At Baukunst, we have a practice of collaborating with artists. It's one of our core values to enable more creative work in the world. We want to be proud of what we're supporting in our collective ecosystem.
This year we were introduced by our own collective member Lauryn Menard to Rafi Ajl, a sculptor, glass artist, and founder of design studio The Long Confidence. We were inspired by his work, and commissioned 100 unique glass vessels based on his beautiful Saguaro Glass series. At 2025's Creative Technologist Conference, we invited Rafi to give a talk on his process.
Below are some excerpts from Rafi's talk.
In 2010, I dropped out of graduate school because I thought it was a bad place to be, and started building bike frames because I thought that was a good thing to be doing. I really felt like I had no idea what it was like to become a master of something that I was not even a beginner at. So I needed to give myself a fundamental education in what I considered design.
My current practice exists at a very awkward intersection of art, design, and craft. It's not any of these. It doesn't really belong in any particular category. It has elements of each discipline, but is difficult to categorize — which can be good and can be very bad.
I always work from process. When you start out by asking a question — what happens when, what happens if — you're setting a machine into motion. That machine will take its own life and its own form and will generate feedback for you. You listen to the machine, and the machine will guide you and tell you what to do next. If I don't like the outputs, I change the process. I don't change the product.
Each glass piece starts out as a little ball of molten glass. You roll it in a powdered glass, which gives it the base color, and then we roll it in chunks of glass — that's what gives it the more dramatic spotted effect. Every time we do it, we lay out a new layout of the chunks, so each piece is always going to be unique. My practice works to generate always difference: how can we create something that is sequential but also has individuality?
I work incredibly iteratively. These were just some of the samples I made to arrive at the core collection — tweaking an eighth of an inch here, a quarter of an inch there, to arrive at something that felt really nice in the hand.
I think of what I go through as a process of domestication. You start out with these wild and feral ideas, you do a tremendous amount of testing, and over time what seems like a very crude process starts to become much more refined. People still need to buy things — and when I think about how they can be applied, I think about things in the home, how things age in the home and participate in our daily lives.
You set a process into motion. That machine will take its own life and its own form and will generate feedback for you — and you listen to the machine, and the machine will guide you and tell you what to do next.
I'm actually completely terrified of making any decisions at all, but I'm really good at making the machine and I'm really good at making a process.
