First Born changed my world an hour at a time, on the bus headed downtown after school. I’d never heard words do that before. That was ten years ago—I had no clue then that he was only 18 years old. Rest in peace, man.

Dang, I was always a big fan. His was work that seemed to come from a fairly authentic place.

Tobias Wong called in to question the motives of a consumerist world with blunt austerity; nearly a decade after inception, a boxcutter inscribed with the words “ANOTHER NOTION OF POSSIBILITY” may not seem Earth-shattering, but that was a pretty bold statement in 2002.

A few years ago, I saw Wong’s work at the Products of our Time exhibition at University of Minnesota’s Goldstein Museum of Design. I went several times, and though the entire exhibit was fantastic, it was Wong’s work specifically that caught me off guard: a rose made from ballistic material, a “killer ring” with the diamond inverted, a mirror cut into puzzle pieces; simple testaments to a world carried away with itself.