Finley Ulm
Industrial & Product Designer
A high school student and industrial designer, interested in the point where form and function actually meet instead of fighting each other. Most objects lean one way or the other, and I like figuring out how to pull them back toward the middle.
A prototype never lies. A render always does, because it never has to survive being touched. That’s why everything I make goes through the same steps. Sketch, model, and create. That last step is the one I really enjoy. Finding the point where a design stops being a drawing and starts having tolerances and a way of going wrong.
Form is what an object says at first glance, and I notice it first too: proportion, line, material. But I don’t trust an object until I know what it does underneath that. I’m not interested in extra features that only exist to fill a spec sheet, or a shape that’s hiding a mechanism nobody bothered to resolve.
What I actually care about is whether something holds up: how it assembles, how it holds tolerance, how it still works on the tenth use instead of the first. I want to build the version where someone took the time, and get good enough over the next few years to make things people keep using instead of just liking on day one.
