Xover0 Mixing Fashion, Design, and Technology

A Welcome to Practice Disrupted, a podcast where we find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects. I'm your host, Evelyn Li, an architect who spans tech as an angel investor, start up advisor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're a seasoned architect or just starting in the field, this podcast is your gateway to think differently about the role architects play within our global community. Hello, disruptors. Welcome back to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. Today, we're joined by Duane McLemore and Catherine Voorhees, the creative minds behind X Over 0, a jewelry brand known for its bold innovative designs that merge architectural form with high fashion. Founded at their kitchen table in Los Angeles, X Over 0 has grown into a premier casting studio in Mississippi, crafting heirloom quality pieces that have captured the attention of customers around the world, including a spotlight in Netflix's The Ugly, where their GeoHarp pendant worn by Joey King plays a primary role in the movie's story. Duane is an architect with a passion for digital fabrication, and Catherine is a self taught graphic artist and fashion designer by training.

A They tell their story, blending complex geometry and traditional techniques to create wearable art that's as thought provoking as it is beautiful. We'll talk about how their passion for art and architecture influences their approach to jewelry, transforming structural ideas into wearable pieces. Hi, Duane and Catherine. We're so glad to have you on the show with us. Welcome to Practice Disrupted.

B Hello. Thank you for having us.

C Yeah. Thanks for having us.

A Yeah. So we've ran through your formal bios. Is there anything you know, we like to kick it off with a little bit of an icebreaker. Is there anything that you all are looking forward to in the near future that we'd like to share?

B I think several things. Most pressing is our newest collection that we're hoping to release by the end of this month. It might be released even by the time the podcast comes out. So we're calling it Ghost Gems, and I don't know how much we can say about it without giving too much away before it's out. But I guess expect the unexpected. It's the first instance of us integrating custom cut gems into our line. So we thought it was high time to add some color into our product range, and this is what we came up with.

A Great. Duane, do you wanna add to that?

C No. Absolutely. Basically, if you wanna if you wanna conceptualize it, it's the expect the unexpected is exactly the case. You can imagine the notion the traditional notion of jewelry kind of deconstructed and reconstructed a little bit, and that's all I'll say.

B Duane, at one point you compared this to, like, the culinary arts?

C Oh, yeah. Oh, no. So yeah. So exactly that. So so if so that's a that's a good analogy is that there's if you imagine if you imagine kind of, gastronomic cuisine kind of deconstructing the flavors and the the the ingredients and recomposing them in a novel way, that's kind of what we're doing with with Ghost Gems. It it uses all of the traditional pieces of jewelry in ways that maybe are a little bit unexpected.

B An avant garde.

C Yeah. Definitely definitely trying to go for something a little bit Catherine, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's a little bit avant garde and also has a bit of a pop sensibility at the same time.

B Yeah. I think that's accurate.

A One of the reasons why I'm so ecstatic to have both of you on is because I think a lot of what you know, a lot of what's been on practice disrupted previously has really been software innovation, let alone software applied to products. And you guys are definitely the first product innovators that we have. I guess product at this scale, I should say. We've had building product innovation. But product that is actually more b two c, right, rather than b two b, which is what the building industry seems to be focused on. So I would love to hear about, you know, what led the 2 of you to create x over 0, and was there a particular moment or experience that sparked the brand's vision?

B I think probably just like a long slow burn of, pent up creative energy that we had nowhere to spend in our day jobs where we were just constantly playing it safe and letting, you know, that safety dictate the outcome of each and every project. So, yeah, we just had a lot of ideas bouncing around in our heads that we wanted to pursue, and we needed an outlet for it. So it was kind of a slow and steady path towards the x over 0 jewelry line, but it just seems like it was always kind of, like, destined to happen.

C And I think one of the things about that that we we don't talk about and nobody our age talks about, but is definitely present, is the fact that the crash happened in a really bad time for our careers. And so just at the point we would have been able to, you know, get out of this first and second jobs and start doing really significant stuff, all of the all of the resources just evaporated. And so there had to become a kind of take the opportunities you can and do it yourself kind of spirit across the entire, you know, architecture and design industries at that time. And so we really came out of the kind of post crash, you know, the kind of the the rebuild from the crash, looking for unique novel opportunities, but knowing that this wasn't, you know, the the the era where they were just giving out big projects and, you know, you could just do whatever. So it was really kind of making making your own opportunities. And I think Catherine and I have always both been kind of entrepreneurial, definitely creative, obviously, as designers. Just always looking for an outlet, even if we were doing it in pretty normative ways in day jobs, looking for things that we could do to, you know, to do things with more novelty.

B And I think I was always quite certain about my goal to have my own business as a student, you know, even before that. Before starting at Parsons. I I knew that that was my goal. So it was kind of just like, you know, now or never take the leap.

A And I know, Catherine, I I would say that, you know, you have a background in in fashion, which I I feel like the the scale of that, just because you alluded to risk earlier, is a little bit different. Well, fashion has its own risk, admittedly. But just like the the scale the scale and capital of building or of, delivering so many garments versus delivering a building is a very different model. So when you think about what you mentioned about risk, was the scale of what you're producing just more comfortable to you as well?

B Yeah. I mean, I don't know how much scale has to do with the conversation about, like, creative risk. There's, like, definitely financial risk and there's creative risk. But I think first and foremost, the scale was necessitated by the fact that we started this when we were living in LA by, you know, standards of most of the country, a small apartment in LA, maybe it was a castle. We were very grateful to have it. Great place. But, you know, it was very, very hard to run a business and live out of that kind of space. So we, you know, limited our scope to what we could actually fit inside of our apartment with us and jewelry objects as we all know are very small.

B So it just seems like a good fit, and it worked. Yeah.

C You know, if we wanted dinner, we had to clear the product photography we were doing off the I say dinner table, but it was really a kitchen table and, you know, cook dinner. And then if we wanted to get back to product photography, we'd have to do our do our washing up and then, you know, reset up the product photography setup. So it was

B And assembly, you know, like Yeah. Not just photography, shape shipping. Yeah. All of the things.

A And then my next question would be, if it weren't for the evolution of computational design and 3 d printing, do you think you still would be pursuing jewelry and ornamentation?

B Maybe not, actually. I think that the digital design and 3 d printing really inspired us to start creating because it's the sky is the limit with that, you know? And I think it was fairly new at the time we got started with it, and there was a lot that we felt we could do. I mean, I don't know if this is a good way to think about it, but I think about it as, like, an acrobatic act or an acrobatic trick. And as unathletic people, this is me and Dwayne's version of that. Right? Like, we can see something that, like, we can create or build upon a technique that we can pursue and really hone. And that's really what made us gravitate towards this. That was something that I think we always would have wanted to do, play with the materiality of things and the structure in a way that was very out of the box. But had these technologies not kind of, like, lined up with the timing of us being, like, chomping at the bit to do something like this, I don't know.

B I don't I don't know that we would have been able to follow our dreams. Certainly not in the same way.

C Yeah. And I can speak to the architectural side of that that a specific driver of this for us was, in fact, that, you know, I was I was a computational designer. And unless you had a large budget project or, you know, you or, like, you know, have a client who was willing to say, you know what, this thing that is really novel and, at that time, still pretty pretty challenging, pretty, pretty avant garde, You know, they really had to support that. And as a you know, if you you either had to go to a big big firm that you know, and you had to kinda pick your opportunities, you know, you'd see the you know, you'd be doing the front desk, reception desk in a skyscraper. Right? And so that was kind of the scope of impact that you could anticipate unless you were one of the the the, you know, the super top end people that was doing a, you know, a a hotel facade in Dubai or something. Right? That was that was what it was getting made at. And unless you were able to and wanted to work at that scale, it wasn't happening. It was gonna be all virtual or paper, quote, unquote, projects anyway.

C And that didn't do it for me in terms of trying to explore advanced fabrication. So that intersection of computational design and advanced fabrication, keeping our scale to the scale of the body, you know, something can Catherine knows the landscape, quote, unquote, of the body very well as a fashion designer, and I knew the computational tools very well. And so that kind of intersection, I think, was a really happy, place for us. So, like Catherine says, kind of try to do something that's a a feat of daring in a certain sense, but also trying to look at something that is both daring but also achievable. Because you're trying to you're trying to take these tools that are you know, we're not the first people to work with them or anything, but definitely pretty novel still, especially at that point, and get them to do real things and test them by making something real and putting it out in the world, not just being able to get by on making virtual projects that'll would never actually stand up, you know, or or having the economy of scale to be able to work on those super large projects. So it was really a it was really a kind of confluence. It was an intersection of a lot of different favorable conditions for us to be able to start x over 0.

A So when you first started conceptualizing x over 0, what are some of the initial ideas or prototypes you worked on? And you alluded, you know, Dwayne and Catherine, obviously, the to the technologies. But where did you guys start, and how did you see it or how have your products evolved to what we see today?

B So when we first started just, you know, pursuing this technology and seeing what we can do with it, That was just digital design, and anything that we made was made out of paper. We actually made a dress that was referred to as hashtag cardware for a stationery and gift company that I worked for at the time. And, that was scripted in Grasshopper, and we assembled that out of greeting cards, actually.

A Fun.

B Yeah.

C Yeah. And then we got, we got the Ultimaker, the original plus. And we, you know, we got the kit, built, the 3 d printer, and ran it until the wheels fell off. Right? And we got a feel for what the machines could do and what we wanted to see. And there's something I think that cuts to a little bit of what we do in the same way that somebody who's trying to, you know, we use the term acrobatics, trying to do something that's a bit of a let's call it a high wire act. Right? You gotta know how to, you gotta know everything from the from the fundamentals up of every single bit of the process. And so building that Ultimaker kit allowed me to understand the kind of consequences of every single screw, you know, in linear bearing and hot end and thermister, what have you, in a in the way that that, in that case, the FFF or FDM process worked to really get the fundamentals of the additive manufacturing in the same way I had broken, you know, Grasshopper down into the atomic level almost. And I, you know, I I still use it to this day as a a programming language, not just a language for scripting crazy geometry.

C And so that allowed us to push you know, once you get the the the fundamentals established, you know, building complexity comes from layering up lots of really well understood fundamentals. And so that allowed us to move pretty fast. And pretty soon, we, you know, both ran the thing until it basically was just not reliable anymore. And then also got a level of scale and kind of ambition that we needed to have our stuff made from sturdier materials. You know? And we decided we decided to try to sell them and went off in that direction.

B Yeah. And we were working with production partners initially to do that. Again, you know, small apartment. But, yeah, we have since taken everything on in house since moving to Mississippi, and that's where we're on we are now. We've kind of upgraded our setup and restricted our line to precious metals.

A So walk us through the design process today. So, obviously, Dwayne, you talked about, like, the breakdown down to understanding even the tooling of the machines and grasshoppers. Mhmm. But I'd love to understand what your design process is today. And, you know, Catherine, you and Duane both started talking about your your new line. And so a little bit more about how that came together.

B So I think the design process kind of evolved for us from just, like, asking the question, but can the machine do this? Like, let's see if it can do this. And then, you know, getting the results and and tweaking it and testing more and pushing more and pushing boundaries. And then, you know, once we got a lot of answered questions and a lot of products into our line, these days, we're kind of, like, looking for kind of gaps or holes to fill in the product line itself. And then sometimes it's just like waking up with an idea in our head and really feeling like we have absolutely have to make that. With Ghost Gyms, we did a bunch of iterations and kind of called that group, chose the best ones. We didn't feel like it was wise to make every single option. So we're just kind of like looking for the best grouping of products that look cohesive together while at the same time having enough variation to keep people excited and cover some options?

C Yeah. I mean, we we we ideated even to the level of of making, you know, digital models, you know, 20, 25 different patterns for for the the kind of one of the big pieces, one of the big parts of the Ghost Gym thing that you'll see. And I think that's that's something you're talking about the design process. You know, we come at it from, you know, interesting, divergent or convergent, I guess, really converging from different places, ways. You know, Catherine is trained as a designer and as a fashion designer. You know, the way she ideates is much different than the way I do. And, I'll let her speak to that. But I can say once we get something into a platform, like, in our case, you know, Grasshopper is really useful not just because, like I kind of hinted at earlier, it's a machine for making crazy geometries, you know, but because it allows us to build a machine that is flexible and that we've built from first principles and can control the variables in.

C Right? And so we can sit down together and look at, like, kind of the space of all of the design possibilities or the design space, as it were. And both make big changes, change whole patterns, change whole scales and things like that, and watch a large change propagate, but then also get down to the real technical details of something that's gonna be able to be successful, as a model, as a piece of jewelry, as something that we know we can cast, etcetera, we know will be a successful print, what have you.

B And Grasshopper is always integral to our process, but sometimes the design just starts as a simple sketch in pencil on paper. Sometimes we make a physical model and we find some clay or something and and and make something make something up for the other to see. And sometimes it's just like kind of an amorphous 3 d sculpture in a program like ZBrush just to spatially work out the configuration of the idea. But I like that it it just kinda like it depends on what side we wake up, out of the we get out of the bed in the morning. It depends on what side we get out of the bed in the morning. You know, it's just like it can vary, and I think that that variation brings some personality into our line rather than it just looking like a Grasshopper design every each and every time. And I think when it comes to having Grasshopper help us hone one of those ideas that started that way, that is more of a challenge to do in Grasshopper. Yeah.

B And helps integrate, like, some more complexity and flavor.

C Yeah. And to to speak to that, not to not to belabor the point, but, you know, it's it's, at at 25 years having done this, you know, in the design practices, kind of, we've learned so many tools that we have these toolboxes, you know, in our minds and literally, where we go and we pick out the right tool for the job. And, you know, I did mention Grasshopper a couple times, and tools like that are good for a certain mode of production. But, we've been at this for so long that, you know, that that we don't privilege the tool over the idea. And sometimes, sometimes we let the tool generate the idea or know that the affordances of a tool can do interesting things in certain ways for us, but, but we pick where necessary the tool for the job.

A So I have a question. There's a lot of different jewelry companies out of there. Are you scanning the market when you go to create a new line and understanding what's coming up next? And how much of it is kind of just really intuition and producing something that you are really just passionate about for yourselves and then sharing your designs with the world?

B Yeah. I think it's definitely a mix of all of the above. There are sometimes when we have an idea that's so out of left field that we're pretty sure no one else has done it before. And I think that we are a little bit tapped in just by kind of what we take in on a daily basis. But, yeah, we do do research. It really kinda depends on the on the product. For the Geoheart pendant, the heart shaped pendant that's in Uglies, that Joey King wears in that movie, that was something that we did a bunch of research before we created that. We wanted to make something that fit in our line, but was a referential heart shaped object to have something for Valentine's Day to sell.

B And so we did a bunch of research for that. We didn't see anything like it, and that's what we came up with. There were some geometric hearts that were just kind of like basic wireframes, but something that has, like, a defined style to it. Yeah. We we definitely made sure that that was unique.

C Yeah. It's funny. It's it's really happenstance in some ways. We I think we generally prefer obviously, there's places on your body that you wear different things, and so there's a direct relationship between the piece and the body. And so, you know, there's there's there's things you can't innovate. There's just ways of putting things on the body that just aren't going to work.

B And there's definitely limitations of, like, weight and size and

C Exactly. But, like, beyond that, we would rather do a type of jewelry that nobody's ever seen before, generally. But the Geo Heart, you know, something that something that just completely defies expectations. And that's that's really our stuff has always come into more standard. It's always it's always been how how far can we push it, and then how far back do we need to come to make it something that's actually fabricatable and salable and shippable. But the geohart is interesting because it came from the absolute opposite direction, which the heart shaped pendant is the most overdone piece of jewelry in the world. Right? If

B you Yeah. Absolutely.

C Look at it online, there is no end to the different the different kind of iterations on the same thing. And it's really interesting because there's nothing out there like it. I mean, like ours. And that's I think that's that's one of the lucky things about about

B About doing something different.

C Yeah. Is that we found, you know, rather than rather than try to find the Track

B a trend.

C Or find the

B blue try to yeah.

C Yeah. Or rather than try to find the blue waters where nobody else is fishing that we normally do, you know, we went into the the the red chummy waters where everybody's trying to sell in the same market and and said, well, heck, there's something that nobody's this most overdone thing. There's a way of doing it that nobody's done. And so we're we're really happy and lucky with that one, I think.

A Dwayne, I I appreciate kind of your reference to to blue water and red water and blue ocean strategy, from a from a business standpoint is one of my favorite books. But, you know, Catherine, you first mentioned it. So one of your pieces is being featured in the uglies on the the primary character, Joey King. So how how did that come about, actually?

B Yeah. I'll get to that in a second. It's, a movie. It's called Uglies, and it is based on a New York Times best selling book by the same title. The author is Scott Westerfeld, and it's part of a series. So it's like a very beloved You series of books that people who read it when it was released in 2005 are absolutely crazy about it. It has a very special place in a lot of people's hearts. And the pendant shows up a whole bunch of times in the book.

B It's it's it really plays a major role in the book, so they definitely needed to find one for the shoot. And I'd like to say that I am a product placement guru genius, and you can just make out the check, for the big bucks and send it straight to me if you'd like to employ me to do the same for you. But actually, it was, like, totally organic. Because the design was so unique, it was just a really great fit for what the story called for. So the costume designer, Chris Arujo, I'm totally butchering her name, Arujo. She found us through our website and contacted us, and we were just immediately interested and intrigued. And Chris has such an amazing resume that we knew our design would be in good hands when we sent it to the fitting, and we're told that, Joey King loved the design. We were just so, like, oh my god.

B Like, that was just a really proud moment for us because, you know, not only is Chris super talented and, you know, she's worked on I think she worked on the Hunger Games and just loads of stuff. But Joey King is not just an amazing actor, but is, like, so good at fashion. Like, it's crazy how good at fashion she is. Like, the looks that she and Jared Ing are serving on a daily basis are just, like, amazing eye candy. So we were incredibly flattered. And, yeah, I just think that if anyone has read the series and is familiar with that universe, and if anyone has also looked at our line, that they would really understand why it's such a good fit. Dwayne, do you wanna talk a little bit about Scott Westerfeld and how he uses architecture?

C So I think it's interesting because Scott Westerfeld, he's really, architecturally informed and sensitive, and he uses distinct kind of architectural styles and references to differentiate between the different, like, kind of sex and settings in society. Right? So so it's really kind of richly conceptualized the way that the way that he implements that. So our pendant, for example, the Geoheart pendant was inspired by Art Deco architecture. And like Catherine said, we designed it for Valentine's Day a few years ago. And like we were talking about at the time, there wasn't really much in the way of a kind of a more let's see, you know, this geometric style, this kind of the nontraditional heart shaped pendant. So we thought it was appropriate creative challenge, and that's what we came up with. And like Catherine said, you know, when they reached out, we were really excited. But I think one thing that's really neat to see looping back to the architecture and Scott Westerfeld thing, is that when McGhee and his whole production company kind of reimagined or put this to visual, you can tell that they were cooking you know, from the same cookbook.

C And I know that I know that mister Westerfeld was a was a consultant on the production. And so I'm sure that he he made sure that people understood the, in the production, understood how the world building comes, yeah, the universe, the world building comes from an architectural perspective, how, you know, the various places have the various architectural flavors they have. And you can see it you can even see it in the in the trailer, you know, if you look look at that.

B And I don't know if this is too much of a spoiler, but you can see, like, the objects on doctor Cable's desk have, like, the a very, like, geometric sci fi feel. And I guess that the spoiler is that the origin of Tali's heart pendant comes from doctor Cable.

C Yeah. Do not accept a a heart pendant given to you by doctor Cable. It may look like our Geoheart, but beware. X over 0 features. X over 0, except only the original. Except no substitutions. Because don't get it from doctor Cable. Watch out.

C Just watch out.

A Were you aware of the books before you were contacted?

B So no. The books actually came out in 2,005, which is right when we were starting our professional lives, and it's a young adult series. It's a You series of books. So we didn't know about them. We just kind of, like, missed that by a slim margin. And when we were contacted about it, we, you know, we we said yes, and then we're like, what are we getting into? You know, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, we did read the books after that. And like, with every page turn, I was just kinda like, hell, yeah.

B This is so cool.

C Yeah. And it really the way the way that Scott Westerfeld wrote it, I mean, it really begs for for a movie interpretation. You know, it's it's really well kind of put together to be you know, to to let the imagination kind of run with how that stuff can be. So you put it in the hands of somebody that's technically a good filmmaker and has a, you know, strong, you know, strong vision for the production, for the, you know, set work and all of that stuff, and it can be really cool. So

B And I think if anyone is, like, super familiar with the You genre, you'll see, like, a lot of pretty familiar themes in this book. But this book came first, so it's nice to see the author finally getting his due.

C Yeah. Exactly. He's he's definitely the he's definitely the guy that kinda kicked off the whole thing. Maybe the maybe the first of the current, you know, the crop since that time of the You dystopians. And oddly enough, it turns out, friends of a friend. So which we had no clue about. So that's that that's just kind of a funny Yeah.

B That's true. We have a friend in common with the author, or Dwayne's friend is in common with the author.

A Did you guys know I mean, when you saw the email come through or the direct message on Insta from Chris, what was your initial reaction?

B She just emailed us through the contact form on our store.

A Oh, really?

B And yeah. Yeah. And we didn't think it was a scam because we'd been contacted by production companies before. We've sent stuff to Cirque du Soleil. We had several orders from the show, The Orville. So we just were kind of like, oh, god. I it's the pandemic. I really hope this works out and that it's not something like, we can't like, the shipping just, like, went off the rails or something.

A Yeah. Great. I'm I'm so glad. I I mean, I think it's just kind of exciting to Yeah. To hear that was out of nowhere. So thank goodness for the Internet. So speaking of website and and, you know, I think that goes to the heart of things that I love, all business operations Yes. And and marketing.

A How do you guys balance the creative and business sides of running x over 0?

B Oh, not well. Not well. Speaking of website, if you wanna get into that, I mean, like, we are still on our Shopify 1.0 theme because it was a lot of custom coding. The thing about running a small business is that sometimes you just have to do things yourself. So, I am the web designer, and I have a 2 point o shop that is ready to go, ready to make live at any minute barring one sure. JavaScript issue that I am banging my head against the wall, but that should have been up, like, weeks ago. And I would love to get it up soon, but there's just so much stuff coming at me right now from all directions with the movie release and the pendant and everything.

A So, obviously, you're launching a new collection. Do you guys have a long term vision for x over 0?

B I would like to have a new collection twice a year. They don't have to be huge collections, but just a few pieces that work together. And we have them in the tank. Like, we we just it's just a matter of, having the time and having everything come together for us that we are able to put one foot in front of another, but we've got lots of works in progress. So we expect that people will be able to start seeing a lot more from us a lot more frequently. The pandemic kinda put us in a little bit of a holding pattern with that, but I think now we are back and fully operational and ready to roll.

C And I I can add to that that from a kind of idea business side, just the whole kind of package, I think that there's a you'll see as we develop and as as we you know, if we like like Catherine said, we really got put on our back foot by the pandemic. But, you know, as the world is coming out of that and as we're able to shift over toward toward, you know, doing more of this, that we want to we want to have the kind of overall collection, right, capital c collection, that kind of acts as a body of work that maybe is not so disparate and diverse where every single piece is a one off or so predictable that you see any given piece, and you're like, oh, that's an x over 0 immediately. Right? But that we we we kind of fluidly go between things that are inspired by traditions of fashion and jewelry and things that are inspired by my weird math obsessions and, you know, coding projects and things that really just fluidly go and things that are inspired by different architectural styles and different references in the world. You know? I think, you know, it's not somebody, like, that we're going to say is is necessarily we're trying to pattern ourselves after in any stretch of the imagination. But I you know, correct Catherine, correct me if I'm wrong because you're the fashion person.

B I don't know. I'm I'm holding my breath. I'm worried that you're wrong.

C Well, yeah. It's it's fine. Tell me if I'm wrong. But I think to to kind of template it out, if you were to think about somebody like Alexander McQueen who

B I don't know about that, Dwayne.

C Well, no. I just mean the diverse I don't mean don't look at any of the work itself. I just mean the diversity of the themes of some of the things and how, you know, some things really played with the technology and other things played with these, you know, age old references and, right, you know, played with the genre itself. I think somebody who's really playing the whole field of this of this discipline for us is is the thing. So that so that maybe there's a recognizable set of values more than a recognizable style or a recognizable technique. You know? We don't just want one button that we just keep mashing.

B In in terms of the future, I think maybe what you can expect from us is more color in the line with gemstones. We're using, lab grown gems primarily. And, I think a lot more kind of tongue in cheek personality, pop art kind of a vibe. We're kind of gradually peppering that in as well. It's just kind of like unavoidable in our in our individual personalities and our in our conversations with each other. So we're not gonna hide that from our products either.

C And I think the other thing, just to make a plug talking about working with Uglies and talking about the future is we would die if our if something of ours, if we were able to work on the on the TV show Foundation. So David s Goyer David s Goyer and, Dagmar Palmakbayeva call us because we are we are such huge fans. From the opening credits of the first episode of that show, you know, design wise, we were, like, this is our jam. So it's it has nothing

B that world.

C Has nothing to those worlds. I mean, so many

A We love those faults.

B We love the ghosts. Yeah.

C And true.

A True. Don't

B come from that ghost.

A But That is true, though.

B You know?

A But I can I can definitely do the references? Yes.

C Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, like, there's the long term scale of what we wanna do as a as a company and as a brand, etcetera, but then there's also just David s Goyer, call us.

B Yeah. We've got a lot of offerings for you to choose from, or we could whip something up for you.

C Yeah. Exactly. Shameless plug.

B Yeah. And then just, you know, we're we're looking forward to more kind of, like, out of the box opportunities. I think Dwayne was approached by someone in custom he builds custom cars.

C Yeah. To do some to do some custom 3 d printed kit and finish kind of stuff for, for specifically one for one private customer.

B Yeah. It sounded like there was one project in mind, but then that kind of died. So we're just waiting for the next one to come along. And then, yeah, we've been contacted by someone who wanted a mask for an opera. But, yeah, just that's what we're here for. So

A Abele, I love your enthusiasm, and I I wish I could say practice disrupted had the right reach to get you to the right people to get on.

B We're just putting it out into the

A universe. Yeah. We're just gonna do the universe.

C Just needs to go into the ether.

A Yeah. But what advice would you give to young designers who are interested in going into the field of product design?

B I don't know. Maybe, like, don't follow advice or do I I don't know. It's, like, kind of it's all kind of random. I know that I followed the advice of my professors when they said work for small like, if your goal is to have a small business, work for a small business. That's what I pursued. And I think there are definitely some pros and cons to that. I don't know that that was super helpful in us having a business. Maybe it was.

B Maybe it kept us from kind of getting stuck in a rut and just being a button pusher in something that was overspecialized, but maybe not. Maybe if I had been overspecialized, I would have made more money and just paid someone to take some of the hats off my plate. My tombstone is gonna read crushed by hats if things keep going the way that they're going. But, yeah, I don't know. Dwayne, what advice do you have?

C So specifically for architects, you know, I mean, having, you know, worked as worked in the profession, you know, full time for 14 years or something. The there's a lot of opportunities taken where you can. I I always worked for small to midsize firms and, you know, we kind of got a very good professional education in my undergraduate, in a very, very, very sober professional, kind of pro practice kind of education. And a lot of that was, you know, look, what do you wanna do with the long term market of your career? And who what kind of firms do you wanna work for? And I I, you know, and even fresh out of school saw this play out where folks that went to work for for the big firms, you know, the people that taught us pro practice, you know, warned. Oh, you're gonna get stuck doing bathroom partition details and stuff like that. And, you know, they they were dealing with that kind of thing. And I went to work for, you know, I didn't I didn't go aboard these kind of battleship firms. I went to the pirate ship firms.

C And I think there's a kind of swashbuckling spirit where everybody has to be able to do everything that the bad embodied that was really attractive to me. And I've always I've always been a pirate ship person more than a battleship person. And I think find yourself in that, understand what you want to get out of your early career, Get your license early as an architect, but also leave yourself open to stuff like this.

B Yeah. We all we just both answered the question and, like, what to do for your day job because that's what we had to do. You know, we had to have day jobs, but so we're just kind of making assumptions that that's everyone's lot in life. But I would say even if you do have a day job, always do something on the side for yourself. Make time for it. Keep the creative spark alive however you can, and build on that and try to just proportionally do more of it every day you can.

C Yeah. Figure out figure out how to make your job not get your job. Right? How how do you do what you want in the end? And I think that comes from I can tell you what it doesn't come from. It doesn't come as much as I love architects, obviously, being 1. Doesn't come from just hanging out with other architects. You don't just sit around and talk shop as good as that is and as fun as that is. You know, your your commissions as an architect or your clients as a as a as a jewelry fabricator come from your social connections. Right? So if you're not from a if you're in a city where you don't know those people or if you're not from a a, you know, socioeconomic background where you grew up around those people, figure out how to get in those circles and figure out how to speak that language.

B Yeah. Hit the club and go into debt doing it. That's what I would say. Like, every celebrity memoir or or success story that I've ever read involves, like, someone going into debt by going to the club every night. So I think that that's that is as good of a piece of advice, or good a strategy as any.

C Yeah. There's there's there's wasting your time and wasting your money, then there's opportunity risk. And I think that, or what what's it called? Opportunity cost. And I think that you need to balance the 2. There's there's obviously being able to do a good job at things. Know your tools also. I think this the the absolute a number one biggest thing is know your tools. Right? So that allows you to do more cooler faster.

C And so

B Know your nightclubs.

C Exactly. So if you're in that if you're in that well, part of part of being part of knowing your tools means being able to say to others to be conversant in the way that your tools work and what in kind of fine grain detail you do and what you can do for them, rather than just sound like a BS artist who's like, oh, yeah. I'll make you the most beautiful thing ever. Like, you know, they're not they're not, you know that whole thing is, you know, what it's, you know, the whole kind of Starkitect kind of vibe is not it anymore. You know, you you can't just get stuck being a technician, but you have to be you have to be able to express your technical excellence. And that's part of how you can show value, I think. And so so it is half hitting the club and being very serious about your, you know, about what you do. So so I guess it's what right? Work hard, play hard kind of thing.

C And enjoy yourself. Do stuff you love. I mean, like, we're really we're really doing a lot of different things now, but, you know, it's it's I think a lot of this came from we really wanted to know about 3 d printing. Not because we thought, oh, there's a great growth market, you know, which it is. Or computational design, blah blah blah. Right? It's because we wanted to know how to new ways to make cool stuff, and we really needed to feed those parts of ourselves. So know what you want, know what you love, and know what's gonna make it worth having you know, doing and having fun doing. Just try to have fun.

B If you haven't already seen Uglies by the time this is released, go watch it on Netflix. If you're wondering or people are asking you, where did they get that cool heart pendant that Joey King is wearing? Tell them to find it atxoverzero.com. A capital x, a lowercase o, ver, so the word over, and then the number 0 on your number key. And that's dotcom@instagram.

A Hi, disruptors. Thank you for joining us today on an episode of Practice Disrupted. If you like the content for today's show, you can find all of our past episodes over on practice of architecture.com/podcast. Be a part of the conversation by joining me, our speakers, and other disruptors in our community at practice of architecture.com/community. Our social media handle is practice of arch. That's practice of a r c h. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to drop us a DM and say hello. Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.