"Matari design. We joke about it. Rust and duct tape. 'When it works, it's done.' But Matari design is the most exciting space for a designer to work these days. Why? Honesty. Limited resources. Challenges. Survival. Because it matters.

"And that's a cultural concept for you: 'lin'. That's the 'When it works, it's done.' It's using whatever you've got to make something that does what you need to do. A sceptre can be a cudgel. Scaffolding and an engine can be a ship.

"Another concept for you is 'dorel': the extras, the things that aren't necessary, that don't make the ship go faster. In our work we want to avoid those. We can strip away all the dorel until there is only what we need, or design with only the bare necessities in the beginning.

"Lin is the line of necessity. If you stop there after that first necessity, though, it's also the line of laziness and mediocrity. So the next concept is to take the necessary and make it better. To make it efficient, robust, repeatable... but also coherent... elegant.

"So the third concept for today is a response to the question 'does it all have to be butt-ugly, and beautiful only to people who like skeletons?' Sometimes the design goes beyond mere function. Sometimes, even working as frugally as we do, the whole work has beauty. And there's a quality to that beauty which we call 'ra-lin'. It means true line. We all argue over what the true line is. But more and more we're finding it and claiming it as ours."

Excerpt from 'True Line' by Jen Gerard