About the journal

This journal is an ongoing inquiry into the act of making and the poetics of ownership. It considers the space between the object and the self, the quiet, often overlooked terrain where meaning is formed, transferred, and preserved.

As a designer, I’ve come to understand that design is not merely the arrangement of materials toward a functional end. It is the externalisation of interior truth, a practice of coherence between what we make and who we are. To design well is to refuse detachment. To resist the demand for immediacy and instead engage in a practice of sustained attention. What is made carries the imprint of the maker’s logic, their pulse and their moral architecture.

But design is not a monologue. It completes itself only in relation. There is always another side — the one who lives with the object over time. This journal concerns itself just as deeply with that person. For ownership, too, is a form of authorship. To participate is to assert a worldview, to say, often unconsciously, what matters. And this assertion has become hollow. We accumulate but rarely connect.

This journal proposes another way. One that neither romanticises the object nor moralises the user, but instead, initiates a reconsideration. It suggests that both the designer and the participant occupy moral and imaginative terrain. That both are engaged in shaping the world not only as it looks, but as it feels and functions.

The entries in this journal are reflections, essays, and observations on this shared responsibility. What does it mean to design from the core, to imbue a thing with interior necessity? And on the other end, what does it mean to choose an object with intention? To allow it to carry weight, memory, presence?

There is a kind of responsibility here, but it isn’t moralistic. It’s quieter than that. It honours the distance between maker and user and seeks, perhaps slowly, to close that distance with care. When design is approached as a philosophy rather than a product pipeline, it reminds us that living is not separate from making, and that what we surround ourselves with either deepens or distorts our experience of self.

While the journal begins in the terrain of design and meaning, tracing the quiet, potent space between object and self, it doesn’t end there. Because by its very nature, creation and communion are both a reflection of a way of being. And being, if we are doing it honestly, requires both depth and delight.

So while some entries may carry the weight of inquiry, others may simply offer a song we can’t stop playing (right now it’s Sisyphus by Andrew Bird), a fragment of dialogue, a moment from a film that moved us (right now it’s Tanya’s death in White Lotus), a recipe for something warm and absurdly beautiful, a book we’re underlining to death, a brand we love, a place that felt like a pocket of stillness, an unexpected object that reminded us why we make things at all.

Let this be a space that holds both: the work and the wandering.

We’ll meet you somewhere in between.