those things and also support ourselves and I would sort of almost just think of it as a case study that would hopefully encourage other people to come along and be like, "Oh, it is actually possible. You're not gonna be gazillionaires, but you can find your own way and carve your little niche in the world and be able to do what you want to do on a day-to-day basis and feed your family." **Che-Wei:** Wait, but why can't it continue? **Taylor:** I just like, that's the thing. Exactly. Like, if those people see CW&T and are like, "That's cool." **Che-Wei:** Like, why would they want to go work at CW&T? They should just do their own thing. **Taylor:** Like, for example, I have a good example. **Che-Wei:** For example, I have a good example. Like Eames. Okay. He built a pretty awesome brand. It has an approach and philosophy that after he died continues. **Taylor:** Yes. **Che-Wei:** But it's not gonna continue forever. **Taylor:** Oh, it'll continue forever. I guarantee it. **Jackson:** Brand as a word probably means less than it used to, but I have a relationship, and it's commercial and there's plenty of criticism, but I have a relationship to Nike that I've always really admired Nike for two reasons. One, because I loved it as a kid. And two, it's like the only brand I can think of that can be like—Virgil can put it on the runway and then it can also come down to a Walmart t-shirt for some 6-year-old. So like, I really hope that Phil Knight, bless him, he's pretty old, he handed it off a while ago and granted there's plenty of critiques. So I, would wonder for you, is it partly that just CW&T is so personal or maybe it's that what you were saying, which is that it's a template, and it's like it's not actually the container, it's the template for you to do it. It's the blueprint for you to, in a way that Nike is a little bit more of this substantive mechanism. **Taylor:** I would say that we're, we only have, we just have another person working with us as of like two months ago and we are not professional at that. **Che-Wei:** We're not there. **Jackson:** Yeah, but you're in year 13. **Che-Wei:** We're so young still. I think I have an analogy for your argument. It's like, and we've talked about this before, where it would be weird if a band continued beyond the life of the members of the band. Exactly. Right. **Jackson:** Grateful Dead's kind of doing it. John Mayer's in it. **Che-Wei:** That's true. That's true. That's cool. **Jackson:** And I would argue that's the most, the band, that's the most an idea, right? **Che-Wei:** Right. Yeah. It holds an idea. But other bands probably can't pull that off, which I think we relate to. We talk about putting albums out, the way we operate. It's like, we're not in any niche category. We're just like, "Hey, we want to work on this new album. We're just gonna put it out." And if you like it, you like it. And I think as long as we operate that way, it is maybe hard to define us as a brand. It's like you don't really know what's gonna come out. You probably don't know what products we're gonna make. You may have some ideas how we approach it, because it comes from us. **Jackson:** Well, I know it when I see it. **Taylor:** Right. Maybe. **Che-Wei:** Yeah. **Jackson:** But that, that isn't nothing. That is something inside of that. Just cause we don't have the words or the script or the... **Che-Wei:** Right. Yeah. But maybe, I could also see us being more like a band and then maybe there are other cover bands that show up, but they don't officially become part of our band. When we're done, we're done. And you can be a cover band of us, but the company, the band is done. I can kind of see it both ways. It could be interesting. We'll see what happens. We still have many years. Hope so. Yeah. ## [01:17:23] Kickstarter, owning your audience, and what it would look like to start today **Jackson:** On a slightly more practical note, you've built a business on the internet as two people without tons of resources. One big part of that has been Kickstarter which I think maybe is not certainly not as exciting or sexy as it used to be, and yet you continue to return to it. I'd be curious for any thoughts broadly on Kickstarter and what it has allowed for you from a momentum or an audience or capital standpoint. And if you just have any reflections on building this sort of weird identity, personal, life-mix of all these things, just sort of like an internet business. Any reflections on that? **Taylor:** I have too many reflections on that. You know, Kickstarter is very much responsible for where we are today. I don't think we would've gotten a start at all if it wasn't for Kickstarter, that really made our first project take off like it did. And it helped us build a fan base. It's really hard to find a following on the internet. There's lots of people on there and lots of noise too. **Che-Wei:** So many things to please, distract. **Taylor:** I really like the idea of using Kickstarter. I think that crowdfunding is a way that makes sense of putting a project into the world. Like you should see if people actually want it before you go and make a thousand of them, 10,000 of them, so that you're not spending a ton of money and wasting a lot of money and resources on garbage that nobody wants. So it makes sense. That said, Kickstarter's not that cool. It was kind of cool 15 years ago, but it's not anymore. And for us, we just launched a project on Kickstarter about a month ago or a month and a half ago. Pencil Type C. We're gonna ship this week and it'll be on our website really soon. It's a big question now, once we sort of have an audience, and I'm not sure I actually know that Kickstarter doesn't bring that much more of an audience to our work. I like the idea of us being on there and just kind of doing it over and over again, just because I think it's a great tool. And I want young studios, small studios to be using it for that and to be able to use it for that. And if we can't use it, then those other studios aren't gonna be wanting to use it either. So I just like, I feel like I want to use it in solidarity, but it's not that helpful to us anymore, sadly. Wish it was. **Che-Wei:** As you were talking, I was thinking about the most recent Peak Design launch. They launched a suitcase which was a huge campaign. And that's their thing. They've been on Kickstarter too for a long time, but they're a much bigger company. They have these huge campaigns, but they started small also. And it makes me wonder, who is Kickstarter for? I think we all, Peak Design included, we all started pretty early when it wasn't such a crowded place and now it's super crowded. Partly because more people are on there trying to launch things, but also there's all these legacy companies that continue to use it and in some ways are kind of soaking up all the attention. And I don't know if that's actually healthy for Kickstarter in terms of their original mission. It produces income for them. So I understand why they would do it, but it doesn't quite align with what Kickstarter was meant to be. And I'm sure they think about it. I don't know if they're doing anything about it. But I would also love to see a platform where it's not for us, it's for people who are in our position 10 years ago to get going and I don't know if Kickstarter is that anymore. But I'm very glad we were there. We were there at the right time at the right place kind of thing. If we launched the same product today, it would be crickets. Yeah. ## [01:21:34] Partners in life and work, the tension between merging identities and maintaining individuality **Jackson:** You are partners in life and work. There's a bit I'll read. "Taylor tends to think of things from a systems perspective. She likes to have a comprehensive understanding of the problem before diving in. Che-Wei likes to tackle things as if it's a sprint and continue on that momentum until we run out of steam." And then Taylor, you had said, I think somewhere else, "Something that comes with having kids is a sense of empathy towards difference. Before having them, I assumed they would be like us, but they're really not. There's this deep sense of appreciating and loving them for exactly who they are and for their differences. That has been really valuable." And so in some sense it seems like both sort of a whole and a half at the same time. You're half of this thing you're building together, and then you're obviously two very different, distinct people of your own strengths and instincts and all this stuff. And obviously anyone who spends their life as a partner to anyone knows a little bit about what it's like to be kind of a shared organism, but you guys are really doing it kind of at full dial, even in little ways. I was curious, most of the stuff you do publicly in the social accounts, it's a CW&T thing. You're usually doing it together. There's an old website you made on noodles. And you even talked about the notion of sharing a password with somebody who you care about to sort of leave these diary entries. Do you try to draw really clear lines? Are you letting yourself merge in some areas and not in others? What is this like? **Taylor:** What's it like? I think it's really different for, it's a weird thing that people do, right? **Che-Wei:** We couple with other people. **Taylor:** And I don't know if this is like a female characteristic, but I've found that in many relationships that I've had, not many because I haven't had that many relationships in my life, but I have always found that I have a tendency to really merge with that person and there was always a tension of where I was within that. And so that's something that I think about all the time and still to this day, is we, I think it's a female thing where women, I think men do this as well, I actually don't really know that much about it, but amongst my women friends, we've felt this ability to transform and become a lot like our person and lose a sense of self, especially when you have kids too. Your identity becomes very revolved around this new type of person, which is a mom. So we have that, which all people who are coupled have, but we also have a working relationship and I think that those are constantly just, we're changing all the time and I find sometimes I do kind of make a concerted effort to decouple from you and really do things that are just siloed in my own practice, and Che-Wei is probably more like, "Why do you need to do that? Come hang out with me." But I think he has more of a solid sense of self that hasn't mutated the same way that I think mine has. **Che-Wei:** I'm also not very sensitive to these things. I think I've definitely mutated and definitely influenced by you. I don't know how you feel, so I don't know if it's more or less, but it's there. But I also see the mom thing as a significant transformation both in terms of priorities and just how you think. Having kids also shifted the way we work quite a bit, and it's been a cool adventure. When we first started, we spent every minute together for several years. Now when I think about that time, I long for it. I'm like, that was such a good time. We were so productive. We came up with all kinds of cool shit and we did a lot of cool, fun things. And then kids shifted our priorities. I think we were still quite productive and I really enjoyed that working process where it's like, now we have to include this third thing. And it still worked and I still love it. It's just a different thing. And I find it really fun that we've kind of moved across these different ways of being together and hopefully keep continuing, keep doing it. We were talking about moving somewhere else. We'll see if it happens. It's many years away, we're like, "What are we gonna do when they go to high school?" I think those are more transitions to come, it's like, what happens when our kids become teenagers? Our family dynamic is not gonna be the same as it is now. What happens when the kids leave the house? It's gonna be this other phase. And I look forward to all of it and I like that the CW&T part, the design studio is a constant and that we've been able to transform the way we work so that it fits the way we live instead of the other way around. I think in other people's cases, if you work somewhere, you kind of have to fit your life around this work thing. And I think we've been fortunate enough that we can do the opposite and it feels quite nice. It's really cool that we've been able to evolve it that way. ## [01:27:00] Growth, explore vs. exploit, and learning, dream collaborators, and more resources **Jackson:** It seems like your north star, and I think you probably said this, is in the business freedom, answering curiosity, this exploration. You joked earlier, no retirement plans. I think you said like some people sort of sprint towards 60 and then they can retire. And you're like, "I'm gonna do a slower marathon." Haruki Murakami I think said something similar. He's just like, "I'm just trying to, I want to keep writing." I have a couple questions about that process, maybe from a looking forward longevity standpoint. The first is just how much you think about getting better. Another way of putting this might be explore versus exploit. It seems like your disposition, at least how you talk about it, is usually just, "We want to explore stuff, we want to do whatever is exciting." But you're also clearly one, obviously very talented, but two, even the quality and the output seems to be improving. Is that just something that is a byproduct or is that something you're ever conscious of? **Che-Wei:** I think it's a byproduct. I see us improving as well just because we're learning more, like we're learning on the job. And we're practicing working with really amazing people and learning from other people and learning from other people's practices. I think all of it converges and adds up to things that we put out that look better, perform better, or are closer to what we want them to be. But the exploit thing is really interesting because we also do get excited about certain new pieces of technology that present themselves to us where we're like, "Oh, that's cool. How can we exploit that to become part of the way we work?" And it might be a tool or it might be a component or it might be whatever, a new piece of fabric. And that's also part of our studio moves. We want to explore, but then once in a while we'll also find these little gems where it's like, "Someone made that? Why does that exist and why aren't people exploiting that to turn it into a thing?" So there's a lot of that also happening. **Taylor:** When you say exploit, do you mean take an idea that we already have and really run with that one? **Jackson:** I think it's a framing that is used in lots of different ways in different contexts. In this one, I suppose what I mean is "explore" - I'm relating to as just the purest essence of "follow curiosity" and "exploit" is a little bit more considerate or contrived. It might be around a tool, it might be around an opportunity, it might be around getting better at this process or business or whatever. **Taylor:** Okay. That's interesting. Something that has come up with conversations in our studio. We have a new person who's been working with us, and I think it's our responsibility now to share what's going on here with them on a day-to-day basis. And the other day I was, we were eating lunch and they asked the question, "Why don't we make an inexpensive pen that's just very affordable?" And I was like, "No, what?" I didn't mean to be rude, but I was like, "That's not what this is." So there are opportunities to exploit some of the niche markets that we've kind of put ourselves into. Not purposefully, but we do make a few writing tools. We do have an audience there, and I guess we relinquish a lot of opportunities to exploit those areas because it's just not what is interesting to us. But I do think that there's opportunities to figure out more strategies to optimize how our existing things are already running. And we should do that and we are going to do that. **Jackson:** This might be contradictory to the whole kind of small collaboration thing, but are there any dream collaborators? That could be people, that could be brands, that could be institutions. **Taylor:** I think it would be cool to do something with Nike. We have some brands that we do like a lot that it would be interesting that work sort of outside of what we do or what it appears that we do. That would be fun to do something with. **Che-Wei:** I don't have any specific ones in mind, but I like consulting on other projects, which is really fun. And the thing I realize is I just really love working with really good people. Ultimately, that's what would make a collaboration fun. I don't really care what the brand is. Brands can be huge and they kind of have an image. But if we can work with people who are really at the top of their game, who really do whatever they do really well, working with them is always such a pleasure. It doesn't matter if it's a tiny brand or a big brand. It's like if the people care and do the thing that they do really well, it's such a huge learning opportunity for us and collaborating with them ends up becoming fun for everyone involved. So we're not actively seeking collaborations like that, but once in a while something like that shows up and it just is the best. It's really, really fun. **Jackson:** I like the idea too, of sort of capability or even domain outside of, I don't know, you mentioned Nike, I found some old thing that listed the San Diego Zoo and Yves Saint Laurent, like clearly you guys have possibilities or potential there. The last question on this, this before we begin to wrap up, what, and clearly you're defying this in many maybe small and large decisions, but what would it look like to be more resourced, to have a kind of a more ambitious version of this? Or would there be anything that would get you excited about that? Acknowledging that clearly why you've kept it how you have is largely due to compromise and getting to have it be what you want it to be. **Che-Wei:** Yeah. I have thoughts. We've talked about this and it shifts. I think if you asked this question maybe a few years ago, I would've had a really straight answer, which is essentially just incorporate every step of the process in-house. So if we had more space, more money, I would just buy all the machines we need to produce all the products that we currently produce so that we fully control that process. All of the manufacturing. Yeah, like big machines essentially, which is sort of where we started. When we learned how to run all these big CNC mills, that's part of maybe our magic sauce is that we understand what it takes to make these things and we prototype that way. But it would be really awesome to have that capability in-house so that we can iterate as we're manufacturing, which we currently don't do or don't do for all of our products. I think that would be one—if we had infinite resources, that's sort of the way to round out our practice. And then the other constraint is essentially time, time to work on certain ideas. And so just more people, more hands on the prototyping process or bringing ideas into manufacturing so that we're not the only ones pushing it there. But if we had multiple tracks going at once it would be amazing, because then we can get more ideas out. **Taylor:** I think also one of our big bottlenecks is just storytelling and the whole marketing side of our business, which is not nothing, but it's very, very... we don't spend that much time on it. I'm mostly responsible for it and over the years it has become not something that interests me that much at all actually. It never really interested me that much. **Che-Wei:** But you do like storytelling? **Taylor:** I do like storytelling. I think that having somebody who is in-house who is able to tell stories on a day-to-day basis and put those into the world would be really great. Sort of in tandem with how we're working that aren't like, "We made this project, let's now go and photograph it a bunch and make it look fancy so people on their phones can want to buy it." I'm not really interested in that. ## [01:35:54] Lighting Round: great teachers, New York City focus & serendipity, creative inspirations, CW&T book, nature and green things, morphology and architecture, “form and force,” a gift for children or grandchildren, what to hang onto **Jackson:** My last little bit is a kind of lightning round... just a miscellaneous list before we wrap up. First, teaching—you both teach, I think have taught at least over the years. And you wrote recently about, we talked about this when I came in, you wrote recently about getting a piano teacher and neither of you having had a teacher for at least 10 years prior to that. What makes a great teacher? **Taylor:** Somebody that you want to get better for. Somebody who you're just excited to go and be with every time you have your lesson. Somebody who makes you want to be better. Like, and motivates you to be better because they see something in the work that you share also, and you just want to participate with them in that world. That's how I see it with my teacher. **Che-Wei:** Your piano teacher? Yeah. Excites you. Taylor describes it as the most exciting part of her week is going to see her piano teacher. And I agree. I was like, that's a very cool relationship to have with a teacher. But my definition would be different. I would be like a good teacher is someone you want to learn with, like study with. So it's almost like a study buddy. So I think it's less about someone who you want to learn from, like someone who you think can give you the knowledge. I think that's sort of a misguided relationship to the teacher. It's someone who you want to work through a problem with, I think is a great teacher. And obviously all these other things, to want to do that with someone I think is hard to foster, but is the ideal situation. **Jackson:** Both of those answers are about energy, right? The knowledge is out there. The Harvard lectures are on YouTube. That's not why people aren't learning. It's the energy to actually get up. **Che-Wei:** Right. **Jackson:** You live in New York City. I think you lived here since '98. You probably like a few years after that. **Taylor:** 2007. **Jackson:** Okay. **Che-Wei:** Eight days. **Jackson:** I'm pretty new to New York. You lived in New York for a long time. My specific question about New York is how you relate to, or balance, focus and serendipity in a place that maybe isn't always catering to both of those. **Taylor:** I think it caters to both of those actually in the best possible way. I think serendipity is one of the most special things. And when serendipity happens, there's nothing like it. And New York is a place that's optimized for serendipity. Like you go out on the street and there's a pretty good chance that something serendipitous is gonna happen to you. And that's what's beautiful about living in New York. And we're fortunate that we have a home that we're comfortable in. We spend most of our time focusing in our home and don't get out much. But when we do get out, serendipity can happen. And that's why we live in New York. It's because we don't make a ton of effort to do all the social things that you're supposed to. **Jackson:** Yes. But the friction is low when you want to. **Che-Wei:** Exactly. **Taylor:** Exactly. **Che-Wei:** Same. Good answer. I agree fully. **Jackson:** We talked a little bit about music. You're learning piano. You did this 365 days of the Teenage Engineering... I don't even know what that thing's called. Are there notable, either domain-wise or specifically, notable inspirations in other creative mediums for either of both of you? **Che-Wei:** We go see a lot of art. Especially when we travel, if we ever go to a new city we basically hit up as many museums as possible. Just because there's so much good art out there. It's really fun seeing what other people make and thinking about it. Oftentimes what happens is we'll go to a museum and then we're both itching to go home to work on stuff because it's so inspiring. We're just like, "Damn, I want to go home and work." And it's not even about making the work that we saw, it's more just being inspired that people make work at a certain scale. **Taylor:** And maybe work that makes you feel a certain way. And we're like, "Oh man, I want to go home and craft or do something." **Che-Wei:** Yeah. **Taylor:** I also feel I share that feeling, but I also get a lot of inspiration from books, just from reading. I have so much respect for people who can move people like they do with just the simplicity of words on paper and storytelling. **Jackson:** The squiggles on tree. **Taylor:** It's amazing. Yeah. **Jackson:** You mentioned in a Reddit AMA recently, somebody asked about a book, and you mentioned the possibility of doing a book one day. Two questions you can answer, both or neither. What do you think the cover would be or what would it feel like? And two, if you had to try to predict, what do you think you would want to say in a book? **Che-Wei:** Well, the book that we've been thinking about is essentially a monograph. So it's like lots of imagery. But I think it would be mostly about our process, like what we've been talking about. **Taylor:** I have a very strong feeling about what I would want for a book. I know what I want it to feel like. I don't know what's on the cover of it, but I want it to feel like a novel and not like a monograph. I don't want this fancy, heavy art book that squeaks and stuff. I want that kind of gross paper too. **Che-Wei:** Oh, I don't want the gross paper. **Taylor:** Well, we're gonna have to find another solution. When you're reading it, I want you to snuggle up with it and have the experience of it being like a novel in terms of its intimacy and not a coffee table book. **Che-Wei:** Yeah, I don't think it's in my head. It's not a coffee table book, but it feels like a novel in my head. It's like Frankenstein. **Taylor:** It's like... **Che-Wei:** No, in my head it's like this feeling that I had when I was younger. This was when Flickr was really big and I spent so much time basically snooping on other studios because people had automatic upload features in Flickr. So some studios had every photo they took just automatically uploaded to Flickr. And I would just, it felt like I was stalking them. But it was so cool because I got to see so much of the behind the scenes stuff. They're like, "Oh, that's the machine you have. And you put it in this tiny space? What, you're just a two-person team?" I learned so much that wasn't presented on their front face. And I would love our book to deliver that as well, where we really don't have any secrets. And so, in interviews like this or presentations, we're always trying to be like, "Hey, especially during Q&A sessions, we're like, 'Hey, ask us literally whatever you want. We have no secrets.'" But I don't know, people are maybe shy about asking hard questions, but I would love to give back because I think I learned so much from other people being so open about their processes. **Taylor:** Unknowingly. **Jackson:** Yeah. You're the lurker. The last time I was here, the only first time I met you guys, about a year and a half ago, you recommended a book. You're the second person to recommend it. The other was also on this podcast, he's like a science oriented venture capitalist. You guys aren't that. So two pretty different groups and you both recommended this book "The Overstory," which is probably the most meaningful book I've read in the last couple years. It's about trees in the natural world. What is nature and inspiration for you? **Taylor:** A lot. A lot. Yeah. Just the other day I was, this is, I'm gonna sound very silly, but I was just doing the dishes and I looked over at our plants that are by the window and I was thinking about, there's one of them that we bought when Tree was a baby and it's like really big now. It's not even doing well. Tree is our son. And we've got that plant. It's not even a good plant, really. It's not doing well, but somehow it's grown and it's fine. And I was just like, we have 10 of these plants that are doing really well and we do so little for them. **Che-Wei:** I take care of them. What do you mean "we do so little?" Well now I do so little. I take care of them every Sunday. **Taylor:** Che-Wei waters them, but it's just like bloop. I also tie them. I make sure they're growing in the right direction. Very, very little. I just think plants, they ask so little of the world, of us, but yet they give so much and they're so beautiful. That's awesome. It's awesome. Nature is awesome. Yeah. **Jackson:** Speaking of time, they're on a, and that book's obviously about that. It's like they're kind of on... **Taylor:** A different timeframe. **Che-Wei:** Yes. **Taylor:** Yes. **Che-Wei:** Yeah. I find nature not inspiring directly, but I just find it so awesome. I have core memories from doing multi-day hikes with my dad that I don't know how it's affecting my view of the world, but it is just so deeply embedded in my memory. Not a happy memory, but a joyful memory that I want to also provide for our kids. And so one of the things we decided a few years ago was just, when we go travel, let's go see awesome nature things because there's nothing else like it. Museums are great, but you cannot, it's like listening to Bach. You cannot not feel the awesomeness when you see awesome things in nature. You feel it. Right? **Taylor:** Yeah. You cannot not feel it. **Che-Wei:** And so I find it really important, even for myself now, to seek it. As grownups, you kind of have to seek it because we don't have parents that are like, "Oh, we're gonna go do this now." Otherwise we'd just be in New York all the time, not seeing awesome nature things. So every opportunity I get to experience it, I have to go do that. **Jackson:** This is, I guess a question probably more for you Che-Wei, two disciplines. One that I think you're actually part of, starting some degree program at Pratt - morphology. And then architecture, two pretty, maybe morphology is broad, but two pretty distinctive disciplines. I'd be curious if there were any theory or observations or lessons from those disciplines that you think might be more generally applicable to creative people, to technologists, to people in the world who they feel might be behind the curtain, especially? **Che-Wei:** I feel like architecture's very closely related, at least from my experience. I think the discipline of how you design in architecture, like the rigor, I think being so rigorous about the choices you make in an architectural design process, I think carry through to basically every other design discipline in a really good way. So rigorous that you kind of have this advantage if you study architecture. And I think the other one that I can think of is the practice of reducing ideas into a concept, which I think is very hard. I still struggle quite a bit with it, but I think great projects have clear concepts that are easy to disseminate to the group essentially. I think the reason we have these amazing architectural projects is because we have these amazing concepts that everyone in the project from the junior designers all the way down to the construction workers, all understand that we're all working towards this idea. And so anytime you try to cut a corner, like, "Well, we have to do it this way because the concept is this." And it's sort of like a north star. **Jackson:** Is that like a Christopher Alexander pattern language type concept or something more meta level or...? **Che-Wei:** I think it can be anything almost, so I think of Herzog and de Meuron, they make some pretty amazing buildings, but conceptually it's almost like a motif. They're just like, "Here's a cool motif, but this is it. This is what we're doing, and it's gonna be everywhere in the building." Versus other architects where the concept is more abstract and more meta. I think that can exist also. So I don't think it matters, in my head, where the concept lives, but as long as there's one that everyone kind of agrees to be like, "Oh, this is what this design is about,” then all the details and everything kind of can fit within that puzzle. **Taylor:** Even for your parents' house, the core idea was population explosions. It has to be comfortable for two people, but also comfortable for 10, and those things can't be at odds with each other. **Che-Wei:** Architecture, I think, is quite closely related to the way we operate. I think, morphology, I don't know. Also I think is very closely related. Morphology, that program was started by Haresh Lalvani. He's, I would say, a mentor of mine. I helped establish it as a minor, but it already existed for decades before I arrived. And that is very much more about understanding the world of form through systems. So actually there's two parts to it. There's understanding what he calls the genome of shapes so that every shape actually has a genetic code to it. So you can understand that shape's relationship to other shapes. Thinking about the world of shape through the system is sort of like one branch and the other branch, which I think relates to many of the things we do. And also the way I think about architecture, it's form through force. So not understanding shapes through function to be like, "Oh, this needs..." It's very popular to think about form and function. But form and force is more on the structural engineering end where it's like, "Oh, this thing is shaped this way because of the forces that are applied to it." **Jackson:** A little generative designing. **Che-Wei:** Exactly. Yes. So that's kind of where that branch ends up as sort of generative design optimization work. But I think as a way to think about form making, it's really interesting because it's actually one of many branches. I think it's so interesting to me that generative design ended up where it is, where it's very alien looking because it is just topology optimization. I think because that's kind of a math that we were capable of doing and we could ask the machine learning models to do. But there's so many other branches of form finding that we haven't even touched yet. And I think that part really excites me. It's like, "Oh yeah, we know computers can do this, but actually anything you put through this machine learning topology optimization kind of looks the same. They all look like bones because that's all form follows force." But if you want to do form follows function, that machine learning model doesn't exist yet. We have to work on that. And then there's so much more stuff and I think a lot of that stuff, sorry, this is a tangent. We're getting sidetracked by the way we've been doing image-based stuff. So image-based generation is all about, "Here's a source material. Now generate something that looks like this stuff." And I think that's a little bit unfortunate because it just misses all of the information if you apply that to physical things, because this physical thing was designed not to look like this. There's so many other forces at play. And I think if you don't include those forces it's gonna be a weird world. **Jackson:** Right. Or the highly digital one. **Che-Wei:** Yeah. **Taylor:** Which... **Jackson:** Which of the objects you've created are you most excited to give to a grandchild? **Che-Wei:** Oh, grandchild. I'd say it doesn't exist yet, but that time capsule. **Taylor:** Oh yeah. But hopefully we have it out soon. I'd also just say a pencil. **Jackson:** Here you go, kid. We might not have paper anymore. Just use this thing, please. **Taylor:** But yeah, our kids have time capsules that when they turn three, our friends and family wrote little letters in there for them and they get to open them when they're 18. **Jackson:** What's something you hope that in 20 years you haven't let go of, or something that is still true, something you've held onto? Could be about you guys yourselves, your work, from a value standpoint, from a principle standpoint. **Taylor:** Curiosity. **Che-Wei:** I think for me it's just doing what we do now. I think the way we operate and the way we get to experiment and make things, I feel very lucky that we get to do it. And so I hope in 20 years we're still doing it. ## [01:54:05] Timelessness **Jackson:** All right. My final question. We talked a lot about time, especially at the beginning. When or how do you best experience timelessness? **Taylor:** Oh, definitely when I'm playing piano. Hours just melt away. **Che-Wei:** I guess maybe when I go on a long walk. I love eating gummies and going on long walks. It's maybe one of my favorite solo activities. It's so enjoyable to me and it feels like time slows down a lot. **Jackson:** That's all I got. This was wonderful. Thank you both. **Che-Wei:** Cool. Thank you so much. **Jackson:** Thank you.   Hey, before I leave you, if you enjoyed the episode, please leave a rating and subscribe on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. You can also find full transcripts on my website at jacksondahl.com/dialectic, and obviously everything's linked in the description. If you have notes, feedback, or guest ideas, you can email me at pod [email protected]. **Jackson:** See you next time.