Sometimes I think I've been designing Focus Deck since I was a kid.
I just didn't know it yet.
I've always been a dreamer and a doodler. The kind of child whose school reports regularly included some variation of "Will needs to spend less time daydreaming."
I was always drawing something.
Usually something from the future.
Robots. Spaceships. Machines. Control panels covered in mysterious buttons and switches. I loved imagining what these things did, even when I had absolutely no idea myself.
I was obsessed with science fiction, and particularly the physical objects that populated those worlds.
There was something irresistible about a control panel.
Rows of switches. Chunky buttons. Dials with markings around them. Flashing lights. Levers that presumably did something incredibly important.
I wanted to touch all of them.
To be fair, I still do.
An optimistic version of the future
I've always had a particular love for retro-futurism.
There's something wonderful about looking at what previous generations imagined the future would be.
The technology is often wonderfully tactile. Nothing happens with an invisible tap on a piece of glass. Machines are operated with enormous buttons, mechanical switches and chunky dials.
But there's also an optimism to it that I love.
It's a vision of the future where we're going somewhere.
We're building things. Exploring things. Making things better.
That aesthetic eventually became intertwined with another of my design obsessions: mid-century modernism.
The beautiful furniture. Walnut cabinets. Moulded chairs. Concrete architecture. Sculptural lamps. Houses filled with natural materials, huge windows and objects that somehow still look contemporary more than half a century later.
There is a timelessness to that period of design.
Things feel like they were made to last.
More than that, they seem to have been designed with a kind of confidence in the future. As though the people making them genuinely believed good design could contribute to a better way of living.
I've always found that incredibly appealing.
Then I grew up and got a desk job
Fast forward a few decades and, despite becoming a professional designer, some things hadn't changed very much.
I was still doodling.
Still daydreaming.
And definitely still fidgeting.
Over the years I'd accumulated various fidget toys and little desk objects. Things to click, spin, roll or absent-mindedly fiddle with while I was thinking.
But I could never quite find the thing I wanted.
Most fidgets were designed to be carried around or felt like toys. Many were brightly coloured and made from plastic. Others leaned heavily into the EDC world of machined metal gadgets.
There were plenty of good products amongst them.
But I wanted something different.
I wanted a fidget designed specifically to live on a desk.
Something mature and understated. Something tactile and satisfying, but also something I would genuinely want sitting next to my laptop.
Almost like a tiny piece of interactive furniture.
The control panel comes back
Around this time, I noticed something slightly ridiculous that I did while driving.
I would fidget with the controls on my car radio.
Not because I needed to change anything.
I'd click a button. Turn the volume dial slightly. Run my fingers across the controls. Turn something one way and then immediately turn it back again.
There was something soothing about the physical interaction.
And somewhere in that behaviour, an old idea came back.
The control panel.
What if there was a control panel that didn't actually control anything?
No screen. No electronics. Nothing to connect. No consequence if you pressed the wrong button.
Just a collection of beautifully satisfying physical interactions.
Buttons to press. Switches to flick. Dials to turn. Sliders to move.
Something that could sit beside you while you worked, giving restless hands somewhere to go while your mind stayed with whatever you were actually doing.
Suddenly, the idea I'd been circling for years started to become much clearer.
A paper cut out model of Focus Deck.
Understanding my own brain
At around the same time, I was diagnosed with ADHD in my late thirties.
That experience gave me a new understanding of myself.
The daydreaming. The restless energy. The constant fiddling. The difficulty holding my attention on something even when I desperately wanted to concentrate.
Things I'd spent years treating as unrelated quirks suddenly began to make a little more sense.
More importantly, I began thinking differently about them.
Instead of constantly trying to force myself to work in a particular way, I became more interested in understanding how my brain naturally wanted to work and designing around that.
What if the restless hands weren't necessarily the problem?
What if I simply gave them something better to do?
That thought added rocket fuel to the project.
Focus Deck
This was the point when Focus Deck really crystallised in my mind.
I wanted to create an entirely analogue tactile control panel for your desk.
But it couldn't just be a collection of fidget mechanisms stuck in a box.
I wanted it to feel like a proper piece of design.
It needed to belong in the workspace of a designer, developer, writer, architect or anyone else who spends much of their day thinking at a desk.
It needed to feel mature.
It needed to be beautifully made.
It needed some of the warmth and optimism I loved about mid-century design, combined with those wonderfully tactile science-fiction control panels I'd been obsessed with since childhood.
And it absolutely had to contain wood.
The basic design language started to emerge.
Warm walnut. Cream surfaces. Metal controls. Simple geometry.
Part mid-century desk object.
Part retro-futuristic control panel.
Part fidget.
Making it real
As with most things I design, it started on paper.
I sketched different layouts, shapes and controls. I moved things around and gradually worked out what belonged where.
Then I made a paper model.
It sounds incredibly basic, but printing the design at actual size and cutting it out immediately answered questions that were difficult to judge on a computer screen.
How big should it actually be?
How much space should there be between the controls?
Where would your hand naturally sit?
From there came 3D models and a succession of 3D-printed prototypes.
Each one taught me something.
A few millimetres came off here. A control moved there. A corner became softer. A button changed size.
And slowly, the thing I'd been imagining became something I could actually put my hands on.
An early 3D printed prototype of Focus Deck.
Designing it with other people
Focus Deck has never been developed entirely in isolation.
Over the months that followed, I started showing it to people.
Friends. Designers. Industrial design professionals. People with ADHD. Neurodivergent people. People without ADHD who simply liked playing with it.
I watched which controls people instinctively reached for. I listened to what felt satisfying and what didn't. I heard how different people imagined using it and discovered use cases I hadn't necessarily considered myself.
At the same time, I started sharing the idea publicly.
And something slightly terrifying and wonderful happened.
Other people wanted one.
A growing list of people started following the project and asking when they could get their hands on Focus Deck.
Suddenly this wasn't just a strange object I wanted to make for myself.
Maybe other people had been looking for something like this too.
A 3D model of Focus Deck.
A product that's been a long time coming
Focus Deck is still being developed.
There are still details to refine, mechanisms to perfect and manufacturing problems to solve before it becomes the product I want it to be.
But along the way, it has already become the foundation for something much bigger.
Experiments with its materials and mechanisms have inspired other Focus Lab products. Ideas that began as individual parts of Focus Deck have developed into objects in their own right.
And I think that's fitting, because Focus Deck itself is really a collection of ideas that have been following me around for most of my life.
A childhood obsession with science-fiction gadgets.
A love of drawing and making things.
An appreciation for mid-century furniture and timeless design.
Decades of absent-minded fidgeting.
A better understanding of my own neurodivergent brain.
And the generous input of lots of other people who have picked it up, played with it, criticised it, encouraged it and helped make it better.
Somehow all of those threads eventually met in one little wooden control panel.
Perhaps those hours spent daydreaming in school weren't completely wasted after all.
Focus Deck is still a work in progress, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes next.
I'm glad you're joining me for the journey.
A 3D render of Focus Deck
