Author: Laura Entis / Source: Adobe 99U
Husband-and-wife duo Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy have built a following for an array of well-made niche products.
Can you quantify wonder? If so, Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy of Brooklyn’s CW & T studios have mastered it.
Partners in art and life—the pair are married with children—Wang and Levy have amassed an impressive following for their often whimsical inventions, eight of which have debuted on crowdfunding site Kickstarter.
So far they’ve conjured everything from a poster designed to sharpen your ability to decipher scale to an iOS app that tests your internal sense of time and an indestructible “forever jump rope”, in the process melding tech, industrial design and product development with a hint of performance art. Their most successful project on Kickstarter to date has been a $99 minimalist stainless steel pen that raised $282,000 from more than 4,000 backers; its successor raised $148,000.Last month, the multi-talented duo celebrated the shipment of one of their most unusual projects: the Time Since Launch single-use clock, similar to the tickers used to determine marathon winners. Once you pull the clock’s pin, the clock begins to count the days, minutes, and hours of your life, ending at 2,738 years. Designed to mark momentous occasions such as a wedding, birth, or the day you quit smoking, it’s meant to chart your “personal epoch.” But where do such fantastical ideas come from?
In the interview below, Wang and Levy share the inspiration behind their ideas, their process, and how they enable others to connect with their offbeat products.
Q. How did you get the idea for the Time Since Launch clock?
Levy: It started as one of Che-Wei’s thesis projects while we were in residency at the MIT Media Lab. It’s one of several devices we’ve made to alter our everyday relationship to time. Traditional devices such as clocks, watches + calendars are practical but tend to only address scales we’re familiar with—seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, years. Time Since Launch references something much more significant than we can wrap our heads around. It draws inspiration from John Glenn’s Mercury-Atlas 6 mission, where the astronaut wore a 12-hour stopwatch on his arm on launch, synching it with mission control and tracking stations around the world. This created a shared global timezone centered around the mission. The ability to own time like that, to let anyone create their own moment zero, is a beautiful thing, and something we hope to give people with this piece.
“After the initial burst, a prototype will often live with us for a few years before we decide if it’s good or interesting enough to sustain the long and painful process of bringing it to market.”
How do you create these fascinating products?
Levy: On the simplest level, everything we make is something we want for ourselves. We often find a small void or need in our lives, then furiously search for a solution. When we can’t find one that we find satisfactory, we make it.
What is your process?
Levy: We’ve set up our studio and workshop to work seamlessly so we can move an idea from sketch to functional prototype as easily and as quickly as possible. After the initial burst, a prototype will often live with us for a few years before we decide if it’s good or interesting enough to…
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