Better Than Being Nowhere
by Jemma Frost
David Michon on For Scale, his Substack about the “supreme potential of domestic space.
Scrolling through For Scale is a delightful journey. You’ll find an ode to the Tolomeo lamp (which includes the hilarious pondering of what it means for humans to have “AGENCY OVER LAMP”), a borderline rant entitled “THE POO-IFICATION OF THE DOMESTIC COLOR SCAPE,” and a juicy interview with an anonymous industry power player who laments that consumers are forced to “’CHOOS[E]’ AMONG ENDLESS VARIETIES OF THE SAME OLD SH*T.”
With For Scale, David Michon (design editor and author) joyfully puts a stake in the ground while challenging his readers to think critically about the stake itself. The Substack covers all angles of the “supreme potential of domestic space” while assuring readers that it’s meant to be “funny — but not a joke.” For Scale’s punchy personal essays and opinion pieces about furniture and design let you in on Michon’s mind: an amusing and sometimes contradictory place.
Michon’s wry sense of humor could be interpreted as ironic detachment if not for his obvious sincerity. We spoke over Zoom, me in a cluttered office with my laptop perched on a book, and him in an apartment in Tuscany, with a gloriously sunny window just out of frame. He wryly tells me that “it helps to have an Italian partner.”
Michon uses the word “TANGENT” as a verb: “TO TANGENT.” Throughout our conversation, he tangents around, sandwiching thoughtful insights about humanity and design between “This may sound pretentious…” and “…but who am I to judge?”
Michon’s goal is not to be an authority, like other design critics who may position themselves at a pulpit. Talking with Michon is more like stifling laughter with your friend in the pews… while that friend is working on his 95 Theses.
For Scale was born of frustration. When Michon moved to LA to work at an interior design start-up, he met a slew of highly intelligent, super-cool interior designers who had a looseness about themselves that he didn’t see reflected in the interior design discourse of the day. These designers layered new and old pieces to create spaces with depth and warmth, but all he saw in magazines were shallow, cold spaces that leaned heavily on the idea that good design is expensive — full stop. When he would pitch stories to design publications about the textured, authentic interiors he was interested in, he would be turned down. Over and over again. This was “so painful.”
In 2022, fed up with having cocktail party conversations more interesting than anything he could find or write, Michon launched For Scale, his little corner of the internet where what he says goes.
Michon insists that “not a ton of thought” went into the name For Scale, but it perfectly encapsulates the purpose of the newsletter. The same way random objects can be held up to help a person understand the scale of a room, Michon’s writing helps his readers contextualize “CAPITAL-D” Design (generally expensive, usually intellectual, often inaccessible) in the grand scheme of things.
For example, Michon visited Salone de Mobile this April. Salone de Mobile is a prestigious interior design show in Milan: an epicenter for capital-D Design. It would be too easy for For Scale to look at the beautiful, expensive objects on display and say, “These are the beautiful, expensive objects you should buy.” Michon encouraged me to take a look at his Salone de Mobile stories to determine whether he did a “good job” at striking his intended balance of criticality and permissiveness.
In his reporting on the event, he pulls on the thread of how many of these interiors are simply EXPENSIVE THINGS NEXT TO EACH OTHER, leaving his readers with a LESSON: “Don’t think that because you simply have a bunch of Expensive Things that you have swag.” I let out a snort at his kindly critical take on Hermes’ “delusional” framing a lamp as an “object that lights up.” (“Does that mean we need to think of ‘SOFA’ as ‘SOFT SCULPTURE FOR THE ASS’?”) It makes sense that engagement is higher when he’s meaner.
Unsurprisingly “with a little grain of salt,” Michon wants For Scale “to be slightly anti-establishment.” Core to For Scale is the manifesto. A manifesto may seem serious, dogmatic, or a little reductive, but Michon purposefully designed For Scale’s to be cheeky and thought-provoking. Instead of laws for how design SHOULD be, it proposes how design COULD be. But only if you’re into that kind of thing. And if you’re not, that’s okay. Because it’s not really about you. Because:
“For Scale is getting inside my head a little bit. And I’m not saying that that’s the best place to be or the only place to be. But it’s better than being nowhere.”
Better than nowhere is somewhere, and somewhere is where you can start to have conversations. Michon’s wary distrust of authority is balanced by his desire to have real conversations about design. For those conversations to BEGIN, someone has to put SOMETHING out there — authoritatively. For those conversations to BE REAL, someone has to be willing to follow TANGENTS to their logical end. And those TANGENTS should take a stand, but also leave space for another person to DO THE SAME — permissively.
Michon wants For Scale to stay joyful as its success grows. Recently, he released a paper broadsheet (to much acclaim!) but there aren’t firm plans to continue with a regular paper subscription model. Monetization is not a high priority for Michon. He doesn’t want For Scale to take over the world. One of his goals is to inspire more, and different, “For Scale”s.
“I just want people to play around with [newsletters] more, and be super voice-y and super niche. That’s what I seem to respond to most. So selfishly, I hope other people do that.”
By creating the newsletter that HE wants to read, Michon speaks to a need for more smart, funny, “voice-y” voices in design that acknowledge their subjectivity. The more TANGENTS, the better.
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This piece was written for the “Art of the Profile” workshop instructed by Adam Harrison Levy during the 2024 D-Crit Summer Intensive Residency at the School of Visual Arts. The next Summer Intensive session will take place June 2–13, 2025. Apply for free by April 15th.
