Original, unrestored clocks at the Paimio Sanatorium have flaking paint. Several of the deteriorating clocks were repainted by patients in the sanatorium’s workshop, giving each its own idiosyncratic set of numerals. Project from my residency at the Paimio Sanatorium.

An idea that emerged while cleaning up my workspace and materials stash: made of two leftover aluminum profiles, a clamp, jumbo zip ties, a vintage Philips spotlight, and a distinctive halogen bulb.

A lamp made of two sheets of paper with the watermark of the Belgian royal family, 222 cm of steel wire, a gouache-painted bulb, a bakelite Philips socket, and 4 m of luxurious Swiss-made electrical cable from a decommissioned Luxembourg power plant twisted into a lamp cord.

Developed from an initial collaboration with Louise Dousset, Nathan Raccah, and Ward Lauwers as we worked to replace our house’s landlord-grade lampshades. Louise found the paper, the cable and sockets come courtesy of Ward, and Nathan insisted on the necessity of a handle.

Living and working in a room at BASE Milano during fuorisalone 2024 with Louise Dousset, Nathan Raccah, and Perle Venzal. I worked on my Paperclip A5 lamp based on experiments we had done together, and we introduced people to our new collective, Montjoi Institut, through the book we made about our house.

Space-efficient layout for an extension to a small stone house in Normandy, defined by three storage volumes.

Design for a slideshow, to be delivered in conjunction with a lecture on changes in the function and meaning of money since the renaissance. Judicious composition and rewriting to untangle economic esoterica for a general audience.

A device to show how time passing can mean two things at once. A series of twelve mechanisms, each made up of a clock which activates an ink dropper once an hour through simple mechanical means. A basin of water, catching the ink and giving it medium to bloom.

There are different, seemingly contradictory ways to observe and experience time passing.

One is that it is cyclical. The basic example of a society adhering to this understanding of time is ancient Egypt among other river-bound cultures, whose understanding of how to live with the seasonal flux of the Nile is associated with the civilization’s longevity.

Any cyclical system is in the image of the cosmos, and so the clock mechanism demonstrates this circular model of time. It comes by this by way of the sundial, a device necessarily adapted to respond to the movement of the sun. Circularity may be functionally vestigial for a standard analog clock but many of us have adapted our daily understanding of time such that the circular model is more intuitive than what is provided by a digital clock.

Another model of time? (among many many others)

The linear, or progressive: our main current historical understanding of time. Unix time, the number constantly going up since 00:00, January 1, 1970. We do not live in such a culture of cyclical response to nature; we have largely managed to untether ourselves. Time is used as a technology in the service of efficiency. Take the arbitrary (useful?) shift of daylight saving time, or the slow, dishonest, shift-prolonging clocks in Victorian factories. Or even the timezone, which in its standardisation knocks clocks out of synchronization with the sun in the easternmost and westernmost regions.

Our structuring mechanical means of telling time is linear. Even a cyclical mechanism must necessarily respond to this by deteriorating over time. The first rotation of the new wheel is perfectly smooth while the ten thousandth has changed as the materials wear on each other with some amount of friction, minute though it may be.

The drops of ink are the more physically complex part of Meridiem. Variables are controlled to a degree, but not enough to prevent some difference in each drop iteration.

One room where it was installed would naturally heat up through the day as people passed, slightly drying the ink on the end of the dropper, thus changing the ink pressure required for a drop to form, burst, and fall. At the same time, the viscosity of the wet ink in the dropper is changing so the drop behaves differently when it hits the water, itself also warmer than at the beginning of the day.

Not only is the water warmer, it obviously becomes increasingly saturated with ink. The inky water is replaced every morning — and without meaning to, this became a primary point of interest in the project along with other daily “rituals” of adjustment and maintenance.

A cyclical routine to enable a linear phenomenon.

I wanted to reconcile the cyclical and linear ideas of time. Meridiem is a synthesis but not the definitive answer to the outcome of these opposing forces.

further reading:

An elevated glass tank with lighting that I used and adapted throughout the semester to do fluid experiments and tests, as I worked up to the Meridiem ink-dropping device.

Clamped together so it can be taken apart and reconfigured, small and densely packable so it can be transported. Capturing and compacting time.

further reading:

I presented Meridiem and Time Escaping four times at the Design Academy — once at the midway point in the semester, then three times at the end to different examination commissions. I took a different approach to each of these both spatially and discursively.

Each installation was in a different place. Working with the same set of panels and lighting each time, I tried to plan as little as possible beforehand and set up entirely based on the space.

I assembled a set of elements: scavenged chipboard shelf panels in two sizes, moulded cardboard padding pieces, a plastic crate or two, a secondhand XL macintosh screen, Philips spotlights, and some tripods and aluminum profiles. Then I’d find or borrow whatever bricks and boxes could be useful but interchangeable.

There was considerable strife about the boundary between the exhibition design and each of the two projects. I always conceived of the three design tasks as a whole. It would have been artificial to arbitrarily use different panel sizes for the Time Escaping table and the exhibition surfaces or to use steel for one rather than a range of aluminum throughout.

Worse still would have been to use the provided exhibition furniture. I was not willing to settle for an ugly, low-quality screen when I had a good one (incidentally, cheaper) that matched the materials of the rest of the setup.

In the first presentation, I sat, kneeled, and stood behind the screen and two tables and addressed the commission so that I was looking at them rather than the display. This was received as being a performance piece. From this point on I would stand looking at the display alongside the commission, which diffused expectations of a performance but diminished the quality of conversation and interaction.

I decided to move away from the increasingly bloated visual site builder I had been using for years and gave myself a few months to figure out html and css with no prior experience.

My main objectives, beyond saving money and learning something, were: minimizing dependencies; improving information density in both visual and bandwidth terms; adhering to standards; thinking about future-proofing and avoiding trends; using the characteristics of different screen sizes with more intentionality; and making use of good tools (BBEdit, mechanical keyboard).

I learned to value the aesthetics and legibility of my code as well as the rendered page. Moving away from social media platforms around the same time reinforced to me how wasteful and overprovisioned almost every online platform has become for most peoples’ needs. It is in platform operators’ interest to mystify the process of publishing work online, but it remains satisfying, cheap, and simple to do it the old-fashioned way.

A very simple front carrier for a drop bar bike bent from a length of steel tube. On most bikes I prefer a front carrier to a rear one so I can better keep an eye on things and make sure they're secure.

In its initial configuration, it held a basket I found. This was certainly useful, but too heavy for nimble handling. Removing the basket and experimenting with just the carrier and various straps, I came to a satisfying solution with repurposed elastic ribbons that balanced utility and minimalism. It is strong and lightweight and attaches to existing mounting points on the bike (brake bolt and skewer).

What is the relevance of a functional object without function? The twin factors of obsolescence and replacement, and wearing down through usage or neglect, push once-valued things into the dusty shelves and soggy cardboard boxes of material purgatory. A brief window exists to get a grasp of these things as they pass from discreteness to aggregate, and our only option is to take them as they come.

Find a “design piece” you've seen only representations of and you may be surprised by how little it can do for you outside its intended time and place. This project is an argument for a quality that remains independent of something’s original purpose. Anticipation of unselfconscious usage evaporates and leaves behind a mist of directionless, unprogrammed visual and tactile interactions.

This project is an attempt to create rich and rigorously objective replicas of found objects that possess this quality. Available here are digital models, each based on a close reading of an object’s surface. It is my hope that the process heightened my sensitivity to this quality, and that the models can themselves be used as references, when the originals are not available, for what might be formally “good”.

Poster, programme, and social media for The Immaculate Perfection of Fucking and Bleeding in the Gender Neutral Bathroom of an Upper-Middle Class High School, a play by Daniel Halpern staged by BodyCube Arts as part of the Edmonton Fringe festival.

When I bought my secondhand Braun MP 50 juicer, an iconic work of functionalist design, I didn’t realize that it was missing the plunger. This part is critical for pushing fruit and vegetables against the blade without risking injury. I looked into a paralyzing array of options for replacing this part, evaluating the material outcomes of each and the implications for usability, aesthetics, and collectibility.

Later, I found a variant of the juicer at another secondhand store. What I realized challenged my assumptions about design as problem solving — buying this new juicer and selling the incomplete one was more profitable than any option for replacing or replicating the missing part. Regardless, I modelled and 3D printed a replica part based on eBay photos and my own measurements.

Lemon juice is widely available in small yellow bottles styled with a lemon-like appearance. A wide range of approaches to shape and texture are evident, with different degrees of abstraction. The bottle cap is typically a verdant green. What if these bottles are superseding our idea of what an actual lemon looks like? A green plastic cap that can be stuck onto any lemon resolves this semiotic anxiety, clarifying that what we are looking at is indeed a source of lemon juice.

Indulging an obsession with the meaning of measurement verging into numerology: 35mm as a base unit for ideal page composition with ISO formats, and a utopia without margins.

Document summarizing findings from studies into two spaces in Eindhoven, one domestic and one communal — a cramped student bedroom and a garden. With Théa Brochard, Lucie Gholam, Michelle Jonker, Brenda Salirrosas López, Luna Wirtz-Ortvald, and Maija Zēģele.

A storage system for symbolic and physical things. Objects entered into the system are classified as missing or represented, or are actually present — with spaces left empty, replicas or representations constructed, or the object itself incorporated.

Taking advantage of the iPod’s limited feature set to apply an inside-out formal approach to a digital device with analog inputs and outputs, shaping the casing based on its energy and data flows.

Planning a park for a former industrial plot in the centre of Eindhoven, using the site’s existing geometry to create zones encouraging a range of uses.

Rather than mapping Eindhoven in the way I might a more familiar city, I responded to the prompt to make a linear map by attempting to more fully translate this place to a flat, narrative representation according to a system of absurd rationality.

I started by travelling around Eindhoven’s ring road by bicycle, looking for a defined entrance to the city. The eastern point where the Ring crosses the canal serves this role.

I identified key sites in Eindhoven that would be immediately recognizable to a newcomer: institutional elements like city hall, national government facilities, and religious congregations; transportation hubs; and a few other cultural centres.

The “entry point” where the canal crosses under the road was the start of radial set of lines that crossed through these key sites to the opposite side of the Ring. Lines perpendicular to these form an intersection on each site, meaning that each site is then associated with three points on the Ring plus the entry point.

The outer lines served as a rough demarcation of the city’s geometric “core”. The remainder of the lines that cross through the core divide it into smaller zones.

The diagram of lines and zones was then distorted so that the lines run only horizontally and vertically, rather than corresponding to degrees on the rough circle of the Ring, reshaping these zones into rectangles.

The same distortion and division is applied to a satellite photo of Eindhoven. The satellite image of each distorted rectangular zone is stretched or compressed to all match in size. This series of resized images is presented in an accordion format, labelled with an approximation of the zone’s actual scale (small, medium, large) to determine the degree of distortion.

Controllers encouraging freeform button and potentiometer assignment.

A small amplifier cabinet (30×30×45cm), solidly constructed of plywood and painted sheet metal with custom 3D-printed knobs. Meant for use at home, it has more furniture- and appliance-like characteristics than comparable portable amplifiers. All controls, inputs, and outputs are readily accessible on the front. The lower compartment, which is easily detachable via low-profile clasps on the sides, can be used to store cables and other accessories and has an integrated power strip. The front panel of the lower section hinges downward and can be used as a surface to attach effects pedals. As naturally as any box, it works well as an ad hoc stool or side table.

A sprawling apparatus that is entirely interconnected but completely nonfunctional and unlinked to external electrical or data systems. Nonsensical junctions like audio cables running into a typewriter betray the solely visual nature of these connections.

Gathering maple keys, peeling off the leaf fibres, drying the seeds, and collecting them in a plastic box.