Che-Wei Wang opened his talk at the the 2018 TNW Conference with the idea of “aesthetic value judgements”—instinctual split-second decisions we make when designing a building, crafting a product, or even selecting between nearly identical produce in a photograph. The theme of “intuitive judgements” is an ideal lens to examine the breadth and creativity that Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy (collectively CW&T) produce.
Their online store features strange art-house projects like Time Since Launch or Solid State Watch alongside machined daily carry essentials built to last a lifetime like Pen Type-C or Herring Blade. Each piece is infused with its own curiosity, creative storytelling, and painstaking focus around a set of recurring themes.
I had a chance to chat with them recently as they graciously agreed to answer some questions about their products and their practice. I hope that you will find this conversation as illuminating as I have.
Your site houses a diverse range of ideas, production, curiosities, and points of view. How do you go about generating new ideas for products and how do you know when an experiment has deep resonance with an audience?
Most of our ideas come out of an internal desire for something to exist. Oftentimes that thing already exists, but once in a while, we can’t find a perfect match, so we start by making one for ourselves. We end up making lots of things. For our house, for the office, tools, little bits of software, toys, games, clothes, etc. Once in a while it evolves to become a project that seems like a good enough idea that we think other people might appreciate it too.
That said… we don’t think too hard about how products might resonate with an audience. And not because we don’t want to, but more because we’re not equipped to. We don’t have the overhead to run user testing, focus groups or anything like that, so any kind of speculation we do about how things might resonate would be a stab in the dark. So instead, we’re deeply focused on designing for ourselves. An audience of two.
Since CW&T stands for Che-Wei and Taylor, can you talk a bit about how both of you collaborate together? How much back and forth is involved in a typical project? Are there skill sets that each of you have that compliment each other?
Our skill sets overlap quite a bit. We both write code, CAD, run machines, etc. but we come at problems from opposite angles. Taylor tends to think of things from a systems perspective. She likes to have a comprehensive understanding of the problem before diving in. CW likes to tackle things as if it’s a sprint and continue on that momentum until we run out of steam.
In practice, typically, CW sketches and prototypes a proof of concept over and over until we’re both happy with it. That can take anywhere from a few months to a few years. Once we move a project into production mode, Taylor will do the photography and package design while CW handles manufacturing.
Looking through your shop there are a couple themes that come to the surface for me. One is writing or capture (pens, notebooks) the other is time (Time Since Launch, clocks, counters, Solid State watch). What is it about these ideas that keeps drawing you back in?
I like how you use the word capture, I’ve never heard it in that context, and it really resonates. I wish it wasn’t this way, but putting creative ideas into the world isn’t accessible to everyone, and for reasons more serious than our products address. But I do feel that for some people, and I’m one of those people, having easy access to beloved creative tools can reduce that friction, and ease capture.
Timekeeping is an area that we’re explicitly focused on. Early on I think it provided us a framework, or space to solve within. But today we’re actively interested in providing people with opportunities to better understand or change their perspective on time. It’s central to the way we all live, yet we pay little attention to it and have no power over it. CW has written two master theses on timekeeping, and some of our work is a continuation of that research and thinking.
Honing in on your pen system a bit (Pen Type-A, Type-B, Type-C) I'd love to hear more about the process of developing these products. Did they begin as sequential explorations… a sort of evolution over time? If so, I'm curious what drove you down the path to keep exploring the same idea (a high-quality container for a Hi-Tec refill) in different forms?
Pen Type-A was our first product that really took off. We weren’t expecting such a big response to it. It started as an homage to the Hi-Tec-C. Taylor liked the pen so much we felt it needed a home that wasn’t disposable plastic, and would live up to that reverence. So we made 2 prototypes of Pen Type-A for ourselves.
Our friends suggested we try to launch the project on Kickstarter in 2011. On a whim, we tried raising $5,000 to make 50 pens. We ended up making 6,000 pens for 4,000 backers. That moment changed everything for us, and we weren’t at all prepared for the response.
Before delivering the 6,000 pens (it took two years to figure out manufacturing) we designed Pen Type-B. As much as we liked Pen Type-A as a desk pen, we immediately wanted something more pocketable and thought of it as the ultimate pen. And so we announced to everyone that Pen Type-B would be the last pen we’d ever design.
A few years later, we were approached by Shinola to design a pen for them. We designed a flat pen that’s super pocketable, relatively affordable and still used the great Hi-Tec-C cartridges. After a few back and forths, they ended up walking away from the project because it didn’t fit their cost goals. But we were really happy with the design, so we launched it on our own. Today, Pen Type-C is our go-to pen.
I love that story of how your pen products all built on each other. This brings me to one of your core Principles: "Make it last". In this you talk about over-engineering your products. What role does material selection play in your products and process? If someone were to pick up a CW&T product 100 years from now, what would you want them to take away from that experience?
I think we all want things to last. So we’re just trying to do what I think is the right thing to do. Every engineer knows exactly what they’re doing when they select an inferior material or thickness to save on costs. The trade-off is really simple. There’s definitely the potential to go overboard with the over-engineering, but we try to be sensible with the design, material selection, and manufacturing processes to make a product last for a long time.
I would love it if someone picked up one of our products 100 years from now and still appreciated it as an object. As a designer I think many of us aspire to design timeless designs, but that’s nearly impossible on a 100-year time scale. I’d be curious to find out how outdated they think our designs are and in what way they seem weird and confusing.
Over the past couple months I've had a chance to use two variants of the Pen Type-C. One is raw titanium and the other is a Grade 5 Titanium Orange Cerakote version engraved with it's CW&T product ID: CWT_HSM4PW4_1610. Both feel durable and timeless. ※
