It is personally an interesting time for me. I always like going to ICFF, going to other design shows, seeing new things — things I've seen online, but in person. That's super valuable and fun, making connections, putting faces to names. It's this one moment when there's just a big density of activity in this space that I'm very interested in happening here. So that's cool.

But as a company, we've never really done anything for Design Week, and coincidentally I always seem to be traveling when it's on. But also, when we have a new product to launch or something new to talk about, we generally just talk about it. We don't usually wait till there's a lot of noise happening about design.

The ICFF gift shop is going to be very high on my list — that's going to be a banger. Our buddy Charles Constantine is doing this night light show, 'DUDD LITE', where he invited a bunch of people to make night lights, and I'm pumped to go see that. Also, Kevin and I have been helping with a student design class at Keene University — an industrial design course centered around designing some hypothetical products for Craighill — and some of the students will be showing work in the WANTED section of ICFF. I am very much looking forward to that.

I think there are some obvious upsides to essentially liking my work, liking what I get to do. There are a lot of things I'm personally interested in that I get to justify doing through work.

I do a fair amount of stalking of online auctions — furniture auctions, accessory auctions — and occasionally place random bids, and sometimes the office ends up being like the depot of strange furniture auction wins. And I really do have a weird love for manufacturing processes and being inside factories. I feel lucky that I get to visit manufacturers every year, get on the floor, and get a deeper understanding of how things are made and the different types of solutions for problems.

I feel like there just isn't much of a gap between my personal and professional design interests. Sometimes my personal creative instincts are a little wilder — I might take bigger risks buying a totally bizarre piece of furniture than I would designing an object for the company. But it feels very much like one and the same thing to me.

Richard Sapper is like all time, possibly my favorite designer. So many cool fucking designs. Joe Colombo, another one of the greats. There's this designer Philippe Malouin, everything he does gives me that pang of envy. He's just a fucking amazing designer. Then there's Industrial Facility, Max Lamb, Jamie Wolfond, Jumbo… too many to list.

And then there are some very famous designers who seem maybe less cool to openly praise, but they're famous because their work is awesome — Jony Ive, Marc Newson, Jasper Morrison, Naoto Fukasawa. Those are some of the biggest names in industrial design, but the work speaks for itself.

There's something that's kind of wormed its way into my brain, which is that when an object is designed with deep care and love — when people have really poured a lot into it, not just checking the boxes — that feeling comes through in the final object, whether or not people are conscious of it. I've come to firmly believe that.

We just put a lot of care and attention into sometimes not obvious details, and I hope — and believe — that some element of that comes through to people when they encounter them. Even if the logo is worn off and it's become a more anonymous object. You see this with vintage items — even if the maker or designer is anonymous, you can tell if the thing has a little bit of character and soul and spirit, and somebody cared about the making of it.

I hope there's some subconscious recognition that someone really cared about creating this object. And then some kind of delight. There has to be underpinning functionality — I'm very much architecturally trained, everything needs to have a purpose. But I increasingly think that sometimes that purpose can be to delight. That shouldn't be at the forefront, but some element of it is important for giving products some kind of life. There should be some joy or beauty or fun to it — done within constraints, not the dominant thing — but that feeling should be present.

I hope that they're like, wow, this is a really functional object — because the wine key does open a great bottle of wine — but also, boy, that was fun, and this is a cool looking thing.

I believe that caring more about your environment and the built world — the objects you surround yourself with — makes life more interesting. The making of things, and for people to have a deeper understanding and connection to the things around them, is like our somewhat lofty goal. Whether or not that's a Craighill product, whether or not the things we make are things people care about — if we can engender more curiosity and understanding of the objects in people's lives, that's the grandest dream in some ways. That's fundamental to my curiosity and what I try to spark in people.

And then on the more practical side, it would be a collection of objects that resonate with enough people, perform their function in a successful and beautiful enough way, that they become — for lack of a better word — iconic. That's a personal aspiration. You want to design things that culturally last in addition to physically. That means we've done our job well as a design team — that we've been thorough enough, creative enough, and put enough love into it that it holds up remarkably well in comparison to everything else out there.