About us
We design for digital distribution and local production, using parametric and generative methods, and a touch of art.
Stuth is a generative design and design research practice based on the territories of the Lekwungen Peoples of the Xʷsepsəm and Songhees Nations in what is also known as Victoria, BC. With a decade of experience in design for additive manufacturing, working primarily on mechanical products and functional items, Stuth designs the objects that make up our lives. We have worked in architecture as both designer and builder, in consumer product design, digital fabrication, interactive electronics, and the creative arts to accomplish both client and personal goals.
Based on an ecological ethos of digital distribution and localized production, Stuth provides consultation, digital and industrial design services and products that respond to the changing conditions of the world around us.
Stuth
Stuth is a Scottish Gaelic word meaning material or substance, chosen for its embodiment of the stuff things are made from, and in how the Gaelic language embeds place into the architecture of meaning-making.
As a design practice we steward stuth amh, raw material, into stuth-obrach, working material. Stuth defines and accompanies our design journey, from the curiosity that raw material incites, to research and inquiry, to developing stuth-cluiche, the play materials, and to the generative outcomes that derive from this process.
Building Things That Can Be Fixed
There's a quiet politics to repairability. An object designed to be thrown away when it fails is an object that concentrates power: in manufacturers, in supply chains, in the assumption that replacement is always possible and always affordable. We think that's a design failure, and we think designers have a responsibility to do something about it.
Stuth approaches every project with the question: who has the right to repair this, and have we made that possible?
In practice, that looks like modular systems, documented assemblies, standard interfaces, and the willingness to sit with a broken thing long enough to understand it before proposing a solution. It also looks like a growing repair practice, using our 3D printers, welding equipment, and woodworking tools to help clients fix what others would replace.
Our longer-term vision is a community makerspace in Victoria: a place where people can come in, work on their own repairs, and access tools and expertise on a sliding-scale basis. We're not there yet. But it shapes the work we do now.