A World of Stuffs

Rayon wants to contribute to the space design world, starting with the internal layout of our buildings. That is why, in parallel to the development of our platform, we are today releasing KITS, a free public repository of high quality 2D furniture, available to anyone, and meant to grow over time.

We believe this effort can provide a meaningful assistance to people designing spaces everywhere; this article explains our thinking.

Kits

Space Design and “Stuffs”

“There isn’t any such thing as a building. A building properly conceived is several layers of longevity of built components.”
– Frank Duffy, 1992

For Duffy, and later Stewart Brand, buildings stack together multiple “layers”: Structure, Skin, Services, Space Plan, Stuff (Figure 1). Each system ships with its respective lifespan and its own constraints.

This framework is especially relevant when creating a space design application: each layer requires distinct features and level of care. To address each one of them, we have to strategize.

At Rayon, we hope to one day tackle Brand’s diagram entire stack. However, for the time being, our journey starts with the innermost layers: furnishing and space planning. These dimensions are ordinary architecture’s most immediate and daily concern.

Even if these layers are an integral part of space design, Stuffs remain an afterthought in most design software. Yet, picking the right items can make the difference between long-lasting interior design, and wasteful, constant refurbishing.

To be fair, the furnishing of space can be a challenging layer to address for at least three reasons:

• Scarcity — For designers, well curated libraries of 2D objects are not easy to come by: quality is rare, access often restricted due to pricing, and curation always quite limited.
• Quantity — Not to mention the fact that “Stuffs” come under almost any shape and form in the real world: knowing which items to choose to furnish a space requires cutting through the noise of the endless catalog of existing items.
• Curation — Furnishing space also comes down to a matter of pairing, knowing which items to use together, to create harmonious, relevant interiors.

That is why Rayon is today releasing “KITS”…

Shipping Kits

KITS is a free, high-quality library of architectural elements: furniture, windows, doors, items, etc. In other words, things that architects know as “CAD blocks”, and that the rest of the world knows as “stuffs”.

We offer to bundle items as ready-made curations, aka. “Kits”. Building our platform, we have seen to what extent furnishing is as much about sourcing items as it is about pairing them, to finally find a given space’s best use. That is what kits represent: collections of items, made for a specific use, enabling designers to quickly test out any given space’s potential.

The collections we have built are hosted online (here), and available to anyone as of today. We believe that, to empower people to design the innermost layers of our buildings, providing them with collections of beautiful, curated elements is essential. And the internet certainly enables us today to build such a repository for everyone to use!

Check it out now by clicking here!

This initial curation is of course meant to evolve, and more importantly, significantly grow. To follow its latest release and addition, feel free to follow our Instagram account.

So What’s Next?

Beyond Kits’ catalog lies Rayon’s vision: gathering a broad community of passionate designers. That is why, if Rayon is today building a space design tool, Kits ambitions to provide a shared repository for people to find inspiration and present their work and assets.

It is an essential stepping stone in Rayon’s journey to democratize space design, and one that we are excited to kick-start today!