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TALBOT: We realized pretty early on that there's
a myth about the lone genius designer, that's just a myth.
When you work on a large-scale project with multiple moving
pieces, it really takes a whole team of people
to make something come to fruition.
It's never just the labor of one mind, even.
So what we see as being most important to the design
process, coming from that background
of doing more complicated design, is collaboration.
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YOON: As a young designer, you don't really
have a lot of say in the designs that we are participating in.
So I think that kind of stemmed the interest
in focusing on a lot of the smaller products
that we surround ourselves in.
And also, as architects, you usually
can't afford the things that you can design.
So [LAUGHS] by doing these smaller product
designs, you can design the things that you actually want,
and surround yourselves with it.
And hopefully, other people want it and like it too.
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TALBOT: We see as play as the most appropriate ethos
through which to address collaborative processes
in general.
And I think that's where we kind of started,
with the notion of play.
One of the ways that we develop design
is by thinking about how we used to interact with our parents'
stuff, and the way that we used to think about furniture,
when we weren't just consumers of furniture,
but when we could see furniture for maybe what
it wasn't intended to be.
So one of the examples that we like to use
is the play fort, and how the play fort
is kind of an early manifestation of a child's
interaction with a couch.
There's nothing about a couch, to an adult,
that would suggest that it should become a fort.
There's nothing that makes a pillow
a simulacra for wood or stone.
But a child kind of looks past that understanding
that couch cushions are only removable because you
need to clean them more often.
They say, no, couch cushions are there so
that I can make walls out of them, and then, with a sheet,
make it into a space of my own inhabitation.
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YOON: As designers, we're not interested
in the mass-produced.
I think that's key.
For this chair, or this table, these cups, for instance,
they're just objects that you don't really
attach yourselves with.
I think we always try to design objects that are carefully
considered, and carefully-- the materials that we choose
are also carefully considered.
So just in that sense alone, I think
the end user finds an attachment from day one,
and has this kind of emotional attachment to it
throughout the life of the product.
TALBOT: There are less and less objects
in the world that have the inherent staying
power of some of the objects of older generations.
So I think one of our objectives is to--
and I think an objective of a lot of our peers
within the kind of design world that we're interested in,
their objective is to reimbue objects
with the quality and staying power that
would keep them around long enough to remain dynamic.
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We understand that design is a part of this kind of culture.
It's a part of a culture that has a longer history.
If you're going to make something that's not just
going to be around for a short amount of time,
but needs to be around for a longer
amount of time, such as a building, or even
a piece of furniture, we feel that it's not only
important to make things that you like at the moment,
but engage things that are part of our shared cultural past
as well.
YOON: I think Mark's point is we're interested in scaling
back up.
So we've scaled down from architecture,
and playing with these scales is, I think,
very important to us.
So I think we'll just continue to do that
throughout our profession.
We'll scale up at one moment, to the living environment,
to a larger interior environment,
and then back down.
And we'll just keep playing with scales.
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