If you rode the train between Portsmouth and London back in 2000, you probably noticed Karen Ryan on her hour-and-a-half commute to the Royal College of Art -- she was the one lugging a bag of trash along with her backpack and books. Half magpie, half broke university student, Ryan collected gum wrappers, old spoons, cigarette boxes, and used them to make miniature furniture models. "I had to use the materials around me," she explains. "What could I afford? Rubbish on the train."

Soon, the scraps grew larger, and so did her projects. Today, Ryan makes technicolor franken-chairs out of pieces of wood and cast-off bits of furniture. Before getting a masters in design from RCA, Ryan studied fine art at the University of Portsmouth, and her work combines the two disciplines. Boarded Up, a new line of paint-splattered lamps and bony, scrapwood chairs that launched at Designer's Block in September, could be furniture with a flashy paint job or abstract expressionist paintings that use furniture as a canvas. Damned if Ryan knows which it is. "It's difficult when people ask me, ‘What are you? What is this?' I think I'm just confused," she says.

It's not hard to split the design process into a series of steps: inspiration, sketch, prototype, production. Ryan's work is a different story -- or maybe it's just tougher to explain. She works by intuition and feel, like an artist. "I see something, and I want it, but I don't know why," Ryan says about the scraps she picks up off Portsmouth curbs. "It'll sit in my studio for six months as a narrative will start to build, images will form. The whole process is a piece of design, rather than having one moment as the design act."

That process is long and intimate, "kind of like a love affair," Ryan admits. But simply swooning over wood scraps is a superficial romance. Ryan's love is deep -- that is, political. By shunning mass production, her work brings a spark of humanity into an increasingly impersonal world, and a bit of artistic flair into industrial design.

"I turn on the news and am just speechless at what's happening all over the world," Ryan says. "How do I go and make a salt-and-pepper shaker that's mass-produced by the thousands and sold for three pounds? I'm haunted by mass production. I'm miserable if I'm not personally making something."