Station Design Featured in Core77 for Their Moiré Clock
Station Design, a studio founded by Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design alumni - Amber Li, Felix Cooper, Francesco Mauro, and Parrish André - has been featured in Core77 for their Moiré Clock, an elegant kinetic timepiece that transforms optical phenomena into a gentle expression of time. The recognition comes just months after the team launched their senior capstone collection, “Drop 01,” which sold out within 24 hours and showcased the collective’s shared ethos of craft, sustainability, and thoughtful design.
Station’s origins started in the studio and culminated in the place they called “home.”
“Our collaboration began when we first moved into a house together,” said the team. “It was above a train tunnel and had a plaque tied to the porch reading ‘The Station.’ There, we spent years exploring the parallels between graphic and industrial design and discussing the future we wanted to contribute to. When Senior Capstone rolled around, it was a no-brainer to finally actualize our shared ethos by combining our skill sets.”
“We wanted to imagine the ideal product lifecycle,” they explained. “We set out to hand-make sets of objects from finite amounts of recycled and reclaimed material. Everything else was sourced with intention, ensuring American-made transparency and quality. The guiding belief was simple and powerful: “We know how good it feels to trust what you own, and we wanted to create products with the transparency, quality, and craftsmanship we all deserve.”
Station credits much of their approach to the School of Design’s process-centered pedagogy. “Our professors trained us to design the steps to get to a product, rather than just a final product,” they shared. That mindset proved essential as they produced over 100 handcrafted products and the entire brand campaign for Drop 01 within a compressed three-month capstone timeline.
This orientation toward building systems—not just artifacts—continues to shape their work today.
The Moiré Clock, led by Amber Li and Felix Cooper, exemplifies Station’s interdisciplinary instincts. Moiré, the visual phenomenon created when overlapping patterns generate distortion or movement, became the conceptual spark.
“We began exploring ways that the graphic concept of moiré could be integrated with physical motion,” the team explained. Early studies took the form of a custom glyph set designed to test the optical potential of animated moiré. Those experiments ultimately inspired the clock’s defining feature: a clean, circular face wrapped in a single strip of metal.
But achieving the final design required careful technical orchestration. “The biggest design challenge in the clock was designing for manufacturing,” they noted. Even a few millimeters of deviation would render the animated text illegible. This precision requirement led them to sheet metal, which could be digitally simulated for accurate, repeatable fabrication. Designing with manufacturing constraints in mind became a major step not just for the clock, but across the full suite of Station’s products.
The team is quick to acknowledge the role the Carnegie Mellon community played in their early success. “We are incredibly grateful for the support of the CMU community throughout the endeavor,” they said, reflecting on the rapid sell-out of Drop 01.
Following graduation, Station has scattered geographically but not creatively. Parrish André, Felix Cooper, and Amber Li have relocated to Brooklyn, while Francesco Mauro has moved to Austin. The transition brings new challenges, but also new opportunities.
The team is already deep into reimagining processes and materials that suit their new contexts. “There are already some exciting things happening with Drop 02,” they shared. “We couldn’t have done it without CMU’s staff, students, and the greater community. Thank you all and get ready for Drop 02!”
The Core77 feature marks an exciting new chapter, offering wider visibility for a studio whose work resonates well beyond campus. For the School of Design, it is a proud moment to see alumni explore cross-disciplinary experimentation, material stewardship, and human-centered craft featured on a national stage.