I am starting LAB, a new design and technology company exploring what happens when computing becomes a material for designers.
I think the computer is more malleable and explorable than it has been in decades, and that we are at the beginning of a new period of creative experimentation in computing.
The technology underneath computers is becoming increasingly modular, accessible, open, and manufacturable. Framework gives us access to excellent, supported compute. Companies like Seeed Studio and Waveshare let us start with development hardware we can buy today and provide paths toward customization and production. Modern fabrication gives us access to sophisticated manufacturing without owning factories. Open-source software gives us extraordinary foundations to build upon. AI dramatically increases what an individual or small team can design, engineer, program, research, and operate.
Computing as a material
For most of the history of electronics, a designer couldn't approach computing the way they approached furniture.
A furniture designer can buy aluminum, marble, glass, leather, hardware, and textiles. They can work with machinists, upholsterers, cabinetmakers, foundries, and fabricators. They don't need to invent aluminum before designing a chair.
Increasingly, I think we can approach computing the same way.
LAB treats computing as a material.
We can source compute like we source marble: find exceptional suppliers, understand their material deeply, and concentrate our authorship on what we do with it.
Sometimes that will involve significant engineering, custom electronics, embedded software, mechanisms, and manufacturing development. Sometimes our intervention might be surprisingly small. Design has always worked this way. The contribution can be invention, but it can also be selection, composition, proportion, material, context, craft, and point of view.
For a long time, electronics made that kind of authorship unusually difficult. A single furniture designer can make an important new chair without developing a new aluminum alloy, building a factory, or designing a new fastener. They can enter an existing ecosystem of materials, components, craftspeople, manufacturers, and processes and move the conversation forward from there. Sometimes that involves years of development and substantial technical invention. Sometimes the intervention is remarkably small. What matters is that the resulting object has something to say and that somebody wants it.
Electronics have traditionally asked much more of the person who wants to participate. Before you could get to the expressive part, you could find yourself designing circuit boards, writing firmware, developing tooling, navigating certification, negotiating minimum order quantities, building supply chains, and raising enough money to manufacture at meaningful scale. A designer with an idea for a chair could start making the chair. A designer with an idea for a computer often had to start a technology company first.
I think that distinction is beginning to collapse.
Framework is interesting to us not because a motherboard is itself a new idea, but because it gives us access to sophisticated, supported computing as a component deliberately intended to be built upon. Seeed Studio increasingly connects the development board on your desk to customization and production. Waveshare and companies like it make an extraordinary range of displays, sensors, controllers, and embedded electronics available in quantities of one. The broader manufacturing ecosystem increasingly lets us move between prototype and production without recreating every layer underneath the object ourselves.
None of this means hardware has become easy. It means more of the difficult work can exist before the designer arrives.
That distinction matters.
Design reaches for technology
For roughly the last two decades, one of the defining stories of technology has been technology embracing design. Technology companies brought industrial designers, interaction designers, architects, typographers, artists, and craftspeople into their organizations and increasingly treated design as central rather than decorative. The public responded. Some of the most successful technology products in the world became inseparable from the design cultures surrounding them.
The movement was largely from technology toward design.
I think we are now beginning to see movement in the other direction.
Technology is becoming something designers can reach for.
Computing can begin to escape the technology silo and become a medium used by furniture designers, interior designers, lighting designers, ceramicists, photographers, artists, architects, and craftspeople. They do not necessarily need to become computer companies first. They can increasingly approach electronics the way they approach other sophisticated materials: understand enough about their properties, work with specialists where necessary, and use them in service of an idea.
This is not unprecedented. New technologies often begin as highly specialized technical disciplines before becoming creative media. Photography did not remain solely the territory of chemistry and optics. Film became more than the machinery required to capture and project moving images. Electronic music became more than electrical engineering. As the underlying technology became more accessible, the center of the conversation could move from making the technology possible to deciding what to do with it.
Computing may be entering a similar moment.
A different kind of object
The computer itself has also become strangely stable as an object. The laptop is a screen attached to a keyboard. The phone is a sheet of glass. The desktop is usually a box attached to one or more displays. These are extraordinarily successful forms, and there is no reason they need to disappear. But their success can make them feel inevitable.
They aren't.
The components inside them are becoming smaller, more modular, more powerful, and easier to acquire. Software is becoming more adaptable. AI is changing the interface between people and machines. Displays can take increasingly unusual forms. Compute no longer has to occupy the same physical object as the interface through which we experience it. The technical boundaries that once held the computer together as a single recognizable thing are loosening.
That creates room to ask basic questions again. Does a computer need to sit on a desk? Does its display need to be attached to it? Does it need one display? Does it need a display at all? Can computing become part of furniture, lighting, audio, architecture, decoration, or an object whose category we already understand? Can it occupy a room rather than a box? Can it be quiet, persistent, tactile, ornamental, upholstered, precious, temporary, architectural, or strange?
Thinking about computing as a material makes these questions feel less like predictions about the future of the computer and more like ordinary design questions.
Learning the material
Materials arrive with properties and constraints. Marble has weight, grain, brittleness, provenance, cost, dimensions, and methods by which it wants to be worked. Aluminum behaves differently. So do leather, glass, ceramic, wood, and textiles. Designers learn those properties and make decisions with them.
Computing has properties too. A particular board has a certain amount of processing power, heat, connectivity, size, cost, and power consumption. A display has a resolution, brightness, proportion, color space, refresh behavior, and viewing angle. A speaker moves a certain amount of air. A battery stores a certain amount of energy. A sensor perceives particular things. Software and AI models have capabilities and limitations of their own.
These properties can become part of the design process rather than obstacles that have to disappear inside a finished black box.
And importantly, treating computing as a material does not require pretending that every use of it represents technological invention. We do not demand that every furniture designer invent a new species of tree. Some important design work is technically radical. Some is an extraordinary use of an existing process. Some is a new combination of familiar materials. Some is a change in proportion, context, finish, or point of view. Sometimes the authorship is enormous. Sometimes it is almost shockingly restrained.
The same should be possible with computing.
We can admire the engineering of a Framework board and use it without pretending we designed it. We can select an unusual Waveshare display because its proportions suggest an object we want to make. We can work with Seeed Studio because an existing embedded system gets us most of the way toward an idea and customize only what the idea actually requires. We can spend our energy on the parts where we have something to contribute.
The result might involve enormous technical development. It might also involve putting an existing piece of technology into a context where nobody thought to put it before.
Both possibilities are exciting.
More people shaping computers
There is a great deal of conversation right now about what AI will do to software, work, media, and the internet. I am equally interested in what happens when these changes reach back into the physical world. AI is not only another capability to put inside an object. It is also a tool that changes who can make the object in the first place. It can help a designer understand an unfamiliar protocol, write embedded software, interrogate a data sheet, model a mechanism, communicate with a manufacturer, or move between disciplines that previously required much larger teams.
That does not eliminate expertise. It makes expertise easier to reach.
And that may ultimately be the more interesting change: not one new kind of AI computer, but many more people gaining the ability to participate in defining what computing looks and feels like.
For years, design was the exciting new ingredient being brought into technology.
Now technology itself may be becoming the exciting new ingredient in design.
That is the territory LAB wants to explore.
Not simply better-designed versions of familiar electronics, and not technology with decoration applied afterward. We want to treat computing as a creative material in its own right, one that can sit beside aluminum, glass, wood, stone, ceramic, leather, textiles, light, and sound, and one that increasingly belongs in the hands of people who have never thought of themselves as computer designers.
The computer is malleable again.
We want to see what happens when more people start shaping it.