Ep. 178: Taylor Levy of CW&T Wants to Change Your Perception of Time

Oct 18

Taylor Levy, half of the multidisciplinary studio CW&T, found adventure and drive early as a competitive skier. Now, Taylor and her life and art partner, Che-Wei Wang, root their practice in transparent, iterative processes that span art, engineering, and design. CW&T received the prestigious Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, a testament to their groundbreaking, and thought provoking work.

Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today I’m talking to Taylor Levy. Taylor is an artist & designer with a penchant for taking things apart, understanding how they work, and then putting them back together in a way that exposes their inner workings. She is an alumna of MIT Media Lab, ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) at NYU, and Vassar College. I/2 of the studio CW&T, the other half is her partner in art and life, Che-Wei Wang. They live and work in their Brooklyn-based studio and prototyping shop along with their two young children

Taylor Levy: My name is Taylor Levy, I live in Brooklyn, New York and a I’m a designer and artist. I am half of the Studio CW&T, my partner Che-Wei is the CW and I’m the T. And I do this work because I don’t know what else I would do (laughs). But it is what I love.

Amy: Well, that’s a good reason to be doing it. Something tells me that you probably gave yourself no other options because you love this so much, which is exactly what we’re going to unpack as we talk. But, I like to begin at the beginning. Can you take me back to your formative years and paint the picture of your childhood for me?

Taylor: I grew up in Montreal, Canada. I am the oldest of two. I have a younger brother who is two years younger than me. I grew up as kind of a person who liked to do all sorts of different things and I was really lucky because my parents kind of threw me into all sorts of activities. I definitely was one of those people who are, I would say, an over-programed child. I was really into sports growing up, very much a tomboy. I guess I still am to a certain extent, even as I’m older. I was also really into the arts. I was really into drawing and kind of just tinkering with stuff, whether it was some weird craft that was lying around or melting something to see if I could make or invent something. All sorts of nonsense like that I would get into as a kid.

Amy: You say you were over-programed, does this come from your parents just sort of understanding that there were a lot of activities that you were interested in, or is it also a little bit your babysitter?

Taylor: I think it was very much my parents. I’m third generation Canadian on all of my grandparents side. I come from Eastern European Jewish roots and I think my parents were very much wanting to give me things that they couldn’t have in their life and opportunities that they couldn’t have. And that really played a role through everything that I did. Personality wise, I was actually a pretty serious kid. I did like my alone time. I would get into my own head a lot. But I was also really amendable to going out and trying new things. I was pretty shy, but somehow my parents did something where they instilled a sense of confidence in me, from a pretty early age. You can just go and try this thing and do this thing.

Amy: Yeah, but that’s pretty great, that the novelty of trying new things was something that you got comfortable with early so that the discomfort of putting yourself in strange situations seems like it wore off at a young age. Did you feel like because your parents were offering you things that they didn’t have access to, did you feel a little bit like they were living vicariously through you and was there a synergy between your experiences and what you’d bring home and share with the family?

Taylor: Yeah, they really sacrificed a lot for myself and for my brother and I really felt that, I think very deeply growing it.

Amy: I’m interested in having been exposed to all of this, I mean awesome stuff, but also maybe a little bit of over-programing when you were young. How did that translate into your teenage years? And where in there did you feel like you were finding your agency?

Taylor: I do think I have a lot of gratitude to my parents, to some extent, for the over-programing as a teenager there is this kind of chapter in my life where I was a very high level competitive ski racer, going into early high school.

Amy: Whoa.

Taylor: I was also very scared of it which is why I stopped doing it (laughs), probably at 15 I stopped. I had to go to school, I had place at the ski hill at an academy, so I kind of like, in the middle missed a whole chunk of school and did my lessons in tutoring separately from that. I did that for a year. On the weekends I was always being shuttled off to go and train or race and so I didn’t really have that much time to get into some of the things that happen when you’re a teenager especially 9th grade, it’s really like, I think for teenagers, but it was really nice to have this very physical outlet that I could go and participate in at that time.

Amy: What actually was the motivation for giving up ski racing and did that feel like… did you have to grieve that?

Taylor: I didn’t really feel like I had to grieve with that. To some extent I felt guilt a little bit. There maybe was a little bit of relief on behalf of my parents maybe too. But yet if skiing was a different sport and there wasn’t that fear element that played such a big part of it, I probably would have continued, to be honest. And the school thing was a nice scapegoat

Amy: Did you put yourself into your school work with the drive and determination that you had previously put into skiing?

Taylor: I was a very lazy student until after my undergrad.

Amy: Is that because it kind of came naturally to you and you could get by?

Taylor: In high school, yeah, and I kind of like, that sucks because I learned stuff and I’m fine now, but you know when I got to college I really felt it. I felt that my classmates in college were way more prepared than I was because I just didn’t really apply myself in school. And I kind of went to a school that maybe you could get away with that that was really noticeable when I went to college.

Amy: Interesting. Speaking of college, your undergrad was at Vassar, you studied film and computer science. What were the highs and lows of your college experience?

Taylor: Yeah, I don’t know how this happened, but in my parents agenda they, from a very early age, knew, I didn’t even know that I was going to be sent away to school, after high school, when I finished, I had a boyfriend for a couple of years who was still in high school. I didn’t want to go, but I did all the motions and I applied to the school and I got into a school that was a really great place to be. When I got there I was very homesick and I was a little bit shocked, just because, I guess growing up in Montreal, I had already done that drinking, hanging out socialization.

Like the drinking age is younger there, and so people have a lot more freedom for that at that point. So when I got to college I felt like… it was a little bit shocking to be honest because it really felt like all these people were jampacking this moment of getting away from wherever they were and really wanting to be there right then and there. And I was like, I don’t really want to be here, you know? And I’m really sad. I was overwhelmed by the whole thing and I wanted to be back at home.

Amy: How long did that last?

Taylor: It lasted pretty badly the first semester; the second semester was much better.

Amy: Did you feel like film and computer science was nourishment for your brain

Taylor: The film thing sort of felt like you could do this technical-ish thing also, but also do some creative work. And I had this mentor from summer camp, from when I was like 12 years old. She was my counselor at summer camp and I don’t know why this was, but we became really close friends. She went to Brown at the time and she was studying film.

And I was like, I just want to do whatever she’s doing, Kim is awesome! And then the computer science thing came as like… I was curious about that field and I tried it out and I really loved it. It was really hard.

Amy: So undergraduate sounds like it was kind of tough and not your favorite chapter of your life. (Laughs)

Taylor: Yeah, a lot of it was really good and a lot of it was hard. But I wasn’t really finding myself within any of these spaces so much.

Amy: Okay, so then what did it feel like upon graduation where you’re like, now what do I do with myself and with this major?

Taylor: Yeah (laughs), I had no idea what I wanted to be. But I did know that I didn’t want to go and get a job in the film industry, I was kind of like afraid of any job, to be honest and I really, I went home the summer after graduating and I was always the type of person who would come up with different project ideas.

And I realized very, very early on, I realized this during working throughout the summers of undergrad actually, that I valued being able to have an idea and to execute on that thing, whatever it was, at a very, very young age. I did move home after college. First summer after college I started a company with a friend where we were computer tutors, it was called Computer Tutors. (Laughs) And this essentially resulted in me getting one pretty big client and forming a relationship with an elderly person who I would go to their house almost every day for a few hours and I was company too in the end. At the beginning we had more clients, but this really evolved into me just going over, very consistently, to this person’s house and helping him out. I did this, I would say probably half a year. So that was one of my jobs.

Amy: And that was an entrepreneurial endeavor because that’s something that you’ve built from the ground up. Did you learn from him as well?

Taylor: Yeah I did. One thing that I did specifically learn from him, I remember this. He was writing an email one day and he was like, always start your email with, “I hope you are well.” Don’t ask it like a question. (Laughs Y)ou’re not going to get a response to that question, just offer your hope towards them. I do that now, often (laughs) in some form, whenever I have communications. So it’s one mark he left on me.

Amy: How did you sort of grow and evolve from there?

Taylor: I also had this other company idea that I started (laughs) that summer also and it was this company called Pod Peels… it was at the time when the iPod had just come out and I was going to make these covers, cases for them, with sublimated graphics that were drawings I was doing in Photoshop of sneakers and skylines. I designed these little pouches for iPods and then my laptop as well and went throughout all of Montreal and sourced the fabric, the fabric printer, cutters and sewers. I found a person who printed little labels and I would have those sewn in there, designed all the parts for them, designed my business cards, designed packaging. (Laughs) I would package them in these cassette tapes because they were exactly that size.

It was time to start selling them, and I had them in two stores. And I was like, I’m done with this, I can’t, I can’t take, like all the fun of it had happened. I had solved and made the thing, but I was like, I don’t want to be in this business forever and I’m just done! (Laughter)

Amy: That’s a crucial experience though because you really learned where the fun in it was for you and it wasn’t necessarily the gaining momentum of the business after you’d done all the problem solving. Even though sales is its own problem to solve, continually. But you’re more into the tangible aspects. So you got into two stores and then you pulled the plug or what did you do? (Laughs)

Taylor: Montreal is a really small city and I was really nervous about going into stores and talking to people about this thing that I’d made and like I didn’t want to be rejected and I didn’t want, you know, it’s such a small city. I felt embarrassed and shy about it and I really didn’t like that. And so I just ripped the band-aid off. I cut my losses

Amy: Is that still the case?

Taylor: Yeah, I have more perspective on it now than I’m a grown up. I can talk to people now and I actually like… if you don’t like something, tell me why, let’s talk this through. Everybody is going to have their strengths and weaknesses and it sounds like being cognizant of it is at least half the battle, you as a fledgling entrepreneur, with your first design project, but you weren’t a trained designer, so this is something that you just pulled yourself through out of sheer curiosity and gumption. So what did you do after that?

Taylor: My boyfriend and I broke up, it was very tragic for me. I also had another side project with a friend, we were making a documentary movie about a jazz singer, her name is Nikki Yanofsky and she was performing at the Montreal International Jazz Festival. And our movie was kind of culminating that summer at the Jazz Festival.

I was working on that and had this lovely friend who was my partner, she’s an amazing writer/storyteller. And I was going through this really hard breakup, still doing stuff with my computer tutoring. I was getting more into learning about web programing and Flash at the time too. And then I also at the time was spending a lot of time reading blogs, like Cool Hunting, which was a huge blog at the time. There weren’t very many and I remember seeing Cool Hunting visited ITP, where I went to grad school, where I ended up going to grad school, interactive telecommunications program at NYU.

And Josh Rubin, who is one of the founders of Cool Hunting did this piece on this artist, Tristan Perich and his drawing machines that were being shown at the ITP Show. And I was like, what is this? And I saw that, submitted an application that was really a bad application, I didn’t have anything. I had kind of the things that I’d been doing (laughs) over the years, but I don’t think I submitted even a portfolio. And sent this application in, forgot about it completely and then one day in like November I picked up and I was like, I’m moving to China. I was very, very heartbroken from this breakup still, it had been like months at this point and I was like, I just need a change of everything.

I don’t remember what the impetus for this was, but I was like, I’m moving to Shanghai and I literally booked a flight that left in like a week, with no return ticket. And I had coincidentally my best friend from childhood, who I went to school with my whole life, we weren’t great friends in high school and college, but we were super, super close friends as children and she lived a few blocks from me. I wrote to her and I was like, you’re in Shanghai aren’t you, and she was like yeah. I was like, I’m moving there, I’m coming in a week. And she was like, great, I need a roommate, I just had to leave this master’s program in Beijing, let’s do this! And I was like, amazing! (Laughs) I moved there, with no return ticket, supported myself through teaching English on the weekends. She had just quit this English teaching job and I essentially was her replacement for it, which was really nice.

Amy: Wow, that sounds like the most impulsive thing I’ve heard.

Taylor: Yeah, it was a huge turning point. I really needed a reset and a change of scenery, I needed to be alone and when you don’t speak a language that’s as different as Chinese is from English or French, you really can be alone in the most profound way. I experienced that there and I really, it meant so much to me and it helped me. I was alone but I was also safe because I had this person who we were very, we still are very dear to each other.

Amy: How did it help you?

Taylor: It helped me heal from this relationship in many ways. I think when you’re in an environment that you get used to, you start to think about yourself in terms of all of these things that are outside of you and that you already… that you know so well and that you’re comfortable in. You start to define yourself by your friends or your family, and even define yourself through other people that you don’t know and you don’t speak to, but are still there and near you. But when you’re in an environment that I guess is so unfamiliar, for me, it forces you to feel yourself and really get to know who you are and you don’t have these outlets or these spaces where you’re safe and where you’re familiar and comfortable. I think that was a very profound thing for me.

Amy: Yeah, it sounds like it. I’m sure there’s aspects of it that helped you forge your identity, but separately from that, it sounds like it helped you see yourself without the filter of everything around you, so that you could know what was truly you, what was real Taylor versus what was the reflection.

Taylor: Yeah, yeah and it also let me just feel things too, I didn’t have expectations on a day-to-day basis.

Amy: How long did that chapter last?

Taylor: So it lasted six months. During that chapter I got a letter at my house, I guess, from ITP to say that I had an interview scheduled and Midori, who she still works at ITP, she was like, she called me one night in the middle of the night and did this interview. It was in the middle of the night for me. And I was like, oh my gosh, I don’t even know what just happened, I definitely (laughs) made this person think I’m really crazy! I did get into the school and my parents received the letterand they were like, you’re going. I moved to New York and yeah, that’s where it all got good.

Amy: That’s a lead-in, let’s hear it! (Laughs)

Taylor: Going into ITP, I had a lot of preconceptions of what I wanted to do. This is so embarrassing to say, but I wanted to have a web start-up, if I was to name that thing, all of my imaginings were to have some web related start-up business. ITP is the type of place that people come from all different backgrounds and they will support you. If you’re focused and you are into something, it could be rubber ducks, it could be building the next Facebook, that’s sort of how it was at the time. If you’re into it, there’s people there to support you. And I think that was what’s so beautiful about the place, because very early on I felt like I had permission there to just try these things and try being a person that I didn’t even know was a possibility. And I started making art projects from, I guess from my first semester in. I didn’t do it on purpose and I didn’t call it that, even then. I remember having a talk with my dad at some point and telling him what I made, and I was like so excited about it. He was like, oh, so it’s art? (Laughs) There was silence. Like, yeah, I guess so. My first semester I made this piece, it was an electronic, it’s called 24 Switch Pixel and it was 24 light switches arranged in a row that controlled the RGB, the red/green/blue value in binary of a single pixel. And I was really excited about it and I was really interested in this idea of creating with technology and figuring out where the person sits within these spaces. In this case I was taking something that’s traditionally imperceivably small, like the bits inside the computer and placing it at human scale where you actually physically have to move and can move and rearrange bits.

So I was very interested in this idea of where does the person intersect with these tools and specifically tools, technological tools that can be used as a means for creative expression. That first project went off really well at the final show at the end of the year. But my second project that I was like really, really excited about, it was essentially built this little pinhole camera and this LED that I would control with a motor and some software that would go on and off. I turned the tiny bathroom that I had at my apartment into the interior space of a camera, but also the world too, of the light as well. And I was like controlling the light, the only source of light was this single LED that I would turn on and off and take these three hour, three to five hour exposures. And I would sit in this dark bathroom and every night, I think it was 24 of them, 24 exposures, like I would sit… sometimes I’d do two a night and then I’d expose it… I’d develop the picture right away in the bathtub afterwards. It was a really small bathroom. So I’d sit in the bath and wait as my software ran, did the exposure. Sometimes I would mess with the camera a little bit too, develop it and then be done with it and then do a new one.

And it took probably like half a month to make all of these things and I was so psyched about them. And I remember I had a really nice spot at the show to show them, but nobody had seen them. The reaction from people at a show in the context of ITP and there were all these projects that were very more obviously technologically… there was flashing lights and robots and all this stuff. And I had just these line up of like 24 black and white photographs. I still really liked them, they’re in a box somewhere and they’ve never seen the light of day since. But I felt very much like the sting of this isn’t what people want to see here.

And it felt shitty at the time. I still today am curious of why that is. I want there to be a space for that in the world of media arts or what people call or classify as media arts.

Amy: It sounds like a moment. Do you ever wonder if it wasn’t just the output, just the photos that you made, but if it was also documentation of your process, that it would have helped people sort of have access to it a little bit more?

Taylor: Yeah, you’re completely right about that. I did take some photos of my bathroom, it was a bad way of installing that work..

Amy: I guess that’s an important distinction within you to kind of make work that you really like, that you’re excited about and proud of, that doesn’t get received well. And so that dissonance there is almost something you have to learn to be comfortable with. It sounds like it didn’t make you feel in any way like you had done bad work or question yourself as much as it just felt really uncomfortable to work so hard on something that nobody else really got or appreciated.

Taylor: I didn’t recover from it right away and my next pieces were very much ones that used the material of electronics as a way of literally expressing some of my ideas. It was more like bookmark that stuff, hopefully one day I could go back to it. I was bummed about it actually. It was like a longing of why can’t I do this

Amy: So I want to get into your life as a professional and I know there’s a whole chapter about MIT, Media Lab. Can you walk me through why that was important and how that led to you becoming a professional?

Taylor: I think we were professionals before MIT. We started our practice before MIT.

Amy: So Che-Wei and I, we met at ITP, we became really good friends, actually during that second semester of ITP. Our first professional project was with someone who is a dear, dear friend today still, a woman named Kiera Alexandra, she’s an artist graphic designer, runs a studio called Work-Order, they’re awesome. And at the time, she was working on the party for Obama when he was first had gone into office. She had this vision where she called Che-Wei up through Kevin Slavin. She called him in and Che-Wei… first of all, she didn’t know who Che-Wei was and he met with her on Christmas Eve of 2008.

And she was like, I have these huge screens, I want it to look like all of the media is just very quickly exploding on to these screens, that will have giant laptops next to them. And I want it to feel like Twitter is coming through it and I want there to be like live cellphone feeds going through it, pretty much every single interactive media you could possibly imagine in 2008, she wanted to have, to be like flexibly controlled and played through these massive screens. She came from more of a TV background and programming is something like that in the TV way, is a very challenging thing. Even at the time, there wasn’t such a thing as JavaScript frameworks at the time too. And Che-Wei was just like yes, yes, yes, I can do all this. And then he called me up and I was working on this internship in Arizona over the Christmas holiday at the time and he was going to visit his family in Tokyo. He was like, I just said yes to this project, can you help me do this? And I was like, sure, this sounds cool, we can just build this through JavaScript and just control whatever inputs she wants and have players for them and we’ll just be in the background controlling them with a keyboard. It was like this epic software project (laughs), really, really epic and thrown together at the time.

I still, when I think about it, it brings me so much joy, like very nerdy joy, of having made this thing. It was really fun and a few days before the actual event, Che-Wei and I were working really hard on it and Kiera was like, I need to see it, please come here, I need to meet Taylor. We show up at her house like 4:00 in the afternoon and we show her and we’re like, we’re still working on this stuff. And we ended up spending the entire night, she was really nervous that we weren’t going to get it to work and she just kept feeding us and ordering us sushi and giving us good drinks, teas and whatnot. At 2:00 in the morning I was like, we’re not leaving are we? And he was like, I don’t think so. (Laughter)

So she kept us captive for 16 hours coding at her kitchen table. And we’ve been friends ever since, both with her and me and Che-Wei, it was kind of the beginning of spending very intense working moments together.

Amy: It sounds like the collaboration and the collaborative dynamic with Che-Wei started first and I mean we know that he’s also your life partner and the father of your children and you’re a family as well as a studio…So things go really well from that kitchen table forward. Can you kind of walk me through how your… yeah?

Taylor: I don’t know. Che-Wei was like, I like you, and I was like, I’m not ready, I don’t like you. There was a little bit of that for a few months and then yeah, we ended up having a romantic relationship started, I guess about six months later. And with Che-Wei and I, we were such good friends at school and being with him was like a very easy… he’s a very easy person for me personally, to be with. And I’ve been in relationships in the past that have made me feel like I can’t be who it is I am and Che-Wei always lets me be who I am. That’s life-changing for me. Not that we don’t have our issues, we have tons of issues…

Amy: Thank you, that means you’re human. (Laughs)

Taylor: Yes.

Amy: So did the romantic relationship also sort of accelerate this idea of collaborating together as a formalized studio or were they… how did the two of those work in harmony?

Taylor: It felt just like very natural to be honest. We started our studio, after we graduated we were both like, we don’t want to have full time jobs, we want to figure out how we can continue this energy that we had from grad school, continuing to make things that we want, but also figure out how to support ourselves. And so at the beginning we just said yes to every client that came along. And one of those clients was this man, Bobby Silverman, who is a ceramicist. He was like, I need a website. So we made him a website for $500. And when we visited him in his studio, he was like, “Why don’t you guys get a studio here? Let’s go look around the building?”

He introduced us and we found this 200 square foot studio that was $400 a month. It was the bathroom alcove, that literally was the address, BA501. It made it real and we had our money from our first website, which was our money for the first month's rent. And we needed insurance to rent a place there, so we formed an LLC because we had to. And it just kind of all went from there.

Amy: How did the clients start rolling in?

Taylor: We were really lucky because of ITP I would say. Our mentor who introduced us to Kiera at the time, at the time there was a lot of weird software projects that were happening, like big interactives, mobile interactive screen stuff and that was kind of like our jam. And so every six months to a year we would have one of these pretty big client projects and we’d work really hard on it for six months, heads down and then we’d have a little bit of flexibility… still have obviously free time, we didn’t have kids at the time. In our free time we could make other things that we wanted to make.

Amy: For context, this is around 2009/2010? You’re a multidisciplinary medium agnostic studio. So you’re making a lot of products that are really conceptual and really profound, but also maybe don’t exactly have a pathway for distribution or an ideal user or something like that. And so talk to me about how your studio operates and the kinds of products and projects that are coming out of your studio?

Taylor: Yeah, I think a nice segue from where we’ve just left off to that is we wanted to… I’d say at the beginning it was 80% client work on software projects that we weren’t very passionate about, but they paid the bills, 20% free time fun stuff. And we really wanted to figure out a way to skew the amount of time we would spend on stuff that we enjoyed and also make the stuff that we enjoyed into things that we could make money with. We got really lucky because Kickstarter was just starting out at that time. And so we had made this product that we launched on Kickstarter in 2010, we had a lot of success back then. I think it was one of the first design projects to be on the platform…That was Pen Type A. Our original goal was to sell 50 of them to our friends and we were like, no, there’s no way we could do this. And we ended up selling over 6,000 of them.

Amy: Oh my gosh.

Taylor: It was insane. And pretty life changing for us.

Amy: It sounds like because you sold 6,000 and you had to fulfill this, but didn’t necessarily have manufacturing in place, that’s the sort of oh shit of okay, now how do we fulfill all this. Therein lies this incredibly difficult, pressure filled, messy crunch. It sounds like you sorted it out (laughs) and…Then I’m extrapolating here, but what you’ve learned from that experience also you took with you into the next projects.

Taylor: Yeah, yes. We learned so much that we now… we got to a point, we’ve over-corrected so that if we, and when we used Kickstarter on a next project, we knew A, that something would go wrong, that we would not expect, so we were prepared for that eventuality. But we also knew that we needed to have all of our ducks in a row from the get-go. I think that’s where Kickstarter is a tool, it starts to get less interesting because it’s a place now where a lot of big companies use it as a marketing platform.

And I think they’ve tried to do things in the past years to make it more of an integral part of the creative process and you don’t necessarily have to have all these things lined up in order for you to put something out in the world. But you know, people think of it like a store and it’s a really, it’s a difficult thing, it’s a difficult tool to use.

Amy: Because mostly what people are pitching is a prototype. They have the prototype and they need the financing in order to get the ducks in a row, if it’s truly part of the creative process. If you already have your ducks in a row, then you’re just using it as a marketplace.

Taylor: Yeah, yeah and for us, as a studio, we have a house that we’re set up in a way that we have machines to prototype pretty much anything we want, in our basement. That is something that we realized was valuable to us very, very early on, this feat of being able to go from an idea or a sketch to the thing in your hand, within a day. That is like instrumental to the way we like to work. And I think that…moving forward, moving forward we want to make, not just… we want to make that streamlined, not to a thing that’s a proof of concept, but to a thing that we can actually put out in the world, but all within this very, very close, small loop.

And that’s kind of where we’re trying to tighten that loop. As the years go by and refine it so we can be as quick as we want to be, and expressive as we want to be and make things that aren’t necessarily mass appeal goods, but help tell a story or reveal something about… or change your life in just a slight way that changes your perspective on something in a way that’s really meaningful, that there hasn’t been a something to help you do that before.

Amy: One of the ways you do that is through the products that you design that deal with time. And I wonder if you can unpack that a little bit for us? You said earlier on in our talk that there was a moment where you really decided that owning your time was important to you, so you had the space to explore your own ideas and execute on them. Then there’s another moment in time where you did these really long exposures, like sometimes two in a night and time has to stand still while you’re there in the bathroom waiting for the camera to capture everything around it. And so I can see that time has had an impact on you, but I’d love for you to describe some of the products you’ve made and how it changes your perspective and your relationship with time?

Taylor: We have three time pieces right now, one of them is called Time Since Launch, that project actually started as Che-Wei’s thesis, or as one of his thesis projects. He’s actually done two theses on time keeping and the idea behind these time pieces is really to… we look around us and we mostly have our cellphones and watches and clocks as ways of keeping time. And time is something that’s universal really to everybody. I think that’s a really beautiful part of it too. No matter where you come from, how much money you have, what your life story is, that’s a ground that us as humans can all connect on.

But we don’t really have any tools around us to change our perception of time or help us with our understanding of time or our relationship to time. We’re mostly constrained to this 12 hour clock, which seems really arbitrary when you start to think about it. And we’re kind of just asking this question: What would it be like if you had something that had a device, a timepiece that would connect you to a timescale that was way bigger than what… not only your day, your second, your moment, something that’s humanly perceivable, but completely outside the realm of your lifespan or even your, I don’t know, five generations from now. And so Time Since Launch is this product where you get this device and you pull a pin when you’re ready and it essentially helps you launch an epoch. That moment that you launch the pin is like your moment zero. And some people… the easiest way to explain it is like a lot of people are like I wanna launch my epoch when my kid is born. So they have this thing that they can refer to that shows how many days/minutes/hours/seconds since I was born. We like to think of it also as just like, yeah, a lot of people get them when they get married and make it part of their wedding ceremony. So they have this device… and I should also add that it counts 999,999 days, so almost one million days and that is 1023 years, or 24, something way outside of the scope of our lives. This thing is engineered in a way that the batteries, the single battery, the batteries that it comes with will last for over 40 years. You can hot swat them because there’s backup capacitors on the device that you can take the batteries out and within a minute put new ones in and it will keep time. If ever it breaks, your moment zero is burned into the e-prom of the chip, so you could send it back to us and we’ll be able to… the code is also open source for this project, but you’ll be able to recover that moment zero, which is like a GMT timestamp, at any point if the thing ever breaks.

Amy: What I think is so profound about it is not only is it beautiful in a technologically sexy way, but what’s profound about it is it makes anyone who pulls a pin or connects with it in any way, think of themselves in terms of their own personal epoch. I don’t think I’ve ever really even considered time in that way. I certainly have considered myself to be one small granule in the middle of an epoch, but not that I have my own or that this moment in time in which is my moment zero that I’m pulling this pin, will frame it so that I’m cataloging all the moments going forward. I’m in that way also paying attention to the evolution that’s happened since then. And I have that moment zero to always mark… I mean I think that’s so poetic. And ultimately this is a sort of poetic symbolic work of design, but it’s incredibly engineered so that it actually functions in the way that you’ve designed it to. You’re not just making an artistic statement with it, you’re backing it up with science in such a way that makes the poetry real.

Taylor: Yeah, I hope so (laughs).

Amy: There’s an incredible amount of effort, energy, technology, iteration, that goes into something like this in order to really make an artistic statement. You’re kind of subverting this whole capitalistic model of product for money.

Taylor: Yeah and it’s also in many ways too trying to subvert this whole capitalistic or top down model of time being something imposed on all of us in like BC, you know, when we 2022, it’s all these… there’s these structures that have been imposed on us and we’re kind of just offering the possibility for anybody to think that they… to have new tools, new ways of looking at things.

Amy: New measuring and marking devices, yeah.

Taylor: New ways of measuring. I also liked what you said too of, a lot of the times we as humans try to, we like to think of ourselves as these tiny blips or grains of sand, and I think that that perspective is really important. But there is also an important perspective of giving yourself permission to be important. I like elevating that humanity and giving tools to people to elevate their own personal humanity and agency within, and their impact within the broader picture of things.

Amy: Yeah, so another one of your products that I’m sort of fascinated about is called Super Local, it’s another time marking device, but this one is a little more practical, but in the same way it’s taking the clock that is so generic and applicable to everyone and customizing it so that it actually demarks your day or counts your day that’s more meaningful to you. I think that’s also a really important way, and it’s so simple and visual and I’ve spent… I’m sure we all have spent a gazillion hours trying to find the right to do app or time blocking app or calendar app that helps us sort of manage our time.

But it’s not something you can just look at the clock and say oh, you know, it’s almost time to pick up my kids, or oh, it’s almost time to start meal prep. And in such a way that’s so unobtrusive, there’s no ding or alert and it’s almost like in the background so you can constantly have a little bit of a sense of where you are in your day, but without being beholden to it.

Taylor: Yeah, that is very much what we’re going for. It’s a 24 hour clock, which isn’t revolutionary, people have made 24 hour timepieces before, but it’s also… it begins with a blank face, right? And it can be jarring, like the first time I actually started using it, I was like, it was confusing to me to even just get used to that 24 hour face and I was like, which things do we put down first? And very early on, and I recommend this to anybody who has one, is just put down where you go to bed and where you sleep. Just giving yourself a visual cue and awareness of how much of your day is spent awake and how much of your day is spent asleep, there’s breathing room all of a sudden within the clock.

And every moment is not treated as this tick of equal weight, you know? And I really want it to emphasize that space to breathe. There’s parts in your day that you can then add, like I do pick up my kids from school here, I wake up, kids wake up, kids go to bed, I go to sleep. Those are the things that I do. And then I can look at the whole thing and it’s all of a sudden like a diagram of transitions for me during the day. And I can ignore it essentially, until it’s time for those transitions to happen. When it is time for a transition, no, it’s not dinging or vibrating in my pocket, it’s a suggestion.

Amy: I think that’s actually what’s so powerful about it is that you can ignore it until there’s time for a transition. Without it, I find that I have to keep checking the clock and calculating how far I am until my next transition, how much time I have to do this task or something like that. And so there’s a beauty to have that silent diagram just there, that you can refer to and kind of know the rhythm of your day without having to do any sort of mental work around it. Your studio is the two of you, you’re also a family, your process, I would love to get into your creative process. But before we dive into the granular details of what that looks like, I do want to acknowledge that in 2022, this year, you were recognized with the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, which is a pretty big deal, and so congratulations! (Laughs)

Taylor: Thank you.

Amy: This must feel like the opposite of that moment at ITP where your photographs were not received (laughs) very well. But honestly, I would like to ask you how has this recognition landed for both you and Che-Wei, both on your hearts and your psyches and in terms of validating your work? I guess I’m interested in the more human aspect first and then we can talk about maybe if it’s changed your studio at all?

Taylor: Yeah, this was a huge deal for us. I’ve never said this publicly, but when we got the notice that we were invited to submit a portfolio, I thought it was one of those design awards that you get solicited for. And Che-Wei saw it and he was like, “Did you see this?” He’s like, “It’s a big deal.” And I was like, oh, because I don’t come from the design world at all.

And we’re not award people, we’re just trying to get by in our studio every day, we don’t have time to seek out these opportunities, unfortunately. So it was very out of the blue for us and Che-Wei was like no, this is a huge deal. And our friend Kiera, who I mentioned before too, when she found… we told her and she actually helped us too with putting our portfolio together and proofread everything for us, and all that stuff. She was like who I trust with everything. She was like, “Taylor, this is a really big deal!” (Laughs) And I was like, okay, I believe you all now. So yeah, there was me just understanding the gravity of it, I guess, was a big thing.

But it was like a really nice opportunity to kind of take inventory and sit back and put together a body of work in a way that I hadn’t because we were just moving forward through these things and doing things. We don’t often take moments to just take a second and step back and really look at the bigger picture of what we’ve been doing and write about why are we doing this work. So on top of everything, I’m really grateful for the opportunity to just pause and do that, which was a really nice thing to come with the award, it felt really nice for Che-Wei and I, to have this together

Amy: Not only is it revisiting all your projects, but it’s also with a magnifying glass and finding all of their defects and also having to regurgitate all of the difficult emotional origins of these projects that you already have given birth to. It’s almost like re-giving birth, I think, and then also with a really critical eye, reorganizing your children and editing them. (Laughs)

Taylor: Yeah. It was a very intense process and a tumultuous couple of months that we spent doing that. Che-Wei was like, it doesn’t even matter, we’re not going to win this, but maybe we’ll be finalists and let’s just do this. I’m really grateful even for the Cooper Hewitt for noticing a practice like us, because we kind of… because we work across so many disciplines, I feel like people don’t know where to put us sometimes.

Amy: You are difficult to categorize because the nature of your work is so sort of undefinable. But that’s also, I think, what makes a lot of what you’re doing so compelling.

Taylor: Yeah thank you, I’m just really grateful for the Cooper Hewitt and the jurors, to be able to see that and step outside the usual comfort of their existing definitions for a design studio and for seeing us, it just really means a lot to us.

Amy: Well, congratulations again. I hope it sinks in and changes you in some way, it would be interesting if you were to pull a pin from the moment you won and sort of see if that kind of recognition and acknowledgement actually does influence your evolution in some way.

Taylor: Yeah.

Amy: I’d love to talk about your creative process. I think your creative process is really fascinating and a worthwhile discussion. So much of it is available for anyone who wants to witness it, to witness it, because you’re really transparent and you share everything, you document things obsessively. So can you talk about A, the importance of documenting, but before we even get to that, just give an overview of how you and Che-Wei work together. From your website it says that your practice ‘centers around an iterative process of sketching, prototyping, testing, writing code, machining parts and building each addition ourselves to assess our intuitions around improving our everyday experiences.’ Which I love by the way, that’s really clear. But I actually want to go back underneath it all and talk about your intuition to start. The products that we’ve already talked about do seem to come from a very intuitive place, of how do we make the way that we’re moving through the day have more ease or breathing room. How do you acknowledge these intuitions, discuss them and decide which ones to assess?

Taylor: Che-Wei and I both work very differently. I’ll tell you a little bit about how we both work because it will help make it seem plausible that we actually get anything done! (Laughs) intuition is very much an important part, as you were saying, of our creative process. Everything that we make is something that we want for some reason, whether that’s like a very practical everyday thing or something that’s more of a poetic, not necessarily traditionally useful thing. I feel like it’s useful, even if it’s not useful by the traditional definition of utility. I’m a lot slower with my process, Che-Wei is very fast with his process. Our utility blade is probably the best example of this.

He was like, I want to make this thing and I was like, I don’t want to make a knife. (Laughs) I just flat out objectively do not want to sell a knife on our website. And he made this thing and I was like, it actually… he showed it to me and I was like, yeah, I actually really like it, it’s awesome. And that will happen often, for both of us. I’ll come up with a thing that I have this idea and he’ll be like, hmm… he’s more positive than I am normally from the get-go. I poo-poo his ideas a little bit too much sometimes, it’s kind of mean. But he overflows with confidence and this ability to just throw things out there and be cool with it and be cool with messing stuff up. I’m very protective of my time, because of having kids especially. And so it hurts me in a way because I can be very slow and private about things, more than him. It takes me time to come up with the thing that I want to do, yeah, our process looks a lot like, we sketch stuff, we use Fusion 360 to make 3D models of most stuff that’s physical or back in the day, and I don’t do this that much anymore, but I think we both use software too as a way to prototype ideas and functionality of things. I used to do this a lot, that you can build a model of something quickly in software and just see, very quickly, how using it feels before you have the thing in your hand making the thing in many different mediums helps you figure out actually what that thing is, if I ever get stuck with something, I’ll switch mediums immediately and try working on it in a different way.

Amy: That’s really good advice. For both myself and my students. Do you switch to writing or to software or to 3D modeling or to paper and scissors, whatever you need just to get into a different flow?

Taylor: Yeah, most often it’s writing because that’s the most practical useful thing, because eventually we’ll have to write about whatever it is, so I know that that will be of some utility later on. But yeah, switching, it all feels like the same type of making to me, but it helps you understand the thing.

Amy: About eight years into your studio you and Che-Wei formalized your guiding principles and wrote them down and I wonder if you would share some of that or unpack some of that with us.

Taylor: It’s funny because we made those guiding principles probably like really, really early on. It was also like a switching medium moment really for us. You’re making things and you’re building a studio, let’s write about this studio and see what that looks like even. And these guiding principles, it’s funny because we did look at them, we look at them every so often. Sometimes when we give talks, especially to students, we talk about our guiding principles. So we always have to look back at them and make sure, do we still… check-check, is that okay. (Laughs) I think it’s kind of cool because they have stood the test of time so far for us. And some of them are like really obvious, I feel even embarrassed saying them. But I guess you can read about them when you go on the blog post.

But one of them that I guess has the best story behind it is ‘buy lots of lottery tickets,’ and also requires explanation. So Darius Kazemi gave a talk, I think at XOXO one year where he’s a Twitter artist, or he’s an artist of all types, but at the time he would make all these Twitter bots. And some of them would go viral and groundbreaking and some of them just didn’t fly. But it’s this sort of idea of there is like… don’t think of everything you make as the be-all and end-all solution to life or whatever your studio is. Just keep buying lottery tickets, keep making things. Sometimes they hit big. We’re not even looking for the thing that hits big. Che-Wei, I guess it’s more of a Che-Wei thing. He’s just constantly making stuff and I think the constantly making stuff is an important thing because it doesn’t have to be a thing that’s necessarily, you’re going to sell a gazillion of them. But you could make a small amount of them and really impact a group of people in a profound way.

Amy: I think what was so powerful for me when I read it too is this idea that there’s no correlation between how much time is spent working on a project and the ultimate pay-off.

Taylor: Yeah.

Amy: The underlying ethos of this statement is that you keep making stuff, you keep trying, some of them fail, some of them work. Just because you spend a lot of time on it doesn’t mean this is going to be the thing that pays off. But if you treat it all like they potentially have the chance to pay-off, then you can feel lucky and passionate and optimistic about every project. As long as you also keep it in perspective, that not all of them are going to be winning lottery tickets. That feels like a very healthy way to pursue creativity. And it is a little bit like gambling, but you have to be willing to invest yourself because if you half-ass it, it’s definitely not going to pay off. So you have to invest yourself as though it’s going to pay off, but not kill yourself if it doesn’t. And the pay-off, of course, varies, right? It depends. It may not be received well by, in terms of sales, but maybe you’ll get a Cooper Hewitt National Design award several years later, you know what I mean? The pay-off is kind of a moving target in and of itself. I think the fact that you two chose to stay small and are unapologetic about it is also a very important piece of this because you kind of, from the beginning you understand what’s fun to you and where it starts to lose its fun and you will not compromise that.

At the same time you also really carve out space to be who you are, which includes a family, and that there may be snack time in the middle of a Zoom call, if that’s what happens, that’s what needs to happen, which I think is really refreshingly full spectrum human. So the fact that you kind of just call it out and own it is, I think, really powerful. One other thing I really want to talk to you is… well, it’s sort of refers back to one of these, but it’s also very much in the way that you express and your obsessive documentation, this idea of sharing everything…it’s part of your DNA in terms of even why you like to work, you like to see how things work and you like to make that accessible and so sharing is part of that. I wonder if you could unpack that one a little bit?

Taylor: I feel very privileged that we get to do what we do every day and even thinking back to what my parents were allowed to do as jobs, they weren’t allowed to have jobs. My dad wasn’t allowed to have a job like this, his father was not allowed to have a job like that. And I feel like there’s a certain generosity that we have to have to show other people as much as we can, and model for them that it is possible to have a creative practice in your life and show every different facet of that. Maybe it’s not your whole life, but I think showing people glimpses of it and showing glimpses of how we make a certain thing will help people identify pathways to potentially use similar techniques or just really give access to and maybe unearth some part of their creative process that’s not going to look anything like ours, but hopefully, I don’t know… My ultimate goal is really to just show people that if they have something in them that they want to get into the world or if they want to let out of themselves, kind of break down as many barriers as possible for them, that we can… there’s the internet now, so there’s lots of those barriers being broken and there’s amazing tools out there now that weren’t here 10-20 years ago, that give access also. But for me it’s, I like sharing because it helps to show how these things can be possible and how they come to be. It also helps connect you with the thing that if somebody does buy something, that just having access to how this thing came into the world is really important and valuable. And as a culture we’ve become very disconnected to that as somebody who like you, is interesting in the inner workings of things, I think it’s both poetic that that shows up in the products of your labor, but also really powerful that it’s in your execution of everything that you do too. And for our listeners, you can witness a lot of this on their Instagram, which is @charliewhiskytango. We do have an Instagram, but we also newly have a Discord for our studio. Che-Wei actually had this idea a few months ago and I was like, I don’t have the bandwidth to have another thing, it’s hard enough to have Instagram. But our Discord is not super crowded, but it’s pretty cool. We have a few hundred people on there, I think now, and people share their works in progress. We have one channel on it where there’s somebody who is remaking our Solid State watch, who has bought one. Remeasured the whole thing, has like a 3D file and he was like, we have some actual technical problems with making these things that we’ve stopped making them because we’re trying to figure it out we haven’t been able to solve it.

And so we have this person who has been experimenting for the past couple of months on he’s making his own Solid State watches at home and he posts pictures of these things every day with like different movements in them and it’s just like… I had no idea what this Discord would be. I didn’t want it to just be like more work to do, but it’s so beautiful to have a product that’s being made publicly by this person who bought the thing and he’s just making his own version. I don’t know where it’s going to lead, but when else would that have ever been possible? (Laughter)

Amy: Right.

Taylor: Right? I just think it’s really cool. And people also share projects that they’re working on, whether they’re electronics projects or design projects. Somebody posted a light that they made the other day. It’s just kind of nice to see and it’s like a nice outlet for folks who like making stuff.

Amy: Yeah and it sounds like a nice way to expand the community and the passion around what you’re doing and not have to just be the sole content provider or the sole voice of expertise as you’re putting out what comes from your studio. It’s in more dialogue now with the things that other people are doing and that seems really fun and really fertile.

Taylor: Yeah, it’s been really cool..

Amy: I’ll put a link to it on our website. Throughout the course of your work you’ve clearly developed significant creative agency, on land, I think in space too, I think you’ve done some projects dealing with space and time…

Taylor: Yes, Che-Wei’s side project is space.

Amy: Okay. (Laughs) And you navigate the uncertainty of the design process on a daily basis. I’m wondering where you would place yourself on the adaptability scale and what is the thing that can still unravel you?

Taylor: Things are really good unless, as long as everybody is healthy, my family and my friends, stuff is fine. That’s all I need. It’s a big ask, but that’s it. Otherwise I’m pretty adaptable.

Amy: And what’s on the distant horizon? Where do you feel like you’re evolving? What’s your soul pulling you towards?

Taylor: I mean my soul is still pulling me in a lot of ways back to those photos. Weirdly. And I have been manifesting some of those things very quietly for the past few years and I’ve given myself some… not as much, but I’ve taken chunks to give myself permission and space to do more personal creative projects that I know… I just need, they make me feel human and alive and they’re not for anybody else, but they’re really explorations of what it means to make with technology. And that means painting and carving with stone sometimes. It’s part of my teaching practice too, is exploring these ideas with students. I just have… I’m curious how that’s going to take form in the future for myself and how it’s going to come into CW&T.

Amy: I’m looking forward to that too. Thank you so much for all your candor, for sharing your story and I feel like I’ve learned so much from you and about you and I think it’s exciting that it starts with skiing (laughs), there’s something that’s really improvisational and symphonic about sports right, and very adaptable and responding to your environment. And I can see that you are still an athlete. (laughs) you also have this incredible sensitivity for the world around you and you’ve carved out protections and guardrails for these really ephemeral ideas like time and intuition and so in many ways I feel like you’re really, you’re doing it in the best of all the worlds. So thank you, thank you for sharing with me.

Taylor: Thank you so much, thank you so much, that really means a lot.
Amy: Hey, thanks so much for listening. For a transcript of this episode, and more about Taylor, including images of her work, and a bonus Q&A - head to cleverpodcast.com. If you can think of 3 people who would be inspired by Clever - please tell them! It really helps us out when you share Clever with your friends. You can listen to Clever on any of the podcast apps - please do hit the Follow or subscribe button in your app of choice so our new episodes will turn up in your feed.We love to hear from you on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter - you can find us @cleverpodcast and you can find me @amydevers. Please stay tuned for upcoming announcements and bonus content. You can subscribe to our newsletter at cleverpodcast.com to make sure you don’t miss anything. Clever is hosted & produced by me, Amy Devers, with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan and music by El Ten Eleven.

What is your earliest memory?

A hail storm in Montreal. There were golf ball sized chunks of ice falling from the sky. A skylight in our house broke. I remember the sound and watching through the window mesmerized as ice balls hit the balcony and bounced.

How do you feel about democratic design?

The more access, the better. Not just for design but as a general rule for all things.

What’s the best advice that you’ve ever gotten?

Be generous, be brief. Marina Zurkow said that once in a class at ITP and it’s stuck with me. I don’t know if that was the best advice or even advice. Whatever it was, it rings in my head every so often.

Early podpeels designed and created by Taylor

How do you record your ideas?

A sketchbook, an email to myself, notes app on phone.

What’s your current favorite tool or material to work with?

Soapstone. My Nana (my dad’s mom) is a sculptor and used to carve stone with us as kids. She’s 93 and recently closed her studio and sent us her tools. We’ve been carving at home with our kids.

What book is on your nightstand?

Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor and The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté.

Why is authenticity in design important?

Over the past several generations, and especially with the miniaturization and encapsulation of computer technologies, we’ve gotten used to an increasing disconnect between the things we own and where they come from. We’ve lost the sense that there are very real people, humanity, that sits below the surface of everything we own. Anything we can do to close that gap is incredibly important. Whether this is through designing in a way that reveals how something was made, or how it works, or even an honest account of why it is personally meaningful. It’s not stuff that makes our lives richer, it is people and stories.

Taylor and her husband and design partner, Che-Wei Wang

Favorite restaurant in your city?

I love going to Ashbox in Greenpoint, Brooklyn near where our old studio was. It’s a little family-style japanese lunch spot, owned and run by one person.

What might we find on your desk right now?

A camera lens, a bunch of LED samples, 4 Pen Type-Cs, 2 SD cards, a Time Since Launch PCB, an envelope with notes from my son’s doctor scribbled on it, sunglasses, chapstick, a chunk of brass, a screw, a crystal, eyedrops, a stack of bank cards, a medical bill, scissors, 2 Herring Blades, calipers, headphones, my arms.

Who do you look up to and why?

Ha. I’m going to say my partner Che-Wei. I really admire how level headed he is about so many things. He does what he wants with so much boldness, doesn’t overthink things or worry like I do. He can also pretty much fall asleep on command.

What’s your favorite project that you’ve done and why?

If I had to pick, I think I’d say Solid State Watch. I like the project because it is a conceptual piece that I get to wear, and really love wearing, everyday. This project began as a celebration of the engineering behind the Casio F-91W movement, but it is really about the experience of technological obsolescence. Objectively if you look at this project, we took a perfectly good piece of technology and made it worse. We get a lot of flack from people about this, probably for good reason! Many people see it and think we are being flippant or gimmicky. But that really isn’t the case. I deeply value the idea of creating a space for a more nuanced and intimate relationship with technology. With Solid State Watch, you receive the timepiece set to your desired timezone and the electronics are permanently cast in transparent resin. You cannot adjust the time, use the alarm or replace the battery. It just tells time. Gradually, otherwise imperceptible imperfections within the electronics will surface, and time will drift. And the adjustments you make are not directed towards the watch, but towards yourself. Mine is set to EDT and runs 10 minutes slow after 3 years :). So yeah, it’s a really crappy watch but I love it.

What are the last five songs you listened to?

I rarely listen to music while working because I can’t do more than one thing at a time. Che-Wei controls the music playing in our house. My past 5 things played on spotify are circle round story podcasts for my kids from a car trip.

Taylor and Che-Wei receiving the Cooper Hewitt Design Award in 2022

Where can our listeners find you on the web and on social media?

cwandt.com and guiding principles

Instagram

Discord

Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.