The Permanence Gauge
Everything here is built to end. Some of it just takes longer.
Forma runs six small workshops across four materials. Before you book one, the honest question isn't just when, or how much — it's how long the thing you make will actually survive. Search the index below, or tap a marker on the gauge to jump straight to a material.
Browse the indexThe gauge — tap a material to filter, scroll for the full scale
Browse the index
Search by name, filter by material, or show only what you've pinned to your collection. Filters combine.
Nothing on the shelf matches that.
Reading the gauge
The gauge runs on a logarithmic scale, not a straight one — that's the only honest way to fit "a Tuesday" and "a millennium" on the same line. Everything left of the midpoint is gone within a season. Everything past it could outlive the person who made it.
Estimates are rounded for readability and assume ordinary care: a dropped bowl breaks on day one regardless of what the gauge says, and a well-fed sourdough starter has been known to outlive its baker. We rounded down where we weren't sure, and up only for ceramics — kilns don't really give you a choice.
- Left edge
- 3 days — the loaf goes stale
- Quarter mark
- ≈1 month — the flowers are long gone
- Just past mid
- ≈30 years — the painting is still on the wall
- Right edge
- 10,000+ years — the bowl, if it survives you