Erin Schwartz: Anti-AI Ceramics

In my last Strategist Brain, I wrote about a mysterious ailment that had me feeling like a puppet with the strings cut. Turns out it’s been hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome the whole time, a genetic connective-tissue disorder with a slew of ramifications across systems, from poor circulation to joint pain to sudden allergy flares. I feel like my body is a haunted mansion and I’ve just started opening doors. I’ve spent decades ignoring it because I knew, on some level, that I was living in a way I couldn’t sustain, but I was scared that my needs would be too inconvenient to accommodate. On the other side, paradoxically, I’m finding that the opposite is true: You gain so much more power from knowing your limits than ignoring them.

I love building furniture with my partner, but the physical demands became too much, and I took a long break. Now I’m dipping a toe back in with a few projects — a drop-down kitchen counter and a new desk — and letting my body set the pace rather than treating it like an uncooperative piece of machinery. It takes ten times longer, but I can sustain it. I’ve been thinking about the designer Eileen Gray studying “a thousand and one tiny hand movements” to create the furniture in her compact house. To me, this is good design: studying the way your body moves to find the form it wants, normative or not. The drop-down counter is also a perfect spot to lean and look out the window. You don’t know until you build it.