Haris Fazlani is chasing continuous refinement
I sit down with Creative Director and co-founder of WØRKS turned furniture designer, Haris Fazlani, to talk creative practice, designing furniture and why good design is necessary for a joyful life.
Designer Massimo Vignelli once said, “If you can design one thing, you can design anything.” Were Vignelli still alive today, he might find a kindred spirit in Creative Director turned furniture designer, Haris Fazlani.
Since 2020, Fazlani has quietly built an emerging furniture practice alongside his day job as co-founder of the New York creative studio, WØRKS. His first piece, the ‘Italic Chair,’ was a study in the work of Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi. With its 12-degree tilt, the chair explored the concept of visual precarity from Brancusi’s ‘Birds of Space’ while remaining an entirely stable and usable piece of furniture.
In exploring furniture design, Fazlani, like Vignelli before him, exemplifies how a designer’s skills can translate across disciplines—a versatility that feels increasingly necessary as the boundaries between fields blur. But Vignelli and Fazlani also raise a deeper question. If a designer really can “design anything,” what’s the endpoint of this belief? And can refining one’s design craft also contribute to something larger—a better way of living or being?
With these questions in mind, I sat down with Haris in a conversation that spanned his career beginnings, the role of curation in improving your craft, good design as human dignity, and our collective yearning for tactility.
You have a very successful creative practice in WØRKS working with brands like Nike and Fear of God, not to mention one of your personal design heroes Joe Perez. What spurred your decision to try tapping into furniture design?
It was subconscious. There has always been a desire in me for tactility, and there is such joy in tactile feedback. The physicality of being in or around something has always been important to me, and the more we've got on screens, the more we've drifted from that. I've always gravitated towards sculpture as an art form as well because I find the physicality of sculptures beautiful. I don't think I was cognizant of any of this though when I wanted to make a chair—it was more that I wanted to explore a medium that I hadn't yet.
Why specifically a chair as your first piece? And what did you learn coming away from the experience?
A chair is very versatile and compact. It's a single piece that can live in different environments. It was inspired by Brancusi's concept of visual precariousness, which he explored in his 'Birds in Space' sculpture—the idea that something looks like it might tip over but is actually quite stable.
I think there's a lot of value in working with someone who understands a medium better than I do. It allows me to focus on ideas rather than viability. There's a lot of value in that relationship. There is a great Brian Eno quote where he talks about how Picasso is looked at as this singular creative force when he was part of a larger group of artists, writers, designers, and sculptors that helped one another. I think in general creativity is a team sport. There is a myth that people can make it all on their own, and I think that's a somewhat damaging myth that I believed for a long time.
Do you think your furniture design practice has changed your approach to your day-to-day work?
It's brought a desire to bring as much physicality to my work as possible. Even if what I'm creating is something that lives entirely on screen, there is still value in creating a physical, visceral experience. Humans desire physicality, whether we realize it or not. Shadows, the movement of light; they give the idea of a Z-axis.
I am hopeful the analog revival will continue and get to a point where things will change on a company level. At least initially when the internet was constructed, the companies in power had to give us some sort of value, but at some point, we've all become indoctrinated into the system and almost every update to the apps we use is meant to serve the tech company and not the user. I am optimistic that people will continue to take control of what they consume. Devices like the Terra, Rabbit, and Humane are exciting in that they attempt to tilt us back to the right side of the balance - I'm excited for devices that maybe can just give, more than take again.
You had a very interesting, unconventional story for how you started your career that involved an extremely well-curated Tumblr. Can you tell us more?
My first creative job was working with musician Ryan Leslie. I was a fan of [Leslie's] work and his music, and he also straddled this line between hip hop, R&B, fashion, and art, which was important to me.
At the time, I was going to school for marketing and business administration, as well as working on a Master's in Advertising. I pursued advertising and marketing because I was really interested in creativity and psychology, though I found that any job or internship in marketing or public relations I had, I didn't like.
Growing up, I would often create my own worlds by reading and writing, but over time, I think your childlike wonder and creativity can get beaten out of you by societal pressures and the lifestyle choices of those around you because you're so impressionable. I didn't think creativity was possible as a career, but I always kept up a relationship with creative practice whether through making websites of things I was interested in or playing around in Photoshop.
When Ryan put out an ad for a social media intern on Twitter, I was excited by the prospect of working in an environment and an industry that I cared about. And so I sent him my Tumblr and some work samples, and the Tumblr was what drew him in, even though there was a huge gap between my taste and my work.
It started off as designing web pages, but eventually evolved into album art, merch, and a little bit of stage stuff. His confidence in me was greater than my belief in myself, and I knew I always wanted to dedicate my life to something in an ascetic, monk-like way, but I didn't know what that was until that job.
In a way, it seems like developing good taste was a gateway to a career. I see you have a motto of ‘pursuing continuous refinement.’ What does this motto mean for you?
The meaning of refinement has changed over time. For a long time, it was more surface level. I wanted to have the best taste in the world, which was maybe a bit self-absorbed and grandiose.
I believed in the objectivity of good taste, but certain realities of life have had me question the worthiness of that. The metaphor of a rock in a stream comes to mind. It starts off really jagged, but as you expose it to water, it becomes smoother and smoother until it too becomes something that is also smooth and refined.
Lately, it's less about aesthetics. How something looks and the aesthetics of something is still incredibly important to me, but it's more about how to strip away the unnecessary parts of something to leave only what is profound.
How would you describe your relationship with curation?
Moodboarding has always been a way of creating worlds by connecting disparate things. It's also a way to understand yourself better and be able to refine your output. If you can understand why you like things, you are better able to put those things into work and better communicate those ideas to people.
I've been guilty to this day of being a little lazy and unwilling to explain. It takes work to explain why you think something is right. It's true that you don't owe anybody an explanation, but then if you never offered an explanation, you would have to live in a cave by yourself.
The contract of coexistence necessitates that you communicate your needs and desires in an authentic way. I think I'm only just recently coming to terms with this because for a lot of my life, I thought that work would speak for itself, but in the last couple of years, I've understood the value of communication more.
Given you’ve cut across a few disciplines, what would you say has been a motivator for your creative practice overall?
When we look at Maslow's hierarchy—once you've taken care of the basic human needs of food, shelter, water—the privilege of taste and art—whether in art, fashion, any number of things—is the next order. And so, coming maybe from a place of lacking, I've wanted to understand and deconstruct that so I could bring it to more environments and places that don't have it. I look at taste, good design and art and beauty as parts of a complete and joyful life.
What do you think about the role of designers in improving lives?
I'm drawn to modernist principles of early 20th century thinkers. They might have been a bit unrealistic and idealistic but I think there's value in their ideals and principles.
Le Corbusier wanted to redesign all of Paris in a brutalist style, and while I don't necessarily agree with that or look at it as something to be heralded, there is something admirable in wanting to use a skillset to improve the lives of many people.
There was a time in post-war Germany where the successors to Bauhaus, at the Ulm School of Design put together a kit of beautifully well-designed household utensils and provided it to students, as they believed it was an important part of rebuilding a society post-war for young people to understand and incorporate the value of good design.
Do you see access to design and beauty as part of human dignity?
Beauty as dignity is an assertion I agree with. As I get older, I find it harder and harder to exist as normal when there are things going on in the world that dehumanize so many people. I know it sounds trite and inconsequential when we are talking about things affecting humanity, like genocide, but I do think there is still value in aesthetics.
Very early on in my design journey, I came across Better Shelters. They went out of their way to make the shelters they were designing beautiful because the designers felt the refugees deserved that, and they do. Beauty is a real thing that affects people. Of course, not in the same way as food and shelter, but it is still valid.
To be clear, when I speak about beauty, I'm not referring necessarily to my personal taste or European standards of beauty, but beauty in general – the feeling that you get when you find something beautiful. I think that is incredibly important because it does affect us.
Certain architects like John Pawson and Claudio Silvestrin – they understand the power of reducing visual noise and providing clarity. If you've ever looked at their spaces, or the homes they've designed, they understand there's so much power in stripping away unnecessary visual noise.
I also think of a study done that revealed that if you're in the back of a Mercedes-Benz S Class, your heartbeat while you are sitting in the back is a bit lower than if you were sitting in some of the competitors of that car – so the idea of physiological calm or change due to environments, and materials, etc. is a profound one and there is tremendous value in understanding how environments can affect people.
Follow Haris
@harisfazlani
@works.studio