26 Hours, 26 Words, and 26 Design Proposals

Contrary to what might seem intuitive, too much freedom and time can be detrimental in one’s creative process. Without set boundaries, you can end up second-guessing yourself and re-working your idea ad nauseum, often resulting in a frustratingly drawn-out process accompanied by pure, unfiltered resentment towards your own work. NYC-based design studio HAWRAF recently explored what the creative process is like under extreme constraints of time and materials in A-Z, a project involving the non-stop realization of 26 design ideas over 26 hours.

Beginning at 7 AM on Tuesday, November 15th and lasting until 9 AM on the following day, Carly Ayres, Andrew Herzog, and Nicky Tesla (three of the four members of HAWRAF) worked on a single design project every hour out of NEW INC., live streaming their successes and occasional hardships throughout the process. Each of the design prompts originated from a randomly generated English word that corresponded to the sequential letter in the alphabet they were on, starting with "attach" and ending with compound word "zig-zag."

The results ran the spectrum physical and immaterial, ranging from a rebranded, inedible Kind bar for kind to a simple website that simulated a flooding of water for fill. Despite their highly varied outputs, most of the works were conceptually unified by a stark kitschiness and clever interpretation and stretching of the words at hand, revealing both the design studio’s personal touch and a strong talent for improvisation by the three members.

A-Z originated from HAWRAF’s desire to unravel the creative process and also share how the recently formed design studio works with the rest of the world: “Our motive for the project is part of our own studio initiative we are calling ‘Creative Accessibility.’ It’s an initiative to make the creative industry a little more accessible,” Herzog reveals to The Creators Project. “For A-Z, we wanted to tackle the creative process. It’s often thought of as a fixed formula. As a new studio, we were interested in taking a look at our own processes, putting them on display, and hoping people could learn from it.”

“The project was also about accelerating the first few months of our studio practice—conceptualizing, collaborating, developing, executing—over and over again over 26 hours,” adds Ayres. “The idea was that by increasing the pressure, iterating quickly, and putting it all on display, we would quickly see what worked and what didn’t and grow in our understanding of our own strengths and limitations to determine an effective creative process. All the while, sharing this in a way where anyone can watch and take away from it what they choose.”

Despite their clear-cut motivations and more than adequate preparation for A-Z, HAWRAF ran into some bumps-in-the-road that are arguably inevitable for a project with such strict time constraints and the over daylong duration: “Mental fatigue was definitely the biggest struggle. Even once we reached a rhythm, we would be left with only a few minutes after documenting and uploading the completed work before moving onto choosing the next word,” tells Ayres. “Each time, we’d have to wipe our mental slate clean and start fresh, thinking about how we could use the remaining hour.”

But plowing through obstacle after obstacle eventually leads to benefic growth: “We learned a lot about each other, our fears and proclivities, as well as ways to counter balance those. Involving everyone seemed integral, as well as open communication, and, above all, honesty,” adds Ayres.

Documentation of A-Z can be found on the website HAWRAF has set up for the project. More of the wunderkind design studio’s work can be found here.

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