A Fever Dream of Good Design
I usually don’t get knocked out sick. Normally, it is a few days of feeling crappy, two days of sitting still and drinking fluids, two days of feeling less crappy and then back to normal. It happens about twice a year, between the months of February and April. This year though I got obliterated. I got so sick I couldn’t move. I stayed in one room for two days and I didn’t leave, other than to go to the bathroom (which was ALSO part of this particularly good multitasking version of influenza). But as I was in a haze of sickness, I noticed something about a quilt we own—it is impeccably well-designed and made. It is also discretely well-designed. In fact, it took me a good long time to figure out just how great it was. And that is something about good design that people rarely write about—when something is so well made that it takes to a while to find all its features and flourishes.
Think about the first time you saw a Sebenza. You looked at the clip and you were probably like—okay, what’s that dent for? Right? Or was that just me. Let’s say, for the sake of this post, that you too had that thought. Then, suddenly, it all snapped together when you put the knife in your pocket and the double dip ran over the folded edge of the pocket of your blue jeans. Then you were like: “Oh that Chris Reeve DOES make a nice knife.” And, of course, he does.
And that’s something really intriguing. When true master craftspeople sit down to make something, they don’t just think of how to make it sturdy or cost-effective. They think about the details, the context in which the thing will be used, and small touches they can add to make the thing better. The Greene brothers were masters of the small details. And sometimes finding those things takes years for you to discover them (like the needle in a handle slot on Victorinox knives for me—I went decades owning one without even noticing it was there…how clever). A lot of these insights are based on tons of experiential data and some are just inspired. But when you, as the end user figure them out, it feels like, for a brief second, you are in conversation with the maker. They are telling you—yes, you found it, and yes, it works.
As a woodworker, I would love to eventually hide some of these things in my pieces, but I am not there yet. But the quiltmaker or quilter (both are acceptable) that made the quilt was truly gifted. Not only has it stood up to semi-regular use with two boys (which, honestly, should be an industry standard for “extra tough”; alas, our couch has not fared so well), it has looked beautiful doing so. Typically, we use it as a blanket, but in my fevered state, I inflated the back up bed, and used it as a comforter. It was then that I noticed that the velvety underside wasn’t just to keep warm air in and feel nice on the skin, it locked the thin bed sheet in place. Instead of having a crumpled wad of covers at the bottom of the bed in the morning, everything was still in place, the quilt and the bedsheet moving in synchronicity.
And that’s when I realized—she planned it this way.
I have a particular fondness for quilts over other types of blankets because of my grandmother, and so I have had a few different ones over time, some store bought and others handmade. The handmade one from my grandmother will rank as number 1 forever, but this quilt, given to my wife by a student’s mother when she had cancer (hence the colors), is also an astounding work of art. It is beautiful, inviting, and, as I recently discovered, better designed than I originally thought quilts could be.
Good design is a lot of things, but I never imagined sneaky as being one of them. It will always surprise you.
And no, the pre-25 hole in the handle is not a “secret” feature or design element. It is an indexing hole for machining. Tim indicated that they redid all of the fixtures before the 31s and made the hole unnecessary on an episode of Mark of the Maker.
Back to non-fever induced content later this week. And sorry for the delay, I was sick.