Whether you consider it precaution or precognition, sometimes it makes sense to change things up just when they appear to be running smoothly. I feel very fortunate that my hard work over the years has earned me the luxury of making a living doing pretty much exactly what I want to do, some of which I’ve archived on these pages and on the wowhaus website. But at a certain point, no matter how intriguing or germane, work is just work, and its rewards are tempered by the usual stress and uncertainty of earning a living.

The trade-off for having successfully integrated the idea of ‘leisure’ into my art and design practice is that I’ve also managed to eliminate it from my daily life, and am beginning to feel the effects. So I’ve decided to make a concerted effort to pursue leisure as a necessary adjunct to my work, and will be shifting the subject and tone of my Deep Craft weblog accordingly.

Beginning September 1, 2010, I plan to devote a calendar year to the daily pursuit of surfing, whether on the water, building boards, getting in shape or doing research. Our studio compound is just 11 miles from a gentle fall/winter break, and about 15 miles from two major year-round breaks. I come to surfing as a lifelong bodysurfer, woodworker and beach lover. My plan is to learn to surf by shaping my first board from solid wood, and then develop my technique through ongoing experimentation. I hope you will stay tuned as I embark on ‘A Year in Surf’ and attempt to keep a daily log on these pages.

Tagged: california coast, contemporary art, deep craft, longboard, scott Constable, sonoma coast, surfing, woodworking, wowhaus

We tested my Greens Chair at Greens Restaurant over a four course dinner

On the eve of our first full week home after six weeks of travel, Ene, Aili and I celebrated with a prix fixe, four course dinner at Greens Restaurant in San Francisco. Mike Hale, Greens’ manager, generously comped the meal as a gesture of thanks for the chairs I recently designed that now populate the restaurant’s expansive interior.

My lovely ladies enjoying a delicious dinner, as the sun set over the Golden Gate

By all accounts, the chairs are a tremendous success, adding a touch of structure and formality to the dining experience without detracting from its casual simplicity or bohemian legacy. More importantly, we got to test the chairs over an elegant, beautifully prepared and presented vegetarian feast, and they proved to be perfectly comfortable all the way through coffee and dessert. The Greens Chair is the first furniture commission at this scale where I have not actually made the furnishings myself, hadn’t touched and shaped each piece of wood with my own hands, yet I was pleased to feel the same pride of authorship as if I had.

Most of the Greens Chairs are made of maple, with just 16 in walnut

As we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on our way back up the coast in the lingering twilight, while Ene snoozed and Aili surfed her iPod, I began to reflect upon the relationship between craft and design, content with the fruits of my labor. I’m called more and more frequently to shift roles between maker and designer, and I find it helps to make a smooth transition by keeping a foot in either world.

the view from our table at Greens, looking West towards the Golden Gate

‘Craft’ is too broad a term for consensus on its meaning, which can range from implying a level of skill in handiwork, to standing in for pre-industrial technologies, to being a kind of hobby or therapy. For the sake of clarity, I think of ‘craft’ more as an artisanal production model, connoting things made using local resources- material, knowledge, and energy. In such a craft-based production model, ‘design’ is often an afterthought. The final thing more or less emerges from the constraints of tradition and the limitations of resources. Most products of this system live in the past- the Windsor Chair, basket-making, vernacular architecture in general- but they still influence the visual culture of design. From this perspective, ‘craft’ and ‘design’ are mutually exclusive.

While craft is a bottom-up strategy, design is a top-down one. Design most often begins with a visual representation of a thing to be made, but exactly how it is made is incidental to its final manifestation. When called to design something made at an industrial scale, I begin the process by thinking as a traditional artisan might, given the resources of labor and technology in today’s world. I don’t have any preconception of how anything will look, but trust in an ethos of Exuberant Frugality. I try to optimize material and structure, nest functions and eliminate waste, knowing that this will make room for quality to emerge at all stages of a design’s development, and that the ethos will resonate with anyone who works with their hands.

Tagged: aesthetics, chair design, craft philosophy, deep craft, furniture design, greens restaurant, innovation, scott Constable, slow food, traditional craft, vernacular architecture, windsor chair, woodworking