Industrial designer Gabe has built a career by following curiosity wherever it leads. From a childhood shaped by travel and craftsmanship, to an unexpected detour into industrial design, his journey is a testament to the value of taking creative risks and trusting the process. In our conversation, he shares a bit of his analogue tools, rituals, and experiences that continue to shape the way he designs, thinks, and navigates the world.
BK: Thank you so much for being here with us Gabe! Could you begin by sharing a little about your background and where your story originates?
Gabe: Thank you for letting me share some love for analogue! My story winds through some unusual twists and turns. I moved around quite a bit growing up, between a few states and some chances to live abroad, which was really influential for me. My dad was a college professor and my mom was a journalist so they had various work exchanges and sabbatical years that took us to Australia, Brazil, and South Africa. Exploring a new environment, curiosity, adapting your point of view as you discover new things, all of these became really formative to how I approach design.
The use of tools and materials to create and pursue ideas has some deep family roots as well; my grandfather, Ray, was a silversmith, and I would spend time in his shop at his house watching him pound out metal pieces, form them into half beads, weld the beads, and eventually, and very patiently, make the beads into an entire silver necklace. He learned all of this after he had a stroke and lost the use of his right arm, which was always just incredible, and slow, to watch — I probably absorbed patience of craft from him without realizing it. Take the extra time to flip the work over, run your hand along the edge, find that last thing that might still need some attention. At the same time, if you are a little less patient than Ray like I am, a sketch lets you quickly explore the edges of an idea, without some of the details and decisions that will need to come later. I love that moment in between knowing there’s something there but not exactly what it is yet. This is what my sketchbooks are filled with. I wish I knew more about how he sketched or drew or considered a concept before he went to his work bench. Maybe there’s an amazing trove of sketches somewhere linked to all of the silver jewelry in the family.
BK: What first drew you toward a creative path, and what continues to keep you inspired today?
Gabe: From my grandfather’s silver work to my dad making drawings for me when I was little as a reward for various things, to legos, to graphic novels and making my own comic books, story and curiosity and creating something here or there was just always around. The idea that besides finding or using or seeing different things in the world, you could be the one putting some of them there, remains fascinating.
BK: Looking back on your journey, what has been the biggest shift in your perspective or style over time?
Gabe: I think I tried too hard to force ideas early on or to assume an answer. I thought I was really sure of what I was trying to make, or what the result was going to be, instead of letting it unfold and develop, and tell me what it was trying to be. I started to listen to the ideas and step back and observe how a constraint would tumble it around, and then you wait until the right moment, and you reach in and grab it again, and the idea has this experience and its own identity now, and you get to know it better and better. Analogue has been a huge, huge part of that. Digital tools and highly technical tools can change your design in ways you desperately fight against. Getting out the sketchbook, I can work through just a corner, or a detail, or a gesture, while keeping that valuable ambiguity, the space to not know yet.
BK: Is there a mistake, detour, or unexpected moment in your personal or professional journey that ultimately turned into something beautiful? What did it teach you?
Gabe: So many detours. Maybe the most important part, those detours I think define you as a designer. Mine is about curiosity and leaning into the fork in the road. I was not a designer the first time around. I went to design school in my late 20s; I already had a college degree. The pieces were always there, but I hadn’t put them together. I had started to build a path out of jobs in media and politics, writing press releases and speeches, building websites, and thinking about the interactions people would have and their behavior, and how to improve both visually and functionally what they could be using. So I wanted to pursue that deeply, and went to an open house for an Interaction Design program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco (RIP, sadly). Alphabetically, there was another open house the same night: Industrial design. Almost 20 years later, I am happy to say the best detour of my career led me to become an industrial designer.
BK: When you find yourself creatively stuck, is there a ritual, habit, or analogue practice that helps you reconnect and move through it?
Gabe: Ah yes, it’s two very important analogue practices! For me the window of time when I can really focus, and nothing else is distracting or going on anymore, is at night, sometimes pretty late. So I’ll make a really perfect Negroni. That’s the first. Bar tools, nice glassware, regular ice in a mixing glass, and extracting one of those really perfect huge ice cubes for the drink itself. Maybe select a little shift in an ingredient from my bar selection. Stirring, straining, carving a nice citrus garnish. Then pick up the current sketchbook and sit down with my drink. I think it’s not about the booze — I’ve done it with zero proof stuff too — it’s the slowed down pace and intentional transition, like you’re stopping time and other obligations to just be ready for new thoughts and ideas. Then it’s pen and paper and just let any thought through. That has unlocked so many projects for me.
BK: Where is one unconventional place you’ve discovered inspiration that continues to influence your work?
Gabe: I don’t know that it’s unconventional, I am blown away all the time by the intense creativity, craft, execution, narrative, tight knit family-like team, and overall approach of the top restaurant kitchens in the world. They also happen to have some of the most ruthlessly useful and beautiful and story-filled analogue tools around. I keep trying to have our design team visit and tour these kitchens as if they are design studios, to see how they push boundaries within their field and find new methods and combinations of ideas. Repurposing, reinventing, taking ideas down to their literal ingredients and then forming entirely new concepts from them in sometimes radical ways, and putting it out there. (This is such pure design).
BK: Please walk us through your daily analogue carry. What are the tools or rituals you enjoy in order to stay grounded both personally and professionally?
Right now, what I carry to design with all stays in a tote-style bag by Kvadrat in one of their signature textiles, from one of their events at Milan design week, given to me by a close friend who was able to get a few of them. It has a tactility and subtlety of color that is so satisfying as a material. I have a Moleskine Cahiers XL sketchbook, soft cover, spine stitched, plain paper, the current one is black and the cover is marked “17” with a starting date to note that it is the 17th sketchbook of mine since I started using these, (11 years ago). So I was going through about two a year for a while, but either my pace slowed ;) or my ideas got better? This depends on which page you flip to! All 17 of these I have also used the same pen, which I usually have 2 of in my bag, and a bunch more in other places: a Uniball Onyx with fine tip, black ink. This pen is essential for me. Not having that is like not having my car keys. It’s not a valuable pen, I think I found them in a drawer at work the first year, but I discovered that it doesn’t smudge when my palm lies across the paper or when I’m drawing some new lines in another area of the page. I’ve wouldn’t call them rituals, but I love this combo of pen with that Cahiers paper, and if you hand me the same pen in blue ink, or red ink, I’ll probably not use it in the book, I’ll grab some other piece of paper, like it doesn’t count yet. Color is also often important to the ideas though, and for that I keep some simple colored pencils. The goal here is minimal and always with me, so that’s two preferred options. Again the pencils aren’t fancy, it’s that they are with me. One is a set of around 8 colors in a black paper tube, maybe 1” diameter that stays low profile in my bag. The other is even slimmer, a cool gift my team brought me from Japan, one of those tiny credit card size fold-out miniature pencil sets with a sharpener. Ergonomically they are terrible, of course. But you’re just adding that little extra dimension or color to an ink sketch. Maybe I’ll use it to put something extra into an idea I am biased towards on a page that has others. Maybe it’s to clarify color in an idea that depends on it. Colored ink bleeds through the paper, and the pens become a much bigger carry. So this has always been the right tool for my process. So many times you’re on the fly and with a partner or supplier or someone building something with us and one sketch is faster than a 20 minute conversation. Particularly if there’s a language barrier. Can we move this part line to this side? Can we change the shape of the opening to this? Many times these partners are so experienced and professional, and used to a formal set of drawings with explicit instructions and defined conditions. Sketching on paper real time on site, next to the machine or tools or worker making an object, they respond to in a totally open minded way. It’s less prescriptive and more like a dialogue. I’ll often hand them the pen. Like it’s ok, you can be curious about this too. It’s just a sketch ;) And we find a way. So these tools never really leave my side.
BK: If your creative journey had a soundtrack, what genre would it be, and why?
Ha, well at many points my work has definitely had a soundtrack, those moments when it’s just you and an idea you’re trying to make sense of, grab onto, shape into something. So something with a beat, and some drive, because it can take a while to shape those ideas. Plus, I was a drummer way back when, so the beat has to be there for me. You put some headphones on and give yourself the space for that idea to reveal itself. You get to that place in between the beginning of an idea and the final polished one, when you know the project will eventually be over, which is always a little bittersweet, like a good song that ends. So for me it’s that beat when things are moving, going, taking a direction, and you’re feeling that. At times that’s been a Dutch EDM radio show, just non stop. Other times I’ll be in a mood for these 2 DJs who have an online radio show in Montreal mixing vintage soul and funk with the modern tracks that sample from it. Every show has some undiscovered gold. Shout out to WeFunk Radio. My journey fits that too, sampling and remixing influences and thoughts from other stages and parts of my life. Finding the edges of an idea, where can this go, what can we do to it, until you’re just nodding your head, yeah, there it is. You feel that. Music is that way. And the soundtrack would probably be (and often is) played on a Jambox, an impactful little bluetooth speaker that helped define that category, which I designed with one of my mentors and former employers, Yves Bèhar.
BK: At the heart of your work, what is your “why”? What kind of feeling, message, or experience do you hope to share with the world through what you do?
Gabe: I think taking risks is this amazing part of our journeys. I always love hearing about risks others have taken, it reveals so much about what they care about, their passions, it’s where our emotions often are strongest. I ask about it when I interview candidates, like what’s a time you took a risk with a project? Even if it didn’t turn out. That reveals so much. For me, there are big, medium, and small ones, and they all add up to where I am and who I am and who is around me and, ultimately, the why. Deciding to go to art school. Moving to a new city. Changing careers completely. We all know those inflection points, even the ones that didn’t work out but were worth the risk. So every day, I’m looking for what cool risk do we get to take next.
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❖ Interview by: Eunice
Photography by: Gabe Lamb