Being open to change is central to the Farm’s approach, writes founder Dr Guan Lee

Work produced at Grymsdyke Farm often brings to mind the late furniture designer David Pye (1914-1993). Pye described the difference between the workmanship of risk and the workmanship of certainty. The farm operates within the first category. Every cut, cast, joint, or firing can fail. This condition is not avoided. It is used as the foundation for learning.

Material does not behave in a fully predictable way. Clay changes as it dries. Timber moves when cut. Surfaces shift under tools. Because of this, control is always partial. Outcomes must be checked through direct making rather than assumed from drawings or digital models.

This creates a process-based understanding of design. Insight grows through repeated trials, revisions and assessment of results. A failed joint or a cracked cast often reveals more than a clean outcome.

Judgement develops through direct engagement with material and through attention to what each process permits or resists. Yet this judgement is never neutral. It is shaped by received knowledge, inherited habits, and forms of know-how that circulate through workshops without formal explanation. These tacit expectations influence choices at every stage. The farm exposes these influences by making each step open to inspection and adjustment.

Grymsdyke Farm does not present design within a controlled system. It treats uncertainty as a normal condition of the field. Understanding grows through contact with material and through reflection on the assumptions carried into each task.

The value lies in continual testing and revision. The farm provides a setting where material practice and critical observation work together, and where design remains open to change rather than held in place by inherited certainty.