‘Design that is also research is what we learn in the actual designing of things; of keyboards and desks and tables and chairs and lamps and switches. In making those things and thinking about the people who will touch and use them you generate knowledge, understanding and insight about the future. […] A reason these renders take so long is that even adding a chair to a desk scene forces me to ask questions like; how long does this person sit? What kind of things do they like? Are the proud of their work? What else might they need to do? How might their personality be reflected in the chair? And in exploring and answering those questions I feed the knowledge back into the stories and the world-building.’ — Tobias Revell, “Box114: I suppose it’s a gift. But not a good one.” (2024)

Why post this? Three encounters with technical tools this past week track Tobias’s observations about design-as-research, revealing how material resistance generates knowledge. Fresh from an ssxh session with Tim yesterday, jamming on some user scenarios for our Xamota collaboration in real-time, each CLI interaction prompted questions about context, timing, and rhythm – much as Revell’s chair forced a consideration of its future occupant. While Tim explored user pathways longhand, riffing on his own experiences, I engaged in a rhythmic back-and-forth with Claude (※), supplying recent weeks’ codebase prototypes as prompts, each turn in the dialogue revealing new possibilities.

At Dorkbot Manchester last week, artist Nicola Ellis described her long-term engagement as a “welcomed outsider” at Ritherdon & Co Ltd, a Lancashire manufacturer of roadside cabinets. From using industrial machines to create self-portraits to capturing welding rhythms with light sensors, Ritherdon’s culture of measurement – born of lean manufacturing protocols – has supplied Ellis with tools and materials to reveal the human gestures underpinning industrial efficiency.

These dialogues between tool and intention are evident across scales and contexts. While Ellis’s long-term presence at Ritherdon has supported a sustained immersion in factory rhythms, pattern-maker and graphic designer Paul Hallows is approaching similar questions from a different angle. Teaching himself Fusion 360 for a small batch manufacturing project, Paul’s solo venture into digital fabrication is prompting a careful mapping of the gap between platonic digital forms and material constraints – from surface texture to vacuum forming requirements, and the geometry of connection points. Even in this more contained investigation, tools actively shape the design process, each blockage suggesting new possibilities.

From renders to factory machines, resistance is crucial to discovery and documentation. Without friction, we risk leaping to implement preconceptions rather than identifying new openings or possibilities. In each of these cases, the machine is both constraint and interlocutor, forcing us to confront implications we might otherwise miss.