CHRIS BAKER
Industrial Designer.
Published December 1 2023 for Issue 01. Interview by: Chandler Crump
Photography by: Chandler Crump
Stylist: Chris Baker
CHANDLER CRUMP (CC): So last night you did spoon carving?
CHRIS BAKER (CB): Yeah. My hands are so sore, oh my god. Like literally, I feel like a grandma.
CC: What kind of knife do you have to use for that?
CB: A lot of the times when [my RISD classmates] hang out, we’ll do a skill-sharing thing. So last time I did cyanotypes. It’s this straight knife and a spoon knife. You cut them like a mom cuts fruit, but a less scary version of that. It’s a lot of grip strength.
CC: Did you have to use your recently healed thumb for that?*
*In July, Chris deeply cut his thumb with an automatic saw, leaving him with several stitches and no nail.
CB: Yeah, I think that’s part of the reason why my spoon turned a little wonky.
Chris lifts up his carved wooden spoon. It’s great in my opinion, clearly a work in progress but nonetheless impressive. He puts it down off-screen as we settle into a comfortable formality.
CC: What would you say is the log line to your craft?
CB:...What’s a logline?
CC: [In other words] What are the first few sentences of Wikipedia on who you are and what you do?
CB: Oh god. I mean, I feel like one of the nice things about being a designer is you can sort of manufacture the separation between your work for work, and your work in general. Like I have my work and then there’s the work that I do and get paid for. One of the things I care about and [what] I’m good at is this manipulation of form in objects, and I really like subtly destructive things. Like, things that don’t look exactly how you think they look, or working how you think they work, or sort of taking everyday experiences to a different place.
A lot of my work centers around the idea of the every day and the disruption of that as sort of a perfect moment for intervention for change…the disruption of preconceived notions of what something should be, how it should work, how it should be made.
CC: And is that for utility purposes? Are you trying to find an intersection between [utility and design]? You know, is artwork for you simply design and are you only trying to create things with a purpose…?
CB: Yeah, one of the difficult parts of design is the negotiation between what you want and what the world might want because, unlike a fine art object, you have different kinds of stakeholders with designed things – it has to work for somebody else versus with art, it can express [whatever it expresses to the viewer]. I’m less interested in perfect utility than classic industrial designers, and more interested in where the intervention of the every day is. It will still work but it may not be as comfortable and I’m not intending for it to be comfortable necessarily. It’s the intentional disruption of that comfort or the sort of soft side of that – the emotional interaction with those objects and how you can change that by modifying utility.
Chris chuckles as if he knows that was a mouthful of thought.
CC: When was that ‘Aha’ moment for you with creating things by hand and looking into pursuing that career on paper at a university?
CB: I mean, I’ve always been interested in art and making since I was little.
CC: Yeah, you were always good at every art class in high school. Your architecture, silver, glass-blowing-
CB: It was always in high school – some of those Mrs. Wolf classes – where I was like “Oh!”. Also, I was raised by people who work in business and money and stability, and all of that is really important. Having an expressive career that doesn’t have to be [monetarily] sacrificial. Sometimes it still feels that way: “Do I become one of those designers who tries to save the world, or do I become one of the designers who wants to pay their rent?”
We laugh.
CB: I think [the ‘Aha’] was definitely…that’s a…I don’t know. I mean, one time I had a dream about lanyards when I was super little. I used to love making lanyards. I think I was 12. I used to make them for my parents and family-
CC: I was bad at lanyards. I would literally braid them, I could never do the hard designs-
CB: Yeah. I woke up one morning and realized that in my dreams I had come up with ten different new patterns that I hadn’t seen before. Dreams could be generative – sometimes dreams just feel like they’re weird mod podges and collages of things you already know and feel during the day.
CC: You were in my dream last night. It was weird.
CB: What were we doing?
CC: We were trying to save this young woman and her daughter from this evil lady who lived in the basement of this Silo-like world that was in the spaceship because the last of humanity was traveling to this new planet.
CB: Girl, what.
CC: It was several different genres. It started off as a zombie virus.
CB: We have such different dreams.
CC: I think it was because I was watching Mission Impossible last night.
CB: The night before last I genuinely had a dream that I was doing errands.
This is what makes us such great friends.
CC: I feel like a lot of people have a moment in their childhood when, even if it’s finding hobbies, where they’re like “Wait, I like this, and I’m good at this, and I want to do it and am I allowed to do this?” Like whether it’s sports or crafts or singing or musicals or acting or whatever, it’s nice to be able to find something you’re good at that you actually like. It almost feels like a secret sometimes when you’re a kid and you’re good at it.
CB: Sometimes it feels embarrassing.
CC: I’m not a good knitter and you know that.
During the Summer, Chris and I would meet up to work on our knitting projects. A relaxing hobby for early adulthood individuals like us who couldn’t pass the time with fishing in the Hudson, sports, or the Hamptons.
CB: I don’t think you’re bad.
CC: I can’t purl. But, if I was good at it when I was a kid it would’ve been my whole personality.
CB: I’m good at knitting – when I was little I was really good at learning things from the internet and that’s a skill I’m really good at. I can watch one video of someone doing something. Origami phase, lanyard phase…If we sat down and I showed you how to purl, you’d feel it’s easy.
CC: So have your inspirations shifted over the years, in terms of finding inspiration from other people in your field?
CB: A lot of my inspirations come from super talented talented makers, whether it’s glass artists or spoon carvers or people who have a craft – capital C-Craft – that they’re just incredible at. In terms of making objects – conceptually, I think a lot of my inspiration comes out of disagreement.
One of the designers I think about the most is Naoto Fukasawa. He amongst other things is one of the original designers for Muji. His entire design ethos was making things melt into everyday life, so the idea of once you start thinking about how to walk, you’ll start walking weird. The clearest example of that is Muji’s pens – once they’re in your pencil case, you don’t think about which pen to grab; writing just melts into your hand. I think there’s a lot of beauty in that, and I love his work. But at the same time, I think there’s sort of a missed opportunity there.
I’m really interested in this idea of elevated consciousness of actions and of our roles in the world, what we’re putting out, and what we’re taking.
CC: A self-awareness, or elevated consciousness in terms of design – you need to design with purpose?
Chris laughs.
CB: I think alot about the shelf. I don’t know how to explain that. It is really product-focused, and for most of the things I make I’m not interested in mass production. But because of the nature of the field, I often think about “What if this object was mass produced”-
CC: For sure-
CB: And I’ve been really interested in the idea of tempophagy, which is a Queer Theory term. It means time-eating-
CC: Time ink?
CB: Time EATING.
CC: Oh!
CB: It’s like a term used for plastics – plastics that eat time, that consume and digest these millions of years of compression of dead plants and animal material that produced them into fossil fuels. It consumes those millions of years and digests them into a plastic spoon you throw away in an instant. It consumes time and shits out waste. It’s a term that is applied to plastic but I think putting that onto the inanimate material is less effective than applying it to the people who are actually the ones eating that time by creating that material.
CC: Oh yeah.
CB: I’ve been thinking alot about ways we can grow time or farm time rather than consuming it-
CC: It sounds like Inception to me! Or Interstellar…
CB: Whether that’s a material experience or a material intervention, things like Mycelium or biocomposites or bio-assembled materials…
CC: So would you consider yourself an environmentalist?
He laughs, as if obvious.
CB: Definitely. I think everybody should be.
CC: An environmentalist designer?
CB: That’s a funny question. That kind of goes back to the designers who want to save the world versus the ones who want to pay their bills. I really lean back and forth – I tend towards [it] really heavily and it’s where my brain and heart want to go. It's challenging because it’s still new, so especially in a school setting, the crit[ique] begins and ends with “Wow that’s cool, you make it out of a material that I don’t make things out of”. It’s hard to get deeper crit[ique] on more nuanced aspects of things.
I’ve been thinking of different methods of farming time whether it’s producing… what’s that word? The things your parents give to you?
CC: Inheritance?
CB: No, like objects passed down…
CC: Heirloom?
CB: Yeah! I think the two different [common] approaches are either designing for discard or for regenerative discard. What if throwing something away could be good? What if we could make that a joyful and positive and regenerative experience rather than one that’s imbued with grief and death?
CC: So like throwing away furniture? Jewelry? The mundane like utensils?
CB: This semester [at RISD]-
CC: Perfect, I was about to ask about your latest projects-
CB: I grew a coffee table out of Mycelium and hemp hurds. The latter is an agricultural waste product. The material is not revolutionary. I’m not interested in trying to revolutionize materials, there are better people with degrees who are better suited for that. But I’m definitely fascinated by ways in which we can incorporate those materials into our everyday lives because those materials do exist and they do work. That coffee table is right over there-
CC: Wait, I need to see that right now.
CB: It had a glass top.
CC: Wait, that’s crazy.
CB: It’s only one quarter. It was designed to be modular.
CC: So you can move it around [easily]? It looks like styrofoam.
CB: Sustainability is expensive and classed, and I really enjoy finding little ways where it can be affordable [even though] people choose not to make it [that way] because they want to make their buck.
CC: Like glass straws for $30.
CB: Exactly. I only had enough Mycelium to grow a quarter of it. Two-wide would actually be four-wide and a sheet stack of something [like glass on top].
Chris demonstrates how the shorter pillars become a shelf for books and the taller ones hold the surface of the table.
CB: That table was designed for the catharsis of throwing away. So inside every pillar is hollow and stuffed with feathers and hemp hurds.
CC: Cute!
CB: I wanted [the table] to reference materials like the fruiting bodies of the mushrooms they’re grown from-
CC: Woah!
CB: But also club-like for when you live in your college apartment for a year, you purchase [the material] flat and line them up and they grow together and die because you don’t add water….
CC: So this coffee table is dead right now? Did it used to be green?
CB: Yes, and it’s always white. It’s the roots of the mushrooms. It’s very strong.
CC: How long did it take to grow?
CB: About two weeks. Instead of using MDF which has chemicals that are petroleum-based and wood chips that take decades to grow, it’s hemp hurds which are a waste product. And the mushrooms can grow this table in three weeks total.
CC: I’m shook. And glass is a natural material as well.
CB: Yes. Moving is always super stressful so you could have this table for a year or longer and it will last. And if you move you could throw a moving party and break the table apart and bash them against a door frame and spread feathers everywhere and then compost it and leave! No guilt. It contributes back to this biological waste stream, adding nutrients back into the Earth.
CC: Wow. It’s August, and every corner of NYC was filled with Ikea furniture for moving season a couple of days ago.
CC: So would the dream job be to create a company that is in competition with the Ikeas of the world where furniture is not only designed aesthetically by you, but is also not contributing to huge waste?
CB: I don’t believe in any huge-scale companies like that because shipping is a huge environmental problem.
CC: That’s a good point.
CB: It’s a fever dream of an idea, but I would love to start a localized company with a really defined waste stream that does something similar in an affordable way.
A company I look up to a lot is Coffee Form based in Berlin. I have immense respect for them because they’ve been offered to scale [up] so many times and have said “No, peace and love” [so] it’s actually good and not a watered-down idea that’s become bastardized by scale-
CC: Like Blank Street Coffee!
CB: Yeah, like any sustainable company that ships internationally basically.
CC: I feel like there are so many parts of the process of being a consumer, like ordering online and that carbon footprint, getting it home, packaging, using it, and how temporary or long-term one’s living situation [is]. Also, the aesthetics that are trending.
I still have all the furniture I started with, but I actively went through phases of wanting to get rid of the furniture I started with because of trends, but now I've passed that hurdle of what’s trending and I’m satisfied with my taste. It’s hard when we’re living in a consumer-based economy and social status quo. Do I want this because it’s the new “aesthetic” like the fucking cloud couches or the squiggly mirrors….there’s so much.
I’m curious if your taste has changed as a designer and do you feel yourself being influenced by the market?
CB: That’s another place where there’s a difference between my personal thoughts, beliefs, and work, and the work I’m doing for school or for money. I love brutalist aesthetics – not theory. I love material [like] unfinished wood and concrete. Anything that is what it looks like, I find [its] tactility really engaging. Creative ways to manipulate those materials in form but not in materiality. Wood is fascinating because you can carve the same piece of wood in twenty ways and the grain will look infinitely different.
Because materials don’t change, I find my taste doesn’t change but I will see new things and fun ways of manipulating them that I find impressive or interesting.
I do think of trends a lot. With my clothes, I will be a victim of trends from time to time.
CC: Same.
CB: And [trend] needs to stay where it should stay. There’s a place for trend – generational expression, a reaction to what was before, that’s all taste is. The hegemonics of what’s in and out.
CC: But sometimes the trend is a year, and sometimes a decade of the same thing.
CB: The whole idea of microtrends [isn’t] new or real-
CC: What would a microtrend be since I’m off the internet recently?
Chris laughs sheepishly.
CB: No idea.
CB: [My environmental design] needs to be net good. So [doing that] where we’re not sacrificing culture or comfort or the joy those things can bring.
CC: Plastic straws?
CB: All of the bio-plastic straws that don’t melt in your mouth are made of bio-plastics that have to be anaerobically composted. What that means is it needs to be taken to an industrial composting facility. So if they fell in the dirt or ocean, they would be there for hundreds of years.
CC: Agave and bamboo straws too?
CB: Yes. There are companies doing fascinating work by putting enzymes or bacteria into the plastics so when they reach certain environments, they’re activated and they eat the plastic. But they’re manufactured in a way where if you throw them in the dirt, they won’t compost.
CC: There’s really no winning in a capitalist society, is there?
CB: No, there isn’t.
CC: Good thing we’ll be going into space, you and I. Like in my dream.
CB: My dream is to become Geppetto.
CC: In Pinocchio?
CB: Yeah. I want to make little cabinets and sell them to the people in my town, whether that little town is New York. Go out into the forest, cut down one tree a year, plant ten, and just make a little cabinet and sell it to little people-
CC: What kind of tree?
CB: -Make myself a little puppet son-
CC: Well that ties into my next question.
CB: -He’ll have a cricket that loves him-
CC: And not be trafficked by foxes, yes.
CB: Okay I haven’t watched the movie in a long time,
CC: It’s really controversial. It’s actually the craziest shit on Disney Plus.
CB: Damn.
CC: Like it’s out of fucking control. It’s crazy.
So we spoke about your North Star and the guiding principles behind your craft. I’m wondering if you want a legacy – if you could describe your ideal footprint in the [design] industry, what would that look like?
CB: My interests go in so many directions right now. I have ten different answers.
My end goal is to make something that has a huge sweeping net-good impact. I would be okay if my life boiled down to straws. I don’t even know, it’s too early in the morning for this.
I don’t want to be known for an individual object. I would love to start a company that could be one of the first ones to actually perform an actionable change on the economy. Make legitimately net-regenerative products that are actually enjoyable. Within capitalism, that’s the best thing you can do.
CC: If you had unlimited funding what would you use it for?
CB: I’d buy an apartment and a studio and one-by-one take as much time as it takes to make every single thing in that house down to the wooden spoons you cook with. That would be so much fun. [Even] the tiles for the bathroom.
CC: What do you wear right now for making and designing?
CB: Acne Jeans or Amemento shorts. Depending on the day, my Camper Lab boots or my Marni sneakers for comfort. I’ve had to start romanticizing the destruction of those objects as marks of my time and work. My Marni shoes are basically cyanotype.
CC: Des vêtements avec vérité? What are your favorite pieces of clothes?
CB: For pants, my 90s Vivienne Westwood sailor pants I bought with you.
I really love the [cyanotype] shirt I just printed and the one I’m going to make. My Acne Studios cashmere-wool giant brown hoodie. It’s like being in a sleeping bag. It’s the best thing in the entire world. And my favorite scents: Vetiver 46, Marrakech by Aesop, or Frederic Mal.