📐 A Word With: Industrial Designer Sina Sohrab

A chat with the Iranian-American industrial designer whose process involves

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To understand how I came to meet Sina Sohrab, we have to rewind back a decade, where I was obsessed with 1080p, a Canadian record label that had a hand in enabling the careers of electronic acts big and small like Jayda G, Patrick Holland, UMFANG, and Physical Therapy. This was a very formative sonic time for me and many others.

One of the biggest in my world was a little act called Saffron that released two sister EPs called Petra that are a bit hard to describe. A collage of samples that feel like drifting between sonic textures and eras, something to groove to but also to put on in a smokey lounge while sipping cocktails and unwinding with some friends. They’re timeless constructions that feel so specific to “that era” but also of a time well before and yet-to-come: in the music of my life, these releases are classics.

Jump to now-ish, when a new Saffron mix dropped and I started to connect some dots. Is this artist in Madrid? Who is this person? I never thought to ask and, given that we now shared a continent, I tried to figure that out. Getting into my investigative journalist bag, I did some digging and was able to tie the music to Sina, an Iranian via America industrial designer who spent a lot of time in New York. His work — from bird pavilions to benches to boxes — all have the same “vibe” as his music, which is to say they carry a timeless modernity: they could have been made hundreds of years ago, sleek relics of the past, or they could be from a yet-to-be-discovered civilization. Such is Sina’s elegant hand.

Indulging both boldness and going full fan on main, I sent Sina a note to see if he’d be down to talk about his work as a designer, his life in Madrid, and this era making music as Saffron. Thankfully, he was game. On a rainy Tuesday, we met up at Pum Pum for a tea, to chat life.

KRF: I grew up all over the place, because my dad was in the military, which enabled me to always want change in some form, which may or may not be how I thought about moving abroad. I'm curious, then, as you were in New York for at least the 2010s: how did you end up in Madrid?

SS: I had kind of a similar path: we moved to the US from Iran when I was seven and shifted around a lot, just in the immigration process, trying to get visas. I lived all over the states too and spent most of my teens outside of Detroit, in Michigan. Then I went to university and then to New York. I was there for close to 10 years and it was great for a long time, until it wasn't.

KRF: I get that.

SS: New York still has a sense of home — but it's not. It's a nice place for me to go back and visit now and then, but not a place I imagine returning to.

KRF: Leaving the states — and leaving LA, specifically — there’s a standing love and, upon leaving, it felt like a breakup, which I wasn’t anticipating. LA for me — and maybe New York for you — was very giving and did a lot for me. Leaving that behind, on a high, was abandoning stability, my life. It’s been hard but, hey, that’s life. Things change and you have to move forward.

SS: Something I've realized in the years since is that I really need change. Maybe it’s the moving around a lot when I was a kid — but I can feel trapped without tangible, physical change. I do appreciate growing up in the US. Having lived in Madrid now and working more and more with Europeans, I really appreciate the perspective that [the US] gave me. It is one thing to be born and raised in Europe and to stay in Europe, and it's another thing to do the same in the US. Having the perspective of both has been invaluable.

KRF: I’ve found — and maybe you found this too — that I don't consider myself to be super optimistic, but there’s such an interesting response to when I’m like, “Yeah, why can't we do this? Why don't we do that?” There’s a questioning of life and society that comes with the US mentality that other places and people don't have. Why did you pick Madrid, of all places?

SS: My partner at the time was born in Madrid but raised in New York, and we had hit a boiling point with the US that made us want to leave. Madrid was the clearest choice because she had some family here and it made it easy for us to be able to immigrate. In the years before, when we had come to visit, I’d totally fallen in love with this place. I loved the people we would meet, the energy, the climate…It’s a really nice city. It felt like it had a good cadence for living, and still had some texture, some grit. We had made friends here too, which meant life felt easier to build.

KRF: Community’s half the battle, as I’ve learned. It took us years and, only recently, we have the soft buds of a community. Thinking about design here and back in the states, I know there’s a very different understanding of these worlds. There’s a reverence, culturally, in places like Spain and Italy and France. It feels like there is an understanding of design, from graphic design to industrial design to architecture. How has that cultural shift been?

SS: The nature of the work I was doing in the US was tied to market forces in a way that felt entirely logical and also vaguely disheartening if you happened to believe—naively, romantically—that design had some intrinsic cultural or intellectual weight beyond its sheer economic function. It’s just that over the last three, four decades or so, industry in the states has largely repositioned design as an instrument of pure economic optimization, a thing that justifies itself solely through output, scale, return on investment. Whereas in much of Europe, or at least in the pockets I’ve worked in, you get the sense that the best commercial work—by which I mean the stuff that actually moves the needle—either emerges from or at least acknowledges a larger cultural discourse. Not that one approach is necessarily better. They just operate on different assumptions about what design is for, and the gap between those assumptions is real.

KRF: I was gonna say: being able to do both commercial and institutional and cultural work at the same time — outside of the framework of a university — is not something you’d see in the states as most people doing research are housed within an institution.

SS: There's more built-in infrastructure for it here, whereas in the US you would need the backing of an institution or a company—some larger entity to prop it up, justify its existence. Companies used to do that a lot more — now? Less and less. The incentives have shifted. And you need something to worship [in the states], right? Some larger, organizing principle. There's this thing that David Foster Wallace used to say:, in the US, you either make something your god — or you kill it. There’s very little space in between, no room for ambivalence. Personally, it just doesn’t interest me much to worship or to kill. But that disinterest comes with financial consequences there, where the market rewards commitment, fanaticism, total buy-in. Here, it feels different.

KRF: You have your own practice now, right?

SS: Yes. It’s a broad practice that brings a diversity of my interests together. I don't think I could design if I wasn't writing, if I wasn't researching, for example, and that interdependence between disciplines is more or less the basis. The work I do runs across furniture and product design to exhibition design, curation, writing, research projects… All of these things feed into each other. I can write about design and analyze it, criticize it, but ultimately when I’m writing about design I’m interrogating life. That writing leads to design work that, if I’m lucky and having a good day, has a critical awareness on how people live today. You can trace that and interpolate it across any of those categories of work; they’re all ways of looking at something from different angles and, ultimately, all about building coherent theses on living and working. This is what I teach my students, to define a thesis. It doesn’t matter what it is, but if you can’t define it, you're just sticking stuff together.

KRF: I tell writers that all the time. It's the same thing.

SS: The point is that you have to be able to argue. Otl Aicher said that design is argument but, honestly, why stop there? Everything is contingent on argument. Louis Kahn said that a street is a room by agreement. Throwing the poetics aside, reaching an agreement requires negotiation. We are in constant negotiation with everything: space, furniture, architecture, people, governments, whatever. Argument is the ability to negotiate. When I use these words I don’t mean them as solely linguistic or theoretical terms; argument, negotiation, and agreement can be intensely physical, visual, and real processes. Follow this to its logical end and learning to form an argument means being able to negotiate, being able to negotiate means being able to reach an agreement, agreements are the basis for how we exist in society.

There's actually a really nice exercise that I do with my design theory students, who are at the age where they’re looking into the void and really grasping for an identity as a designer. I tell them to pick an enemy, a design or designer, and then form a position on the “why.” You have to argue it. It’s a pseudo-psychoanalytical exercise because you start to dive into, well, maybe you don't like X because it undermines your belief in Y. Maybe Y is something that you appreciate, that you need, in your life or your practice. It’s a simple exercise, but it allows them to learn to argue and start to define themselves through negation.

KRF: Having an experience like that early in your career and your creative development is huge because, once things solidify, you can become a bit calcified. That gives you some freedom. It makes me think about, in the 2010s, that so much of American design wasn’t about an idea but about being a tool for sale. We’re coming to the end of that era, of so many one-off ideas based in some quirky design. I may be crucified for saying this but do you know Graza?

Sina shakes his head no.

KRF: It’s a good example. It’s this very trendy olive oil company where the whole thing is about package design because it comes in this green and yellow bottle, this, um, spray bottle. Spray isn’t right.

Kyle pantomimes the design and use.

SS: Squeeze bottle?

KRF: Squeeze bottle! Yes. That’s the whole gimmick. It’s a design choice that sells a very uninteresting and unnecessarily special product “as special” via a different bottle. Design-as-sales-tactic, to me, is a defining feature of the 2010s and “Millennial” and direct-to-consumer culture, which we’re still in the moment of but that’s going to end soon. Design for the past few years has been the differentiator, the value proposition, which is funny because these items aren’t special. They just look nice.

SS: We’ve lost the ability to distinguish between want and need. And it’s somehow not just that—it’s that we no longer even recognize that the distinction was real and useful. That there existed a time when "need" referred to something fundamental, material, non-negotiable, and "want" was a sort of superfluous tail wagging the dog. But now the two have been flattened into a single, undifferentiated hunger. And sure, this is capitalism’s fault, kind of, or at least its inevitable byproduct. But also, more fundamentally, it’s the result of a society conditioned to mistake surface for substance, until the very concept of substance—real, solid, nutritive value—feels obsolete, if not a joke altogether.

KRF: And now it’s coming to a head in political ways, nationally in States and internationally, wants versus needs. It’s obvious that people now are opting out of buying because the infrastructure of the 2010s was about all objects becoming accessories instead of necessities. “Oh, this Target stuff is so cute!” “Oh, Trader Joe’s tote bags are cute!” Um, they're fucking union busting and sell out queer people. They’re just like any other big business. That era of design-object-as-consumer-good will end or dramatically pivot because — if people are gonna shift towards need, not want, for political and or economic reasons — that means seeing whatever pretty pink glitter coat on an object and realizing, “Wait. I already have a water bottle.”

SS: It's all cyclical. There's only so much you need and people are smart: there's only so long you can sell a new skin as a new idea. At some point, you'll find yourself coloring your ketchup purple.

KRF: …and that happened!

SS: And you're gonna stand there and be like, “What the fuck am I doing with my life?” That work seems so vapid, so temporary. So not interesting to me. Godspeed to the people that can stand to do it.

KRF: It was interesting in the beginning of that era. These things were novel, cool. We just got Instagram! We can share these things with each other! Then it became, like, everything. It became consuming.

SS: I found myself asking “Why?” enough times that it led me to dramatically restructure how I approach things here, to align them much more.

KRF: What does that shift look like?

SS: It’s really about dialogue. I like to work alone in my office, and so to get anything of meaning off the ground, every project inherently becomes a collaboration with an external force, whether it's with a team I put together, a company, institution, or some other kind of partner. From the beginning, it's about dialogue, and eventually good dialogue leads to a solid argument, a solid thesis. If you can take that dialogue to an interesting place, then the project's going to be interesting, maybe even more so if it has a commercial end.

I recently worked on a project which was designing a library for a school of shepherds. It was me talking with Fer, who runs the shepherd school, trying to understand what kind of a library shepherds need. Then, structuring that within the institutional hegemony. If universities use libraries as monuments to their own ambitions — which is a great way to explain why they've maintained the physical scale that they have in a digital age — what are the ambitions of a shepherd school? How do we reflect that through scale, if that’s the dominant language of library-ness? Well, shepherds spend most of their time in small huts in the mountains, so their practical, architectural reality is small. Then we start looking at building a very small library and, if you start looking at building a very small library, you immediately go back to personal studies because that's the scale equivalent. Then you start looking at studiolos and you start looking at the studies of monks and scribes in the Middle Ages. And you start to find that, in these spaces, large-scale furniture was what defined the architectural space, which is the opportunity that we had within the shepherds school building. All of these things start to build into a single coherent thought and, with that project, we ended up with a library that's the same footprint as a shepherd's hut. So, when the students are spending time in the library, they're having a direct dialogue with the spatial reality of becoming a shepherd. They're experiencing a reflection of practice, as they sit there and struggle through the theory.

I don't think those kinds of relationships are possible without rich dialogue, or investigation, or the development of a clear argument. And in my experience, there just was not room for that in the US startup environment of product development.

KRF: The pace is too quick.

SS: What I really fight for in my projects is to find the space and time to really question why we're doing what we're doing, to question all of our assumptions from the beginning. But that’s how I work, and that’s just one way.

KRF: That’s very true. To the point of dialogue, my introduction to your work was via Saffron and, to me, I see the connections within your work and how these all dialogue together. It was of a specific era of music, at the height of 1080p, which was a moment. How does that fit into your creative work? What’s that relationship now?

SS: It's kind of funny. I was in my 20s, in university. I was in a series of bands and I really enjoyed making music. It was very loose, I wasn’t trained in any way. I didn't know what I was doing or really interested in. I was just finding things that brought me pleasure. Some of those bands got enough attention that I started to take it more seriously. Then, when I graduated, I started to put out some solo music on some record labels. I put out a few records under a few different names, which was a nice way to switch personalities and genres. I was living with the film director Theo Anthony and he would make the music videos. My friend Martine Gutierrez would send me vocals. That was a really fun period of time in my life, pulling in people I loved, playing shows, putting out music. Actually, the first time I came to Madrid was on tour, 12 or 14 years ago.

I was doing that for a while and then I think I hit 26, I had this design practice, and I started to think in very rigid ways about what I should be doing and what life should be. Basically, I sold all my music equipment. 1080p was winding down. It seemed like a good time to liquidate and focus on one thing. For a while, I lived and breathed design. What I realized, like four or five years later, is that what actually makes design interesting is all of these other things that you do. Design — based on living and breathing design — to me, is not particularly interesting. It's absolutely a self-serving ouroboros. You have to bring something else to it.

What I learned from music was structure, pacing, brevity, interpolation. I learned about finding and using material. The reality is — and this is what I love about music; if you think about sampling, covers, remixes — these are all ways of reusing parts, pulling pieces that you repurpose, which in many ways is how design functions. The freedom to do that is really what music taught me. It taught me that nothing is original, which sounds dumb to say out loud because it's a fundamental, baseline truth. It aligns with Richard Prince: art is just beachcombing, you find it and it’s yours. It aligns with Jim Jarmusch: authenticity is invaluable, originality is nonexistent. Finding as much as I can and shaping it into something compelling and urgent. That's fundamentally how my practice works.

Take the shepherds: the dimensions are lifted from shepherd's huts. The seat, the bench: the main piece of the room is directly lifted from a fourteenth century miniature of Simon de Hesdin in his study. It's just updated for the context. Music gave me the freedom to reach and grab what I need. When I talk about structure and pacing, I'm talking about the same things that dictate visual language, the same things that dictate argument. Music taught me about writing. Music taught me about designing — but I didn't really realize those things until much later. It was a very crazy period of my life that I definitely took for granted, but I'm very pleased to have had because I think it really shaped the way I approach things today.

KRF: It’s important to have a sort of holistic view of things and, to the point of learning, you have to continue to grow and to seek out new inputs to maintain interest and get better — otherwise it all becomes joyless. I say this a lot but you have to actually live life to make anything interesting, be that a newsletter or a book or an album or a house. There’s this sort of annoying-but-true gimmick in writing spaces that happens in every workshop or class, where people who are non-writers, who have a professional background, are always celebrated and elevated. It shows that writing, that being “just a writer,” isn’t special: it’s the experience, it’s doing other things that makes writing special. You have to experience life.

SS: There’s this thing Noguchi wrote in a letter to a friend — and it’s a tired example but a very nice phrase — he described his work as “a reflection of living.” I think that’s the aim. I’m interested in what is real. I don’t have a necessity for fantasy in my work because reality is rich enough. And it’s so much stranger.

KRF: We’re living in constant change and, while there are a lot of bad things, we’re within history, in time. That context brings more of an immediacy and value to what we’re doing. People can get so checked out and it’s like…you’re alive. Isn’t that cool? Do something about it.

SS: I realize now that’s what I was trying to do with music, pull together some fossil record of real life. I can confidently say that I never got there, I was too young and headless and made a lot of embarrassing, unlistenable things in the process. But insofar as it’s dangerously easy to wax poetic and intellectualize retrospectively about your adolescent fantasies, I was walking around with a recorder, recording on the subway, on the street, whatever sounds I could find. The Petra albums that you like are largely built on those recorded samples and little pieces of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet, which I was watching on a kind of daily loop like a mantra back then. Some of those ways of working—digging, observing, repurposing— are now unconsciously parts of my practice.

KRF: There's a symmetry to it all. I definitely see it. What’s next, on your agenda?

SS: It’s varied, as I like it to be. I'm working on a history of camping tents for a publication called Typologie. I’m working on some furniture designs, some more open-ended design projects. We’re in the early stages of planning an exhibition about an important ceramic producer in Spain. All of these things are taking me in different directions. Like, in June, I spent a week in the headquarters of one of the oldest camping tent producers in Italy, going through their archives, and then flew straight back to work on an exhibition design project for the artist Simone Fattal in Valencia. That diversity is interesting to me, it keeps me engaged. I’m constantly beachcombing, stretching out. There's a real freedom in that.

Explore more of Sina Sohrab’s work on his website and Instagram. Portraits of Sina by Blanca Guerrero.