More where that came from: how working as a designer taught me to let go of individual things.

When I was 21 my most prized possession was an orange track bicycle. It had deep narrow bars, beautiful aero wheels, a real Campagnolo crankset and a leather Brooks saddle with big copper rivets. It carried me all around Philadelphia — North for work, East for school and West for punk shows. I drew a good bit of identity from that bike: on it I wasn’t just a scruffy art student who already knew she was on the wrong career path, but a tough and stylish woman of mystery. In a pre-smart phone era, a friend might see the distinctive bike locked up and jam a scrawled note in the spokes. I named it Tomato Frog and loved it more than just about anything else.

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For most of my life I loved individual things. Semi precious stones, a pair of lucky shoes worn to disintegration; the plush animals I kept in my bed well into my teens. A steady diet of fantasy novels where a sword or ring took on outsize importance fueled this, as well as a vague sense of luck being a physical force like gravity.

These days I ride an upright grey townie bike named Stanley who has none of Tomato Frog’s panache but can haul a week’s worth of groceries while looking too shabby to tempt Brooklyn bike thieves. I design things for a living — beautiful things, useful things, things the world needs and things it does not. At the moment my 3D printer is chugging away prototyping a thing and there are sample things en route to my door from China and Singapore and India. A shipping container full of things I designed is somewhere in the Pacific en route to Los Angeles from Shenzhen.

The first time I got a production model of a product I designed I stepped calmly out of my shared office, walked down the stairs and then ran full tilt round the block singing with excitement. There is something extraordinary and a little terrifying to know that what began as a sketch from my own hand is now being produced in the tens of thousands. I still don’t much like thinking about it — that products I’ve designed take up so much more space in the world than I do makes me a bit queasy.

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This sense of volume and replicability — that everything I’ve done is one of many — has radically changed the way I think about inanimate things. I used to be devastated if I lost a glove or a ring; now I skip right to thinking how I can replace or replicate the scrap of leather or silver. I’ll see a client tenderly handling a new prototype and think that for them this product is a precious manifestation of their dreams, while to me it’s a well shaped piece of plastic or metal with thousands of identical siblings warehoused somewhere.

A good designer thinks about the entire lifecycle of every product, from where the raw materials come from to how it will eventually be disposed of. This second part is as necessary as it is uncomfortable, and there are no easy answers. Products which are recyclable in theory wind up in landfills more often than not, so called green materials have their own problems, and there is a constant struggle between sustainability and costing. I have lately tried to focus on making our products as long lasting as possible, pushing clients to raise prices and lower quantity. Until our waste and recycling infrastructure improve I think this is the path that does least harm, although it’s hardly ideal.

Designers are an individualistic lot, proud and fractious. Some feel deep connections with their creations and put their names on them, some don’t. Some give lectures about their own work, some find the idea appalling. I had some professors who were so reticent I didn’t even know they’d launched products until I saw their name on something displayed at the Cooper Hewitt.

Being able to set projects aside as soon as they’re complete is what keeps my job so engaging. Designing something that solves a problem is immensely satisfying; seeing it out in the world is immensely satisfying; moving on to the next project is satisfying too. I like to give away all my production models of a finished item, and almost never use the products I design myself. It feels like emptying my brain out so I can think about something else.

This is not to say that being an industrial designer has made me into some noble ascetic. I will still blow more money than I should on boots and yarn and sailing gear and I am yet to succeed in throwing out a book, though they spill off my shelves. And I will never part with Tomato Frog.

Some French bicycle designer in the late 70s drew out the geometry and set the angles and picked the color that would so delight a lonely undergrad forty years later. There were hundreds of Tomato Frogs made, indistinguishable from each other. And when that particular run of small orange track bikes was finished I suppose that French bicycle designer rolled up his plans, tidied his desk, and started working on something new.