I’ve been thinking lately about where a kite actually comes from.
Not geographically. Not which factory sewed it, where the materials came from, or whose name is printed on it.
I mean: 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘦𝘯𝘷𝘪𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘸 𝘪𝘵?
I’ve been flying for 36 years now, and for easily more than 20 of those years I’ve spent an enormous amount of time in the field as an instructor, team flier and mega-team leader, traveling and flying with people around the world.
And when I say “in the field,” I mean that pretty literally, but also in the larger sense.
Sitting around the proverbial campfire. Watching people fly. Helping them solve problems. Listening to what they love and what frustrates them. Handing kites back and forth. Trying other people’s equipment. Watching beginners struggle with things an experienced pilot no longer even thinks about. Watching intermediate fliers discover another layer. Working out language with them for things that never quite had good words — building something like a shared syllabus almost by accident. Flying alongside people whose styles, priorities and ideas may be very different from mine.
And importantly, I’ve never particularly cared what name was printed on the kite they were flying.
In fact, the majority of the people I’ve spent that time with probably haven’t been “master” level pilots. They’ve been the much larger population of beginning, intermediate and experienced recreational fliers who actually make up the living body of our community.
That exposure matters to me.
Because over enough years, you start to realize that a kite isn’t only the product of somebody’s design ideas.
It’s also the product of 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘴 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰.
There’s a huge difference between developing something primarily within your own ecosystem and continually throwing your ideas out into the larger world, where they’re going to encounter different equipment, different techniques, different philosophies, different skill levels, different problems and occasionally somebody who demonstrates that something you were absolutely certain about… might not be quite right.
One of the things I’ve been both fortunate enough 𝘢𝘯𝘥, I think, eventually wise enough to do with Kite Forge is share the development table with some very good minds.
The Djinn certainly didn’t emerge from me sitting alone in a room protecting my ideas. Brett Marchel was in that room, and it wasn’t only that he could fly and tell me exactly why something didn’t work — he was still relatively new to the community at the time, with his own connections to other designers, and that mix added something to the stew that my own experience alone couldn’t have. The factory that actually builds these kites is run by fliers too, not just people executing a spec sheet, and that shows up in the finished product in ways I don’t think people realize. The KŪBE dogstake owes just as much to Geoff Hutton, who did the 3D work and spent a long time refining what it actually needed to do in the field before it became what it is. These are just a couple of examples — a lot of the smaller things we’ve developed and refined along the way happened the same way. None of it happened in isolation.
There have been ideas brought to that table that I resisted. Sometimes 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘺.
Ideas I was quite prepared to explain, in detail, why we shouldn’t pursue.
And sometimes, after actually testing them instead of defending myself against them, I discovered that they were functional. Occasionally they were downright brilliant.
I value that enormously — not because collaboration automatically produces better answers, and certainly not because every outside idea is a good one, but because I want the things I believe to remain permeable. I want them exposed to enough reality that the good ideas survive for reasons beyond my attachment to them.
And lately I’ve been thinking that this might be something worth considering from the other side of the counter as well.
When you’re looking at a kite — ours included — look beyond the kite.
Look at the people behind it. Watch them fly. Not just the polished promotional clip — look around, see what they actually do in the field.
Listen to them teach. Listen to how they describe flight, and whether that vocabulary connects naturally with the larger body of knowledge across the activity, or mostly makes sense inside their own branded ecosystem.
Look at who they fly with. Look at what they’re curious about. Look at whether other equipment, other ideas and other approaches are allowed into the conversation.
There’s a place for the equivalent of the perfectly functional skateboard hanging on the wall at a sporting-goods store, designed and manufactured to serve a broad market. There’s also a place for the board coming out of a tiny skate shop where the person shaping it competes, teaches, skates every day and spends half their life talking with other skaters.
Neither exists by accident. They simply acquire very different DNA.
And perhaps that’s something we don’t talk about enough when we talk about kite design.
The culture surrounding the designer gets into the kite. The questions being asked get into it. The flying being done gets into it. The problems being witnessed get into it. The people allowed into the development process get into it.
Even the boundaries around that little ecosystem get into it.
Personally, I’m interested in ecosystems with porous walls. Places where ideas are free to come in, get kicked around, survive or die on their merits, and leave again. I tend to get more cautious when I encounter a culture that requires strong exclusivity — where the product, vocabulary, community and identity become increasingly self-referential.
That isn’t a verdict. It’s simply one of the things I notice.
Because all of this extends farther than the kite somebody buys today.
The equipment we make influences what people learn to do with it. The flying they see influences what they aspire to learn. The language we use influences how they understand it. And eventually, some of those fliers become the next instructors, competitors, designers and manufacturers.
We’ve already watched versions of that cycle play out.
Dual-line trick flying produced an extraordinary explosion of creativity and design, for example. At the same time, as tricks increasingly became the center of recreational dual-line flying, some of the older emphasis on carving, speed control, measured landings, precision and formation flying became less central. Fewer people pursued those skills, fewer teams emerged, and there became less demand for equipment and design specifically oriented toward that kind of flying.
Nobody sat down and decided that should happen. It happened.
Culture influenced equipment. Equipment influenced pilots. Pilots influenced culture. And around it went.
That ouroboros fascinates me.
Because after 36 years in this activity, I don’t think of a kite as an isolated consumer product anymore.
There’s a whole lineage hiding inside it.
And whether you’re looking at something from Kite Forge or anyone else, I think it’s worth occasionally asking:
𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘬𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴?
I find the answer to that question at least as interesting as anything printed on the sail.
— John Barresi