Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy are CW&T, a two-person art and design practice that exists as a container for their creative work. This work is media, scale, and material agnostic: a bespoke piece of electronics, an artwork, or a pen. Everything starts as something hyper-functional and useful to them, and once in a while, an object seems like a good idea to offer to the rest of the world. So, they make more. CW&T creates forever tools for the curious few, transforming how we consider work, life, and time.

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Photography by Bryson Malone, Oliver Yuan, Shubhankar Singh and Shane Singh, courtesy of CW&T.

Che-Wei: I think it happens in little bits. I don’t know if there's one turning point, but we met as students and were already working on projects together for school. It just naturally became a thing that we were working on client projects together. At that point, I guess we became a studio, but we also meandered—we did some external client work and then switched the studio back to doing internal work, making our own products. It’s happened maybe a few times; we switch in and out, figuring out how we want to put out into the world. Nothing is planned. We’re still just trying to figure out where we live in this world as a studio.

Taylor: CW&T also arose from a very fundamental question. We both came out of school; we were doing work that we were very passionate about, that was intellectually stimulating. And we had this question: is it possible to continue this work and also feed ourselves? Our practice is really just answering that question again and again—asking the question and answering it. That’s what this is.

Che-Wei: I love constraints. Constraints are incredibly helpful. When we design things, I would call them more principles than constraints, but they end up becoming constraints. One principle is that we always try to simplify things (almost to an extreme), not from an aesthetic point of view but really from a functional and manufacturing point of view. We’re really trying to simplify it down to the bare bones: “this is all it needs to be the thing that we want it to be.” This often leads to a minimal aesthetic or a single-function device. Simplicity is a pressure that’s always being applied to the things that we design.

At the same time, we’re also interested in revealing how things are made or how things are constructed. Or, if it’s electronics, we want people to understand how the electronics work. So, one of the things that we’re always trying to do is reveal things. If we have a hardware detail that’s really complicated, we’re okay with showing it. It ends up becoming part of the aesthetic. We’re okay not trying to cover everything to make it look super polished and even and neat. We want people to understand how something works and feel more ownership over an object because they can understand how it works. I think that principle shows up, hopefully, in every product that we make.

Taylor: We started in software very much because of constraints. It was expensive or inaccessible at the time (2009) to manufacture stuff in lower quantities. It started to get easier and easier over the course of the mid-2010s, but back then, if you wanted to get something into the world that had all of your thoughts, software was the best way to do it. You could get a lot done; you could reach a lot of people; you could tell a story.

Now, we work a lot in titanium. We do this not only because it’s one of our favorite materials, but because when you machine something out of titanium, what you ask for in the computer is pretty close to what you get in the end. This is markedly different than making a wooden stool or something out of softer material, even though we do like to work in other materials too. We want our things to last for a long time. We want to have as much control as possible from the very beginning. In software, what you code is what you get. Likewise, what you model in 3D is what you get in metal (for the most part). I see a through line in that.

Taylor: Usually, we don’t have to defend our design decisions because they’re in the thing and it is what it is. But the Time Since Launch decision is consistently something that we have to defend. It’s a single-use launch clock: when you pull the pin, it counts for a million days from the day you pull the pin, which is over 2,738 years. Our friend Josh helped us tremendously with the electronics. He was essentially responsible for turning our crappy electronic prototype into a manufacturable thing that actually delivers on the initial vision—a low-level piece of electronics that lasts a very long time.

When we started working together, we knew that people were going to want to backdate these. And we get emails once every few weeks from people who are like, “I'm having a baby in two weeks, but I have my other kid. I want to get a Time Since Launch for them too. Can you set it for two years ago?” We say no. The answer is always no.

From the inception of this project, it was important for us that humans were present whenever a Time Since Launch was launched; it’s a way to create epochs that are at a human scale. Usually, an epoch is outside of our realm of being, but this allows regular people think about and integrate an epoch into their everyday life. So, we want people to be there for every Time Since Launch that is launched, so we have to repeatedly defend that decision.

Che-Wei: When I’m designing things, I’m always subtracting. It’s a constant subtraction process because I think it’s very easy to add things: “Oh, I wish it did this, and I wish it also did this.” In our process, those get snipped out as we’re designing. It’s not like we review things and say, “Time to get that out.” As we’re sketching and prototyping, we’re inserting and removing over and over again. We are trying to prove whether an idea is worth adding or not. In most cases, it’s not. We mostly say, “That wasn’t good; that wasn’t good; that wasn’t good.” And then, once in a while, we’ll hit something that’s the right way to go, and then we keep moving forward.

Taylor: We have Pen Type-C, which is a bookmark pen with a clip. The clip was added at the very end of the design process. Our friend basically told us, “This thing needs a clip.” If we were on our own, I think neither of us would have added the clip; it is what it is without it. I still kind of think that, even though I use the clip all the time!

There was another time when Che-Wei was trying to make a clip as an add-on for Herring Blade. It was clever how he was trying to build it; you didn’t have anything to screw onto and couldn’t attach the clip in an obvious way. He developed a nice solution, but in the end, the design was kind of cumbersome. It didn’t make a lot of sense visually, and it had a wrong feel to it. I had to say, “We don’t need this. Herring Blade doesn’t need a clip. It’s not adding that much value, and that’s fine with us.”

Che-Wei: A lot of clips can be extraneous, and we definitely argue for the zero-clip side. I think it’s because clips are hard to design, hard to integrate with product’s overall design language. The Pen Type-C clip is so simple, but we made so many prototypes before landing on the right design. It took a while to get there.

Che-Wei: We’re starting to build more electronics and mess around with software again. We’re coming back to software and electronics because they’ve become so much easier to build in recent years. It’s been really fun, and we have a whole bunch of electronics projects lined up.

From a studio perspective, the things that are going to stay the same are the things that have always been the same. We want to stay small. We’re not interested in becoming a bigger team. We like the level of control and responsibility that we have. We do want to have more output, but I think that’s going to come through the use of new technology. It already has. As new technologies show up, we’re able to put out more work at a faster rate. So, that’s how I imagine the studio moving forward: staying small but being able to do more.

Taylor: We’re kind of always at this point where we’re gardening what we already have. A good percentage of our time is spent building all the systems so that everything runs as smoothly as possible, and that’s a lot of work. We have over 100 systems right now, which is a lot. Our team is us and one other full-time person and one part-time person. I know that there’s so much gardening that we can still do to make it as pleasant as possible for the people who are working with us. When we bring on another person, I want to build their corner of the garden and make it perfect for them, so they can just get in there and tend it. We have a big body of projects. We do like making things, so we will continue to launch products, but I want to make sure that our garden has all the stuff growing constantly and out there and available. I want it to be a nice, consistent presence.

Che-Wei: STATION Design. I like their model. They’re doing drops of basically handmade products. They’re making stuff that they want to see in the world. Some of the products are one-of-one; others they make a few of. When they sell out, they sell out. They move on to building the next season of products. I think it’s a really cool model, and more people should do it. It’s a good way to make stuff.

Taylor: I agree. They’re nice people, fresh out of school. I also really like Tadashi Studio. I like his work. I think he’s a very good designer. He made this little clock. He works well with constraints.

Che-Wei: There’s only one of these in the world. It’s a spatula that a master blacksmith made, and I begged him to give it to me, and then he gave it to me. It’s our treasure.

Taylor: It’s our thing that we would take if our house was burning down. It’s really the best kitchen tool, probably the best tool we own.

Che-Wei: The album Son by Rosie Lowe and Duval Timothy. It’s clear to me that they’re just doing what they want to do. They each have a very particular sound, and they came together to make this album. In my mind, it’s a perfect album.

Here’s a film that is in our internal manifesto of "we need to be more like this"— Parasite. If I could ever make a product that is as thoroughly considered as Parasite, I would be so happy.

Taylor: I’m on a big Virginia Woolf kick right now. I just read three of her books. Her way of building worlds is so sensitive and precious and brilliant. I like this idea that you can spend a lot of time in a world, and it takes work and time for you to stumble upon and seek out and find these really beautiful moments. It’s not thrown at you. But when you find them, it’s life-changing, and they’re just words in a sentence. If I could do 1/1,000th of that with my work in this world, I’d be pretty excited. The Waves is my favorite. I just finished To the Lighthouse, and that’s a very close second.

Che-Wei: Meditation.

Taylor: We both wake up pretty early. I exercise every morning, and I play piano when I’m home with a piano, sometimes for two hours a day.

Che-Wei: A paperclip. We were at this store called Modulor in Berlin, and they had a nice selection of paperclips, all different shapes and sizes. There was this one particular paperclip where I was like, “Man, this is such a smart design.” It tickled all our principles and constraints. It’s one piece of metal bent on top of itself— a single piece of material, a single manufacturing process, probably a few dies. That’s beautiful.

Taylor: It’s like a butterfly clip, but way better.

Che-Wei: Both give up and don’t give up. People don’t give up on an idea enough, but they give up too early on themselves. So don’t give up on yourself but feel free to give up on ideas. Ideas are cheap. You can keep working on new ideas. Just don’t give up on yourself, and hopefully it’ll work out.

Taylor: Launch it.

Taylor: We both don’t drink coffee. Mostly just water. I have green tea sometimes.

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