Humble is beautiful.

Why do we feel good around certain materials? And why do we dislike being around others? I think it has something to do with how heavily processed a material is, or how far removed it is from its natural state. We’ve spent the last two hundred thousand years existing alongside natural materials and only in the recent past been meddling with them. Maybe we’re hard-wired to find comfort in natural things?

A building made from natural stone feels so much more friendly than one built from steel and dressed in composite sheet cladding. And I bet the majority of people feel more at ease surrounded by wood than they do surrounded by concrete.

Surely theres a correlation between our affinity with materials and how processed (or not) they are. Maybe there’s a scale, a spectrum. How about a wood spectrum? At one end lies the material in its natural form - a piece of solid oak. It exists as it did when it grew from the ground, in the trunk of a tree with its annual rings, grain and knots, all contributing to its honest and clear character.

Somewhere in the middle of the spectrum would sit plywood. It still looks like wood, it has a familiar appearance from certain angles but its somehow less comforting. It’s suspiciously flat and the edges look strange. It has undergone an amount of human intervention, the processing taking it several steps away from its natural form.

At the far end of the spectrum, the end where we feel least connected to the material sits MDF. Its still wood, sort of, but it definitely doesn’t make you feel good. It’s super processed - pulped and blended with toxic chemical binders to form a very useful, but unpleasant material.

I think this spectrum of material affinity could be applied to all of the materials we are surrounded by.

Natural stone, you can see the geology. It looks like nature. The layers of sediment, the composition of the minerals, the natural veining, exactly as it would have laid in the ground for millions of years. Maybe it speaks to our Stone Age ancestry. It feels safe and familiar.

And then somewhere in the middle - clay, terracotta, other ceramic materials, they still have a warmth to them but they’ve been refined, mixed and fired. A house built with brick feels homely, but slightly less so than a house built of stone.

At the far end, synthetic stone-like materials, concrete and other cementitious substances. They feel sort of stone-ish, but almost like an uncomfortable simulation. Some beautiful concrete structures have been created throughout history but the material still has an inherent coldness and hostility to it. No matter how well proportioned and ornamented a concrete structure is, I don’t think it would make someone feel warm or at ease. 

I’m sure you could keep going… cast iron, obtained directly from ore and then formed. It somehow feels so much more friendly than steel and other human-made alloys.

What about plastic? Maybe the antithesis of nature. Oil is drilled, refined, heated and broken down into fractions, further processed to produce monomers, monomer molecules linked and polymerised to produce plastic. Do we feel such an aversion to plastic because of its disparity with anything remotely natural?

It's too easy to make something complicated!

Just because you can, does it mean you should?

Can digital production methods be considered 'craft'?

Remember Platon? The famous portrait photographer who revealed the soul of his subjects? He gets them to open up to the point where the viewer can wholly relate to them. I want my work to do the same for people. 

I want my products to be the souls that surround peoples' lives. That keep them company. That make them feel good and make them feel themselves. They should have a clear honesty to them. How can I convey character through a product? Maybe they can have emotion or expression? Maybe it can be more subtle than that. Perhaps the character of the product is conveyed through interaction. Like how you feel when you interact with someone you like or admire, it leaves you feeling good.

Maybe the product has a real understanding of you. It has an understanding of your needs. The real personality can be conveyed by the way it delivers its function. Maybe at night when you’re tired it needs to be soft and calming. In the day when you’re doing a mundane or repetitive process it can bring a moment of joy or a smile. If it’s used when you need to feel inspired, the interaction can be particularly stimulating. Tactile, textural?

What am I trying to do? I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. I’m trying to give the wheel added purpose. The wheel does not exist in isolation. Allow the wheel to speak to the car to improve the overall experience. The design has to have something more.

The object has to have a personality. Peoples’ personas have texture and shape, and size and colour. One person's whole hearted laughter and smile is yellow and joyful and round. Another persons calming aura is soft, matt, reassuringly gentle to the touch. You can read the intricate and gnarly past of this other character - they have stories to tell me and they are made from dark, weathered wood with knots and cracks.

I need to find a narrative for these products. Not something random but something relevant to their purpose. I am creating these characters like authors craft characters in a novel.

The product will be born into a role. And it will play that role for the duration of its life.

Things that are a pleasure to make are a pleasure to own.

Why is diffused light so much more pleasant than direct light?