Designer of the Day: Trueing

Here, we ask designers to take a selfie and give us an inside look at their life.

Age: 26 (Aiden Bowman) and 26 (Josh Metersky)

Occupation: Product designers

Instagram: @trueing_studio

Hometown: Aiden: New Rochelle, NY. Josh: Avon, CT.

Studio location: Bushwick, Brooklyn

Describe what you make: Lighting and furniture informed by art history and cultural references, enabled and made unique by precise engineering: a result of our former lives outside of design.

The most important thing you’ve designed to date: Probably our Janus Table Lamp, the piece that started everything. We could never have expected so much would come from one small project, but the interest it sparked gave us the runway and support to start Trueing as a full-fledged design studio.

Describe the problem your work solves: The reigning factor in our process is deciding why a new product needs to exist in the world. Is it different, creative, innovative, or meaningful enough to warrant investing the resources (financial and environmental) required for it to exist?

Describe the project you are working on now: Right now, we’re in planning mode—working on an expansion of our newest collection—more lighting that will push the use of our favorite material at the moment, colored glass. These new pieces will be a bit softer and curvy. The best word we can use to describe it is juicy.

A new project we should know about: Elma, Janus and Inigo—our newest collections of lighting—launched just last week. They’re all designed to highlight different qualities of glass, using various techniques for crafting and manufacturing. We have blown, extruded, coated, and cut glass taking all kinds of forms. They all have their own soul, but are connected by a fascination with the qualities and potential of the material.

What you absolutely must have in your studio:

Aiden: Coffee, NPR, and magazines.

Josh: Calipers, tea, and cozy warm light.

What you do when you’re not working:

Aiden: Scouring Craigslist and planning our next trip.

Josh: Doodling and making lists.

Sources of creative envy:

Aiden: Mies van der Rohe, Francesco Borromini, Kara Walker, Björk, Shigeru Ban.

Josh: Alvar Aalto, Sol LeWitt, and Baku Takahashi.

The distraction you want to eliminate:

Aiden: Anxiety.

Josh: Robocalls.

Concrete or marble?

Aiden: Concrete.

Josh: Marble.

High-rise or townhouse?

Aiden: High-rise.

Josh: Townhouse.

Remember or forget?

Aiden: Forget.

Josh: Remember.

Aliens or ghosts?

Aiden: Aliens.

Josh: Ghosts.

Dark or light?

Aiden: Light.

Josh: Light.