Hi everyone! My name is Paulina, and I go by Pau for short (pronounced pow).

An Ode to Objects

I love objects. I love designing them, making them, admiring them, and owning them. And yet, our relationship with objects can be complicated, especially today. The objects we surround ourselves with are such a testament to progress we’ve made as humans, and are largely necessary in order to live in our modern society. But they also represent a dark recklessness with consequences– environmental, physical, and psychological– that we are now acknowledging and trying to reverse, albeit with varying degrees of willingness and success.

My hope in writing here is to explore how we can balance modern living– and all the objects that entails– with sustainable living. How we can continue to love objects, but reframe and reform how we think of them, design them, produce them, and consume them.

My Journey

I’ve been a designer my whole career, and I’d even say I’ve been a designer in spirit my whole life.

Before university, I spent my time in art classes and art studios. I particularly loved figure drawing because it’s equal parts technical and artistic. Human anatomy and its allowed movements set the rules, and the expression and movement of the drawn figure comes from artistry. To me, creativity is that blend of the two.

I was one of those weird kids who knew what she wanted to do from age 16 or so. I just knew I wanted to be a product designer. I enjoyed my chemistry and calculus classes as much as I enjoyed being in the art studio. As a product designer, I didn’t have to choose between art and science. Instead, I would benefit from enjoying both of them.

I studied Mechanical Engineering at MIT and absolutely loved it. It was a difficult environment, of course, but I went about it my own way and had a blast. I took classes across departments, did research at the MIT Media Lab, and participated in anything that would allow me to design and make more objects. I made yoyos that lit up when they were spinning. I made robots that did pull-ups and others that did gymnastics. I made a bike with handles that gave tactile directions. I made expanding tables, hats, and lamps. And I helped design my class’s iconic class ring, the Brass Rat. (Most of these designed in teams, of course.)

I started my career at Apple, which felt like the only place that could quench my desire to design and make products. It’s such an amazing place to work. I worked mostly on the Mac Product Design team. We were given seemingly impossible problems– like more performance in a smaller package– along with excruciatingly high expectations, all the resources we could imagine, and very talented and hard-working teams to collaborate with. I absolutely loved it. I also spent tons of time in factories, playing detective on the assembly line and fixing problems until the result was nearly perfect. It was exhilarating, and probably still my best work.

I’m so thankful for those two experiences in my life. They are the two most rigorous and creative places I’ve encountered, and only increased my love for working at the intersection of engineering and design.

I continued to do similar work in other Silicon Valley companies like Essential and Google. Then, in 2019, I had to make a change. Although I loved making physical products over anything else, I was having a hard time coming to grips with the state of the industry. Yes, I had worked on different sustainability efforts at all three companies, incorporating recycled material or reducing the amount of waste in manufacturing, but it didn’t change the overly consumerist cycle of production and consumption. I was also really tired of the unbridled techno-enthusiasm and obsessive chase of exaggerated company valuations that were so characteristic of Silicon Valley.

A Fresh but Old Perspective

So I moved to the UK with a few boxes and my bike, and interrogated my complicated relationship with objects and consumerism in a new setting. I was designing tech experiences by day, and diving into London’s immersive art, theater, and dinner party scene by night. I lived in a tiny room, and spent my money on experiences over objects. I satisfied my need to make physical things by cooking elaborate meals for elaborately themed dinner parties. I loved that my creations were edible and inspired great conversations.

Over time, I started to re-engage with physical objects in a different way. While I had worked with high-tech products my whole life, I rediscovered my love for purely mechanical design in the UK’s amazing history and culture of craftsmanship. Here, traditional crafts and trades are celebrated and integrated into modern life in a beautiful and natural way. I took a millinery course, learning to make felt and sinamay hats with traditional methods. I interned at a pleating company that has been pleating incredible patterns for more than a century. I learned bookbinding after stumbling upon a bindery in London. I visited woodworkers and artists in their studios. I found a world that thinks of objects differently: not as commodities to be easily replaced, but as timeless pieces designed to last.

Full Circle

In 2019, in the midst of my existential crisis as a product designer, I also took the Ellen McArthur Masterclass on Circular Economy, which gave me an understanding of best practices for circularity and a vocabulary to better articulate my ever-evolving relationship with objects.

I started to gather and strengthen ideas and opinions on how products should be made, and the business models needed to support those ideas. In many ways, they are ideas that already exist, or that existed before mass manufacturing and hyper-capitalist consumer cycles.

I am now exploring how to balance sustainability and modern living. It’s my love of objects that’s motivating me to explore how to continue to live with and design objects in a constructive and forward-thinking way.

My Aspirations

Here are some examples of themes I hope to explore. While they might be in tension now, I hope to open dialogue about how they might become balanced instead.

• Modern and connected lifestyle vs. sustainable lifestyle
• Individual changes vs. collective, infrastructural, and regulatory changes
• Circular economy vs. consumerist cycles and demands
• Making better objects vs. making more objects (even if better)
• Using sustainable products vs. using existing products
• Growth vs. sustainability in business
• Quality and craftsmanship vs. mass manufacturing and scale

And many more that I’m sure will come over time and in conversation.

I will bring everything I can to my writing, but I’ll always be open to feedback, ideas, or points I failed to include in the conversation, so please don’t hesitate to comment or reach out.

Cheers!

Pau