What the objects around me taught me about design

I'm a digital designer. I spend my days thinking in interfaces, screens and abstract systems: components that have to work in a hundred contexts, flows that branch and loop, design tokens that stand in for colours nobody will ever touch. And yet I'm more and more convinced that most of what I know about design I didn't learn on a screen. I learned it by looking at, and touching, the objects around me.

That's why I started Kalos: a repository of every object in my home, with its history, its materiality and the year it entered my life. A lamp, a mortar, a wooden board, a chair. Writing each one down forces me to slow down and ask questions I rarely ask at work. What is it made of? Why does it feel right in the hand? Why did I keep it when so many other things came and went?

Otl Aicher wrote about two kinds of knowledge. One is abstract: it follows rules and plans before acting. The other is concrete and sensory: it's learned by doing, with hand, eye and mind working at once rather than one after the other. And he said something I find key. It isn't that one is better than the other. It's that we forgot they need each other, and that's how we lost our judgement, both in thinking and in design.

As a digital designer I feel that tension every day. My work rewards abstraction. A good system is one that removes the particular: the same button, the same spacing, the same rules, everywhere. That's powerful, and it's what lets a small team build products that thousands of people use. But the further I go into systems, components and flows, the easier it is to forget what any of it is for. A pattern can be perfectly consistent and still feel like nothing.

Objects don't let you forget. The patina on a piece of wood tells you how it has been used, and for how long. The weight of a well-made object tells you someone cared about it before it reached you. A handle that sits exactly where your fingers expect it is a decision someone made, tested and refined, probably over many years. None of this is written in a spec. You only learn it by living with things.

I grew up surrounded by paella, and I think cooking taught me the same lesson. You can follow a recipe, but the recipe doesn't tell you when the rice is ready. You learn that from the sound in the pan, the smell, the colour at the edges. The rule and the judgement have to work together. Design is no different: the system gives you the recipe, but only the senses tell you if it's right.

So I try to bring that sensory knowledge back into my digital work. When something on screen feels off, I ask the questions I ask of objects. Does it have weight where it should? Does it age well, or will it feel wrong in a year? Would I keep it? Often the answer isn't in the design system. It's in the memory of something I've held.

Kalos is my way of not losing that concrete knowledge while I keep living and designing in digital. It's a slow project, and it will never be finished, because new things keep entering my life and old ones keep teaching me something new. But every entry is a small reminder that good design doesn't start in the abstract. It starts with paying attention.