The Standard Pen

This is a project that provoked a lot of personal reflection for me, both on the design process I had developed over the past few years and on the design and luxury goods industries as a whole. The process I went through during this project reflects this, from my personal pain points with those industries to my broader outlook on life and culture. This university project spanned approximately four months and also encompassed my dissertation. Given the timeframe it was difficult to not reflect on and challenge the preconceived ideas I had developed internally, analyzing and understanding them.

Subversion has always been an intuitive part of my design process, even though I had never explicitly addressed or thought about it before. In this case, it became a useful lens through which to examine aspects of the luxury goods and design industries that I did not connect with, and to explore how I could shift or challenge those aspects. For me, subversiveness is a way of expressing discomfort with constraint, rigid systems, and establishment.

This dissatisfaction is In part due to the fact that I'm from San Francisco, which is an extremely liberal place, not just politically, but socially and culturally as well. This ethos is also evident in business practices. If you look at Palo Alto and Silicon Valley, there is no conservative way of doing business, it tends to always be an all-or-nothing mindset. This kind of freedom from constraint is something I constantly use as a point of comparison. In contrast, the luxury industry operates with a great deal of containment, establishment, all systems that I wanted to subvert in some way.

The Standard Pen, in a sense, challenges what I see as being considered "standard" for a fountain pen in the luxury industry; it is a kind of reclamation. I like to look at the fountain pen as an archetype that doesn’t need to be seen as formal or proper but something more malleable. It often carries a certain stigma and association with importance or emotion in writing that I wanted to subvert. I aimed to address some of the intrinsic characteristics of the fountain pen within the context of how we write today, which is mostly digitally.

One of the most interesting aspects of the fountain pen as an archetype is that, by practical standards, it is not particularly great at what it does. Compared to contemporary writing tools and methods, it is almost never the most convenient nor the most practical option, especially since most of what we read and write today is digital. However, this very characteristic opens up possibilities for a different design approach, one that allows for the reinterpreting of ideas and structures surrounding this object archetype.

The outcome of this process is perhaps less of a tangible product and more a result of my reflection. For me, it served as a crucial exercise in understanding and defining my ideas and opinions as a designer. And functions for me as a foundational structure from which I can build and expand in the future.