Notes from the Workshop
Simplicity is what we live for.
On the discipline of deletion, and why the best gear carries no part you couldn’t name.
Notes from the Workshop · 5 min read
Anyone can add. A bracket here, a bolt-on there, a clever little tray that does one clever little thing. Addition is easy because it asks nothing of you — no decisions, no nerve, no understanding of what actually matters.
Subtraction is the hard part. And almost everyone who has thought seriously about making things has arrived at the same conclusion.
The people who got there first
Perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. And that's why we enjoy heading out into the bush and the unknown. Nature makes things simple. Life becomes easier to understand and follows the rhythms of the weather and landscape.
And that simplicity should be reflected in the gear we use out there.
Dieter Rams, who shaped half the objects of the twentieth century at Braun, compressed a lifetime of it into three words: less, but better. Back to purity, he said. Back to simplicity.
Good design is as little as possible. Less, but better.
How we built to it
We made BootKamp the same way. Not by asking what else can it do — by asking what doesn’t it need. No drilling. No proprietary tooling. No drawers in the case of the Unit 1 System.
No four-hour install with a YouTube tab open and a swear jar filling up. Aerospace aluminium, a rail system, and a platform you can pull out and carry yourself.
Every part on a BootKamp system can be named, replaced, and serviced in the field with tools you already own. That isn’t a feature we bolted on. It’s what’s left once you delete everything that was hiding the design — the panels covering the panels, the parts whose only job was to hold other parts.
Complexity is what you ship when you haven’t decided what the thing is for.
Simplicity, isn’t the absence of engineering. It’s the result of more of it. For the purpose of enjoying a simpler way of being while you're touring or camping or overlanding.
The simple-looking object is almost always the one that took the most arguments to finish — and the one you’ll still understand, and still be able to fix, ten years and many deserts later.
— Vaughan