YES, OFF COURSE

A future that never happened

YES, OFF COURSE is a 20-piece collectible design collection by Studio SAGARÍA, developed through an inverted process in which narrative precedes form.

Short stories became graphic compositions; those compositions, in turn, became objects. What emerges is not a series of products, but a system: one that proposes an alternative to a design culture increasingly defined by speed, clarity, and immediate resolution.

At first glance, the work presents itself as furniture — chairs, tables, lights. Then, slowly, that reading begins to shift. The pieces resist immediate understanding. They feel constructed, but not designed in the conventional sense. Composed, rather than developed.

There is rigor in them — exact, almost disciplinary — but also fracture. Geometry holds, then slips. Materials behave, then quietly betray. Structure asserts itself, then withdraws. What remains is tension, and something less definable, but unmistakably human.

The project does not begin with objects. It begins with stories. Twenty short narratives, focused on ordinary lives and precise moments — situations held just before or just after something changes — were written first, not as support, but as origin. From these, a series of graphic compositions emerged: controlled, exact, informed by the radical clarity of early modern decorative arts, particularly the work of Raymond Templier. Only in a final step were these compositions translated into physical form.

As SAGARÍA puts it, “We didn’t design objects. We translated moments.”

This reversal is not a formal exercise: It produces a different kind of object.

The chair is no longer a response to function, but the residue of a moment. The table does not organize space; it holds a condition. The light does not illuminate; it interrupts darkness.