About the journal

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

Design is rarely a simple arrangement of materials toward a functional end. More accurately, It is the externalisation of an 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, opting instead for a practice of sustained attention. What is made inherits the foundational values of the makers internal landscape and the axiological framework that defines their existence.

However, design is not a monologue. It completes itself only in relation. There is always a secondary author — the one who inhabits 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 romanticise the object nor moralise the user, but instead, initiates a reconsideration. It suggests that both the designer and the participant occupy a shared 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 the act of living is not separate from the act of making, and that what we surround ourselves with either deepens or distorts our experience of self.

While the journal begins in the theoretical, they do not remain there. Creation and communion are ultimately reflections of a way of being, and being, if practiced honestly requires both rigour 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 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.