The Soul of Design

By Patrick Clark

An editorial revision of an earlier essay, with a new reflection on the decade that followed.

When I was in high school in the early 1980s, I saw a funny-looking wooden stool at the Kansas Zen Center. It was used for kneeling on the floor. I had never seen anything like it.

No one explained how to use it or why I should sit that way. I simply sat down. Without a backrest or support around me, I seemed to stay upright on my own. Something about the position changed the way I felt in my body. I could meditate with more focus and intensity.

I wanted to know where this little bench came from. Was it a new invention, or something inherited from another culture? This was before the internet, and I could find very little information. So I went home and built one from scrap wood.

I could not have known how much that simple discovery would shape my life. Through Carolina Morning Designs, I would go on to invent designs for floor sitting and sleeping, including the EcoBackrest and Zen Office. That work came before my venture into outdoor gear at Lucky Sheep, and it grew from a question the stool had raised:

What makes a design good?

Is it good because it is new? Because it looks modern? Because it can be manufactured efficiently? Or should we begin with what it does to the person using it?

The body inside the design

The stool communicated something to me before I had words for it: sitting on the floor was possible. More than that, it could be useful and satisfying.

Until then, I had accepted the furniture around me as the natural arrangement of life. Chairs belonged at desks. Beds stood above the floor. A room was furnished when the expected objects had been put in their expected places.

But those arrangements are choices. We inherit them so completely that we rarely notice we have a choice at all.

Furniture shapes how we sit, work, rest and move. It establishes the height at which daily life happens. It can invite us to change positions, or encourage us to remain in one. A room can make movement easy, or fill the space in which movement might otherwise occur.

Once I began using the floor, I started seeing the built environment differently. I was interested in how a design affected breathing, attention and the feeling of being alive in my body. Appearance and convenience were only part of the question.

Explaining that to other people was difficult. Most saw an unusual little piece of furniture. I saw the possibility of a different relationship between the body and its surroundings.

The difficulty taught me something about design: what a culture accepts as good is strongly influenced by what it already recognizes.

An unfamiliar object asks us to reconsider a familiar habit. Sometimes that is a greater obstacle than the object itself.

Looking backward to move forward

I found myself drawn to designs that had been used in other cultures long before the modern office existed. Low tables, mats, kneeling benches and portable backrests offered ways of living that were largely absent from the rooms I knew.

They were unfamiliar to me, but they were not untested. Many belonged to traditions refined through generations of daily use.

That distinction matters. A design can be new to us without being new to humanity. Rediscovering it can be as useful as inventing something from scratch.

The history of floor living became part of my search. What interested me was the relationship between a culture’s furnishings and its everyday practices. When writing, eating and resting take place near the floor, the body participates differently than it does in a room organized entirely around tall furniture.

I did not need to prove that one piece of furniture caused a civilization to rise or fall. The more immediate question was enough: what habits does a design make possible, and what habits does it gradually remove from our lives?

My research went on for years. I often struggled to find the language for what I was investigating. Design discussions seemed to focus on the object, while discussions of the body often gave too little attention to the furniture and spaces surrounding it.

Even the language of ergonomics did not fully describe what I had experienced. Support and alignment mattered, but so did freedom of movement, awareness and the quality of attention. The ideas of chi, prana and cultivation offered other ways of thinking about those experiences.

I wanted to bring these concerns into contemporary design in a form people could understand and use.

When newer becomes the measure

I kept hearing the word “modern” used as a compliment. A design was good because it was modern, streamlined or a break from the past.

Something about that troubled me. In style for whom? Useful for what? How could newness alone tell us whether an object served the human being?

At first, I took this personally. The forms that interested me were ancient, traditional and connected to the earth. If modernity was the measure of good design, where did that leave them?

Over time, I came to see a larger problem. When we assume that newer is better, we can discard accumulated knowledge without examining what it contains. We can also mistake a change in appearance for an improvement in life.

Modern design has made valuable contributions. New tools and manufacturing methods allow us to solve problems, improve function and make useful things more widely available. There is every reason to welcome those possibilities.

But possibility needs direction. Being able to make something does not tell us whether it is worth making, which materials to use, or what its use will encourage.

The questions I wanted to ask came earlier: how will this affect the body? What will its materials bring into our living environment? What resources will it require? Can it be maintained? Will it help us participate more fully in life?

These questions should guide a project from the beginning.

Let the materials guide the design

Materials are often treated as interchangeable ingredients selected after the shape of an object has been decided. I began to think the process should work differently.

Consider the materials first. Consider their effects on people and the environment, their strengths and limitations, and the ways they can be worked. Then allow those qualities to guide the design.

Wool, wood, cotton and other familiar materials carry their own possibilities. They have texture, variation and particular ways of responding to use. Working with them requires attention to what they can actually do.

This approach places limits on a designer, but limits can be productive. They ask us to solve the real problem in front of us instead of forcing a material to imitate something else.

It also changes our idea of beauty. The grain of wood or the character of woven cloth can become part of the design. Variation can express how an object was made and what it was made from.

Traditional materials are not automatically appropriate for every purpose. They still need to be judged honestly. But they deserve that judgment on their own qualities, rather than being dismissed because a newer alternative exists.

The same scrutiny belongs to any new material. A clean appearance tells us very little about its origins or its consequences.

Vernacular has a story

The word vernacular describes design that grows out of the materials, conditions and practices of a place. It carries the experience of people learning how to live there.

Vernacular has a story.

That story may be visible in a building’s response to weather, the way a tool fits the hand, or a piece of furniture that can be moved and repaired. Its form records a relationship between people and their surroundings.

The tipi and its furnishings became important examples for me. In the mobile lives of many Plains peoples, shelter and household objects had to respond to practical demands. Portability mattered. Space mattered. An object that served several purposes could reduce what needed to be carried.

Traditional rollable backrests interested me because they brought those concerns together in a simple form. They offered support near the ground and could be packed for travel. Studying them helped me develop my own version of a tipi chair.

These were sophisticated responses to particular ways of living. They addressed concerns that contemporary designers still work with: weight, storage, adaptability and efficient use of space.

There was also a relationship to the earth that could not be reduced to a list of functions. In the passage I encountered in Touch the Earth, Luther Standing Bear described the old people’s love of the soil and the meaning they found in sitting, reclining and walking upon it.

That perspective resonated with my own exploration of floor living and time outdoors. The ground could be part of life rather than something we continually arranged ourselves above.

Living in a tipi gave me a way to explore these questions directly. A shelter became a setting in which to test how materials, space and daily practices worked together.

The value of studying such designs is not to copy an entire culture or pretend that its circumstances are our own. It is to recognize the intelligence in a form and learn from the relationship that produced it.

What gives design a soul

How can an object have a soul?

I use the word to describe a quality of connection: a sense that an object belongs to a larger world and helps us find our place within it.

A design can tell us something about where its materials came from, whose hands shaped it and what kind of life it supports. It can express care for the person who will use it and for the place in which it will exist.

When these relationships are ignored, an object may still be visually impressive. It may be fashionable or technically accomplished. But something essential can be missing.

We experience life as a whole. The body using an object cannot be separated from the room, the weather, the materials or the habits surrounding its use. A design that pays attention to those relationships has a different kind of presence.

This is what I mean by soul. It does not depend on an object looking rustic or old. A contemporary design can have it. A traditional-looking object can lack it.

Nor does it require rejecting science, technology or modern tools. I want a design approach that makes full use of our discoveries while remaining connected to the experience of those who came before us.

The past contains mistakes as well as wisdom. We can examine both. What we cannot afford is to dismiss it simply because it is the past.

Good design can carry knowledge forward, adapt it to present needs and leave room for further discovery. It can give us useful things while helping us remember that we belong to a place, a history and a living world.

That is the kind of design I have been searching for since I sat on that little wooden stool.

A Decade Later

When I wrote the original essay, I was trying to explain a direction that had already shaped years of exploration. At Carolina Morning Designs, I had been putting these ideas into practice through designs for floor sitting and sleeping. That work gave me a foundation for understanding how furnishings and natural materials could support the body in daily life.

Lucky Sheep carried that exploration outdoors. The setting changed, but the questions remained: how do we sit, sleep, move and shelter ourselves in ways that work with the body and connect us to our surroundings?

In the years since, those ideas have become things people use: wool sleeping bags, canvas packs, waxed cotton clothing and shelters. Designing and making them has given me a practical way to test the philosophy.

The materials have repeatedly changed the outcome. Beginning with wool leads to different questions about a sleeping system. Beginning with canvas and beeswax leads to different decisions about construction, finishing and care. Considering how a pack interacts with the moving body opens questions about the arrangement of its straps.

The work has also made the tradeoffs real. Weight, cost, durability and the time required to make something all matter. A philosophy has to meet those demands in the workshop and in use.

I would not claim that every early idea has been proved. What I can say is that the central questions have remained useful. They continue to guide what I make and how I live.

Looking back, I see a continuous thread from the kneeling bench through Carolina Morning Designs to Lucky Sheep and A Rewilder’s Guide to Outdoor Adventure. What once seemed like separate interests were ways of exploring the same relationship: how the things around us can support a more capable, attentive and connected life.

The body is the first piece of gear. Everything we add should begin with an understanding of that body and the world it belongs to.

For me, that remains the soul of design.