In Conversation with Palaash & Utharaa of Soft Geometry

Inspired in part by a shared aesthetic for pure geometries and in part by their own personalities, soft-geometry is an antithesis to the big, bold, fast and perfect. Aiming instead at a sort of forever experiment with form, color and materials  to find opportunities for softness, slowness and intimacy, built with time and process, in art and home objects.

How have you come to be designers?

Palaash: We had very different childhoods, I had quite a destructive one breaking things and pulling them apart, I’d get in trouble constantly and be forced to fix them and perhaps that is what lead me down this path initially. Utharaa grew up exposed to architecture from her parents and developed an interest and awareness of design early on. 

What is true for both of us though, is that the kind of designers we are now and the intentions and dreams we have today, are a result of our meeting each other. 

How would you describe your work?

Everything we design is expressive of us and ‘soft’ is how we would describe us- our personalities - if that makes sense!. As an extension of that, soft is what we aspire to in our products, our work, and everything we touch. We think of softness as slowness, intimacy, humor, humility, kindness and a quiet sort of courage and strength to be different and true, even if it is sometimes awkward or strange. 

It may be hard to view all of this in objects, but the hope is that you still feel it, a softness within geometries, hence the name. 

Tell me about a time in your career that you wanted something so badly that you were unstoppable in pursuing it. What were the main obstacles you overcame to get there?

(Haha! What career?!) We have not yet had the luxury of thinking about our “careers”, our challenges have always been or at least seemed bigger than any notion of a career, they were personal, existential. When we graduated in 2014 from a rather inadequate undergraduate program, we craved an opportunity to learn - for real, and yet the colleges we were applying to were all outside of India and desperately out of our reach financially. After getting admitted to SCAD, we spent one long year working for different firms, remotely filling out each other’s scholarship applications and writing and rewriting our essays. Over that year we pieced together some 6 scholarships and a lot of generosity from our families to be able to get to the US for our masters. It was the best opportunity of our lives, and even today, after graduating nearly three years ago, we strive to make sure that we make good on that opportunity.

 What we ‘want really badly’ is to give back to our parents, and be back with our families more often, while also continuing to dream up this furniture studio with each other - very standard dreams ha! 

Which project has been your favourite to work on?

The Donut Coffee Table was really special to work on - The project was centered around a sustainable use for wood waste,  it was challenging, collaborative and quite tricky to solve -all of which made an exciting brief! 

It started when an export furniture factory from India reached out to us regarding their solid wood cut-offs. Primarily supplying furniture to American retailers, they have to follow a stringent selection process for wood boards. Any board that carries knots or unusual grain patterns have to be rejected. This process of elimination accumulates vast quantities of wood cut-offs that are now waste. Both of us, like many Indians, grew up within strict instructions to never waste anything - not a grain of rice nor the last inch of a pencil. We can still hear our parents' voices saying exactly those things and that became the context for the brief. 

We worked closely with the factory on studying and categorizing all of the different sizes of wood cut-offs. What was both beautiful and challenging was that there was little uniformity between them. We decided the piece needed to be sculptural, something that can take on these different sizes and celebrate instead of discarding it’s “flaws” and thus arrived at the Donut.

The seemingly simple form of the Donut and its circular cross-section allowed us to design a system of arranging the wood boards that made all these weird sizes come together, and then be carved on a CNC. Since the process of arranging the boards is on a grid format but the final form is rounded - we cannot pre-guess the wood grain - we only see the grain after the piece comes out of the CNC - which makes every piece unique and allows little room for waste. Any pieces that came off the carving can again be used in the next donut. It was very satisfying to arrive at an object that is so beautiful and very us, using waste material. 

What has been your biggest screw up? What did you do about it?

Maybe it is because we cannot afford to, or maybe we are just optimists putting a positive spin on everything, but we don’t have a big screw up - yet. Our daily life and business is instead a series of everyday screw-ups that are frustrating and taxing and usually very boring - like sales tax or shipping insurance or something un-fun like that. 

What was growing up like for you?

Utharaa: I didn’t know it then, but I had a very adult childhood! My parents both worked, and they worked very hard and most of the time, so there were these systems put in place to make sure my sisters and I grew up right, since we didn't have them around that much. No minute in the day was to be wasted. We woke up at 4 am to study every day, and after school we had allotted times for reading, cleaning, and for dance, music, guitar, art, debate classes, and half an hour of playtime! Looking back it sounds so ridiculous - but we all took joy and pride in how much we learnt and did, and we knew it meant that we were making the most of our parents’ hard work. 

With everything that I try to balance today, I still feel like 10 year old me was more sorted with her daily planning and scheduling!

Palaash: Dangerously fun! My daily schedule was to play as long as possible until I was definitely getting into trouble! I had a fantastically mischievous neighborhood gang of boys and the narrow streets around our houses in Delhi, was our playground. It was all terribly fun until of course, our parents found out whatever we have been up to, and the next day we would do it all over again. 

Ut grew up in the coastal town Kochi in South India and I grew up in North India in Delhi and we tell each other stories from our childhood often and it is quite amazing how opposite our lives were until we met. Clearly we balance out each other’s extremes.

What does a typical day at work look like for you?

Palaash: We are chaotic in the way we work. Typically there is something that has gone wrong for that day - it could be big or small, like forgetting to correct the price on something or filling out some paperwork somewhere, but there is always something and we usually start by figuring out how to fix that. Once we fix that, and we always do, I get into managing orders that need to go out or be packed or picked up from a supplier and Ut usually works on e-mails, press and social media. 

On a good day we finish all this grown-up stuff by lunch and the afternoons are for new ideas and for tinkering with prototypes, finishes/fabrics or sketches. We always end the day with an hour-long walk, although it is quite normal that the day stretches on even after because somehow there is always a deadline. 

 What is the invisible part of your work? Can you describe it to me?

The conversations, the intention building, the thought trains behind an object is always invisible. One of the cool things about what we do is that we design together - it is not a staggered process or a tag team model, we design truly and completely together, which means almost everything we make first starts as the result of a conversation had months ago on a walk or a car ride. That dialogue is where our ideas are born and that is the most invisible part of our work. 

What do you find to be the most challenging part of what you do?

Predictably - the business end of things, the pricing, the calculating, the negotiating, the taxes, the measuring, the strategizing. It's hard! And definitely does not come naturally to us, so we have to push ourselves to be interested in it and get better at it. 

What are some of the main changes occurring in this industry?

Within our little bubble of collectible design, one of the more encouraging things we have seen is a small start to being more inclusive of aesthetics that are different from just Eurocentric modern design. It's getting more expressive, louder, more fun and there are more voices. It’s long overdue and we hope that continues.

Describe to me a truly unique moment for you in the last ten years.

The first time we put our work on display, in front of the ‘world’ felt unreal. We were debuting our first collection at Wanted Design, manhattan during NYCxDesign 2018 and we were so excited and terrified and of course everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. Our connecting flight got cancelled, we got stranded somewhere in Philadelphia the night before the booth install, had to get on a bus to New York - made even more ridiculous because we were hand carrying these fluffy yarn woven seats to our chair. We were finally in a cab to our friend’s place at 2:30 am. The set-up day went even worse if you can believe it - it was raining, we had to hand-carry cartons from the 5th floor of an apartment building with the narrowest stairway, spent some gazillion hours looking for parking, accidentally ripping a cover for one of our cushions that we had to hand-stitch back - it was so absurd we were laughing at ourselves and the insanity of the situation.

We barely finished a few minutes before the show was officially open, and after spraying ourselves with a bunch of deodorant in the bathrooms we came back to our booth and suddenly we realised we pulled through - the booth looked fine - it was tiny and cute and our pieces looked like a little cute family, and it was just such a weird cool moment. We will never forget the words we heard from everyone who visited us at the show over the next four days - it was overwhelming, it was wonderful and it made us decide to want to do this every day.

Who is someone you look up to? What effect have they had on you / your work?

We have been incredibly lucky to have spent some time with little artisan communities in different parts of India over the last couple of years, and it has always been awe-inspiring. There is a dedication, a reverence to their craft and pride in their incredible skill that is extraordinary. There is honesty in every piece, backed by knowledge and skill passed down through generations - it’s perhaps the biggest difference of how work takes place in India and in the US. In the US, we create templates for everything, the idea is that you design a good template so you don’t depend on skill, in India, especially in the craft clusters, skill is everything, there are no templates, no expensive machinery and no fancy tools. A metal artisan showed us perfect bends on steel, bent by hand - more impressively he made 5 more matching the first one perfectly. 

The relationship between the maker and every piece is so sacred and meaningful. We aspire to that relationship when we hand-weave our cane tops and yarn chairs ourselves. Each one takes over 24 to 36 hours of weaving but it is invaluable to us and the object and something that we can be proud of as we draw from our own culture and history. 

Where do you like to draw inspiration from?

From things that are shapeless - conversations,  interviews, books, biographies, moods, colors - it is quite endless. Our most recent introduction, the Elio Lamps were inspired by studying light’s interaction with translucent materials - a dusty window pane, glass, water, and skin. We were trying to mimic light itself through the physical medium of resins and it was quite an experimental, open-ended process that eventually led us to new methods, textures, and a new cool object.

What do you believe is the most significant accomplishment in your career so far?

Easy - that we started - and that we still exist. Sustenance is the hard work of any small business and that we are able to do that shocks and inspires us every day. 

What areas of your work would you like to pursue further?

Oh so much! We would love to do more with textiles and fabrics, want to explore working with glass and stone, we want to discover the crafts of different cultures, especially our own and learn from them and diversify our visual language and we want to do large scale installations, among other things! 

The quarantine gave us a chance to do one of these wishlist things which was to explore inhabiting a fantastical landscape in 3D and designing for that - which is what we started with a very global group of independent designers with Imagined, for uncertain times. 

What do you find to be the most rewarding part of what you do?

The feeling of tossing an idea around for months and then suddenly realizing we have arrived at something fantastic - is the best most rewarding feeling. We have danced in pajamas and jumped on beds when we get to that place - it’s very college-energy, very nutty.

What interested you about this type of work when you started? Is the reason still the same?

The reason we started and what we most enjoy about the work even now is our collaborative process. To put it simply, it is a lot of fun. It's invigorating to have this seamless, selfless, intense sharing of work and life. We will always be deeply interested in how our partnership travels and evolves.

Soft-geometry is the collaborative work of designers Utharaa L Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary. See more of their work here.