What's the most important thing you try to instill in your design students?
I've always been an advocate for the innate designer sensibility -- we tend to stray away from it as we become more experienced and begin to see the changes imposed by the manufacturing process. Most of the time the images that formulate the end result happen naturally. How we go about making them into a reality is another process. A lot of times we get discouraged from our original idea, or simply begin to lose sight of it. Our question is: How do we create both an environment and a process that allows us to stay as close to our original idea as possible. The true talent lies in making that initial spark a complete part of the end product.

How do you design so to keep the end product as close as possible to your inspiration?
We do what we imagine and we go find people that can make the stuff the way we imagine it being made. We really stick to our guns and we do a lot of things that are explorative and may not be something that the masses are really going to gravitate toward, but we're accomplishing something by testing peoples' comfort zones in terms of what is a beautiful object. Some people are going to love it, and some people are going to say, ˜What is that thing?" "That thing's not commercial," or "You cant make any money selling that."

Everybody has a different way of judging what is beautiful and what is not, so when we make our own objects in house we let it all hang out. We just do whatever we feel like and then we end up attracting some of the manufacturers who end up seeing the end result. Then we have something that we've made a limited production run of and we say to the manufacturer "There's no reason why you can't do it too if you use this particular technique.' We end up making changes here and there but the other side of what we do is that right from the beginning we design with manufacturer constraints in mind. We already know who our manufacturer is and we know exactly what machines they're using and how they're being used. So that when we're designing we know that everything we're putting on paper can and will be made in a relatively easy kind of way.

I’ve talked to other designers who have commented that Americans are slow to catch on to modern and contemporary styles, do you see that?
Yes, absolutely and I think I understand a little bit of why that may be the case. When you look at Europe and you look at the kind of explorative design languages that come out of there and the more trend setting styles that we all love and are excited by, they’re able to pull it off because European manufacturers are smaller and have less at risk both financially and in terms of the size of their production runs. They’re not doing the kind of volume that American companies run.

America has always been sort of a mass mentality kind of place, and the only way the manufacturers can really survive is to feed that demand. So the risk is greater. They have a lot more invested. They have to be way more calculated and in that calculation, products end up looking the same. No one’s ballsy enough to say ‘Lets try something new’ because there are too many people’s jobs at risk and too much money at risk. But I do believe, at least this is what were trying to do is become that small American company that’s manufacturing their own products and that does explore new languages in new ways.

At this point you are established enough where you can go out on a limb. Has there been one project when you saw yourself really breaking away from the norm, maybe even breaking away from some of your own previous designs?
If I go back maybe 12 to 15 years, before I even knew what design was and what the whole industry was, that’s where my most interesting, amazing kind of creations were being developed. I was in my mid- or early 20s and my drawings had an untainted kind of purity. You’re an inventor. You’re creating. You’re being driven by childhood sensibilities, whatever they may be, that’s where some of the most exciting, fun ideas came out of in those earliest pieces.

I was looking at your Sputnik desk, is that a nod to your background in aerospace engineering?
Yeah, that goes back to my deep love for airplanes and aerospace related objects––whether it’s a space object or airplane fuselage or the technology behind how airplanes are fabricated. When I was a child I spent a lot of time building model airplanes and flying them and being obsessed with man-made objects that can fly. So the Sputnik was definitely an adult version of some of that freedom.

Do you have more designs like that, that come from the same sort of place?
I have a lot like of designs like that but most of them are conceptual in that there’s no reason for them to exist in the real world. One of them was, I designed an earthquake research laboratory. It was a building designed to move and withstand the rigors of earthquakes and be unaffected by them. It was hypothetically located in the Pasadena Mountains and the imagery that came out of that exercise was so incredible and pretty inspirational.

Did the swaying EOS Lamp stem from this idea?
The EOS Lamp is something that’s kinetic in that sense. There were elements of the project that had parts and pieces that moved. There was pendulum that had a laser beam attached to it and once an earthquake began, it would start to move this pendulum. Once it started moving, the laser would create a drawing onto this monolithic laser pad of disks. You would replace these disks after a big earthquake and the disks would be put up on the wall as an artistic expression of each earthquake.

It paid homage to the way earthquakes were recorded in the early days. Then, glass disks, about 18 inches in diameter and sit on a spring and spun beneath a needle. It would sit there all day long until an earthquake came along and it started to vibrate. And the way they etched the glass was by lighting a candle and layering the glass with thick black smoke. When the needle moved it would remove the smoke and leave this etching on the disk. And this was back in the late 1800s. It’s interesting to see how they did it back then and I was just trying to create a futuristic, contemporary version of that process.

What does the inside of your house look like?
Well, I’m recently married so the inside of my house looks nothing like it would look like if I wasn’t married. It’s a combination of two different styles, but it’s a mixture of Bali meets New York loft kind of feeling, with a bit of rustic chic-ness. It’s a lot of––it’s warm, and the best way to describe it would be that there are many little vignettes that have little curated experiences. So there are multiple vignettes within one area and it’s a lot of real, natural wood and has a very earthy warmth to it. It’s not stark and minimalistic, sort of contrary to a lot of the things I make.

Do you have your own designs at your home?
I have two pieces that I designed at my home, but none of the really futuristic kind of things. I have a dresser I designed that’s made out of solid oak and it has an orange stripe going through the top half of it. It has a mirror that sits on top. And I also have a sofa that’s in there, and what else?…That’s pretty much it.

I prefer to keep my private home life and my work life as two separate entities because that way it’s more exciting. It’s like I get to come to work to this other world and get to go home and appreciate someone else’s world. I really love other people’s designs and work and it’s a way for me to pay homage to some of these other designers and beautiful objects that are out there. If I were to come home to my own creations it would feel like an over-saturation. It wouldn’t keep the work exciting.

Who are some of those designers you appreciate?
The work in my house is done more by local craftsman or indigenous people. We have a lot of indigenous works, Asian inspired pieces and a lot of them are pretty old. We have a couple of metal pieces that are sort of rusted, patina metals made by steel workers.

You seem passionate about design but you also seem to have a lot of other interests as well, how did you decide to become a designer?
Ever since I was young I was fascinated by da Vinci and Michelangelo and drawings that showed something technical within them. I admired the Pyramids. Bridges were inspiring to me. The fact the man has the ability to make these incredible things prompted me to build and make things as a young child.

The reward is in seeing the final result, and for me in the process where you have an idea, you sketch it on a piece of paper and you work hard enough on this thing that’s totally abstract and doesn’t even exist, it’s basically just a thought, and then you maneuver a piece of material and the next thing you know you have the object. It’s almost like magic, or sorcery. It’s pretty wild.

Sounds like you could have almost been an architect.
I did study architecture for a while. I took a quick trip to the Arts Center in Pasadena, just to go see what that was all about, and I didn’t really understand what it meant to be a designer or product designer. When you’re that young nobody ever tells you that every single object you’ve looked at and live with somebody actually thought of and drew and had created. Once that realization hit me I said to myself, ‘Wow, that seems like a really limitless career.’

So I like to think of myself as a maker of things––whether it’s furniture or a product or a space or, hopefully in the future, buildings, I think it’s all relatively the same.

Then what will you make next?
The thing I would like to do next would be get involved in movie sets and designing some make believe worlds, behind the camera. And I would love to do interiors for airplanes and interiors for spaceships. That would be great.

Some of your work, like the Aurora Table, even though it doesn’t move, seems focused on movement.
The Aurora Table was part of our Living Furniture series. The idea was to make products that adapt to our moods and have the ability to become dynamic or alive. You can fill a room with Aurora tables and have them all linked to do color sweeps throughout the space from one table to the next. There are random color generations, and more predictable patterns that go through the spectrum. You can set any kind of mood you want by controlling both the speed and the color.

Do you create things with the mass market in mind?
Oh sure. We design a lot of things for existing manufacturers that are available to the masses. However that’s the other side of the business that we do. A lot of these objects don’t embody––it’s a challenge to find manufacturers that have the same kind of enthusiasm that we do in orange22. So the things that we do have out there that are more mass marketable are not an ideal presentation of our work. They finance our explorative pieces. So they’re more driven by money. They’re for us to make money so that we can go out and make pieces that are more explorative but that unfortunately don’t make us money.

We’re waiting for society to catch up with us.