One to Watch: Brooklyn studio Outgoing gives new meaning to the idea of world building

At Outgoing, a small studio on the edge of post-industrial Brooklyn neighbourhood Gowanus, multidisciplinary talents and studio founders Brett Gui Xin and Del Hardin Hoyle are hard at work experimenting with materials like wood and textile but also readily available hardware components.

Get to know the creative duo behind design studio Outgoing

Under the auspices of the recently formed studio, the life and creative partners have brought together their respective skill sets and professional backgrounds to solidify this experimental approach, and not just in object design. At home in nearby Bed Stuy, what they call their ‘clean studio’, the duo mount immersive total work of art installations; compose and record music; and conduct performative drawing experiments as a way of better understanding each other. Those of us currently coupled up, especially in both life and work, might take a lesson from their playbook.

'Since meeting in 2016, we’ve been heavily involved in each other’s studio practices; assisting each other in one way or another,' says Hardin Hoyle. 'Often, our ideas about design, work ethics, ambitions and, a lot of the time, aesthetics are aligned. We both share a love of detail, humour, and colour; though it’s probably what we disagree on the most.'

While San Francisco-born Gui Xin studied fashion and long maintained Fort Greene, Brooklyn design store Forever Grand, UK-born Hardin Hoyle studied interior design and fine art before specialising in the development of large installations for both commercial clients and cultural partners. Her emphatically experimental, material-driven practice and role as a purveyor centred heavily on ceramics, textiles, sculpture, and leather goods but also community programming through hands-on workshops. His work often incorporated the operatically all-encompassing and sensorial elements of furniture, sculpture, sound/music, drawing, and plant life.

The creative duo use a wild palette of bright colours and unexpected textures abound in everything from the fringed og10 three body pillow to a series of yet to be codified round-edge wooden stools crafted using layers of discarded wood sourced from the streets of New York, and in which nail holes have been painted over in specs of vibrant paint.

This procedure is also being translated into a subtly multi-planed and pink-stained wooden table which will eventually carry a multi-hued Plexiglas tile trim. A similar material, strips of soft Italian glass often used as a base component, have been given a new function in the expressively iterative og03 incense holder collection. Often, one line of inquiry informs another and even bleeds over in their respective practices as fabricators and product engineers.

Another concept in the works expands on the unexpected lighting diffusing property of the soft Italian glass. The duo has imagined these endlessly iterative forms as elements that connect to an enclosed light box and envisioned the potential of this fresh formula being expanded into much larger, perhaps even interactive, installations. This demonstration of world building aligns with the speculative practice of noted talents Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne, the forerunners of the Critical Design movement and in which both Gui Xin and Hardin Hoyle came into contact while studying at Parsons School of Design.

Anchored to a circular mirror on the wall above their main workstations, the og02 phase lamp – which featured prominently as part of May 2024's Head Hi Lamp Show – is demonstrative of the multifunctional potential of its repurposed hook screw legs and how much its coloured theatre gel shades can amplify light.

Everything here is wonderfully ad hoc and subliminal as suggestions of entirely new forms and functions. The unexpected application of otherwise overlooked and upcycled materials coalesce with newly formulated and reinterpreted age-old craft techniques in a bid to ideate paradigm-shifting concepts with the potential of being scaled up and even, changing user behaviour.

'Outgoing is a joyful pursuit of our combined creative impulses,' Gui Xi says. 'Initially Outgoing was intended to be the physical and metaphorical place where we develop and release editioned products. That idea has continued to evolve into a studio practice that is open and encouraging of ideas across all formats, including offering our services for private commissions and collaboration. If it is Brett and Del together then it is Outgoing.'

instagram.com/outgoinghq.com