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  16. architecture 110
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  33. Brand, Stewart 4
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  36. Broskoski, Charles 6
  37. brutalism 7
  38. building 16
  39. bureaucracy 12
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  42. Byron, Lord 14
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  49. Cervantes, Miguel de 7
  50. chance 11
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  53. childhood 6
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  55. choice 8
  56. cities 51
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  58. Cleary, Thomas 8
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  64. commonplace 11
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  66. community 7
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  72. Corbusier, Le 13
  73. Coyier, Chris 4
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  78. critique 10
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  80. Cross, Anita Clayburn 10
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  90. Debord, Guy 6
  91. decisions 10
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  95. Dieste, Eladio 4
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  106. Eliot, T.S. 14
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  163. i 18
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  165. identity 33
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  168. information 42
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  171. interaction 10
  172. interest 10
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  174. intuition 8
  175. invention 10
  176. Irwin, Robert 65
  177. Isaacson, Walter 28
  178. Ishikawa, Sara 33
  179. iteration 13
  180. Ive, Jonathan 6
  181. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  182. Jacobs, Jane 54
  183. Jacobs, Alan 5
  184. Jobs, Steve 20
  185. Jones, Nick 5
  186. Kahn, Louis 4
  187. Kakuzō, Okakura 23
  188. Kaufman, Kenn 4
  189. Keith, Jeremy 6
  190. Keller, Jenny 10
  191. Keqin, Yuanwu 8
  192. Ketheswaran, Pirijan 6
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  194. Kitching, Roger 7
  195. Klein, Laura 4
  196. Kleon, Austin 13
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  198. Klyn, Dan 20
  199. knowledge 29
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  207. light 31
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  210. Lovell, Sophie 16
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  212. Luu, Dan 8
  213. Lynch, Kevin 12
  214. MacIver, David R. 8
  215. MacWright, Tom 5
  216. Magnus, Margaret 12
  217. making 77
  218. management 14
  219. Manaugh, Geoff 27
  220. Markson, David 16
  221. Mars, Roman 13
  222. material 39
  223. math 16
  224. McCarter, Robert 21
  225. meaning 33
  226. media 16
  227. melancholy 52
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  230. metrics 19
  231. microsites 49
  232. Miller, J. Abbott 10
  233. Mills, C. Wright 9
  234. minimalism 10
  235. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  236. Mod, Craig 15
  237. modularity 6
  238. Mollison, Bill 31
  239. morality 8
  240. Murakami, Haruki 21
  241. music 16
  242. Müller, Boris 7
  243. Naka, Toshiharu 8
  244. names 11
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  246. nature 51
  247. networks 15
  248. Neustadter, Scott 3
  249. Noessel, Christopher 7
  250. notetaking 35
  251. novelty 11
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  256. Ott, Matthias 4
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  321. Simon, Paul 6
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  325. Sloan, Robin 5
  326. Smith, Cyril Stanley 29
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  333. Somers, James 8
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Craft & Artisanship

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  • All the way through

    "There's a consistency to physical objects that somehow reads all the way through, so that when you make a physical object, if it lacks the proper amount of weight or if it lacks a certain density...I mean, if its outside says, 'I weigh so much and I have such-and-such a density,' and when you pick it up, you discover an inconsistency there, then you can sense that, you can see it, even without picking it up. It's absolutely essential that everything be done all the way through."

    Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
    1. ​​Invisible substance​​
    2. ​​A great painting has to be better than it has to be​​
    3. ​​Finished on the inside​​
    4. ​​Signing party​​
    5. ​​Why YKK zippers are the brown M&Ms of product design​​
    6. ​​You'll know it's there​​
    • objects
    • craft
  • Hephaestus

    Hephaestus in ‘Vulcan forging the Thunderbolts of Jupiter’ (1636-1638) by Peter Paul Rubens.

    The clubfooted Hephaestus, proud of his work if not of himself, is the most dignified person we can become.

    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
    • craft
  • Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

    A Book by Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin
    lawrenceweschler.com
    1. ​​Sonorisms I​​
    2. ​​More than just a machine that runs along​​
    3. ​​Nobody was doing anything​​
    4. ​​NYLA​​
    5. ​​Aggressively Zen​​
    1. ​​The Small Group​​
    2. ​​Infinite varieties of contexts​​
    3. ​​Your only language is vision​​
    4. ​​To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees​​
    5. ​​Robert Irwin: A Conditional Art​​
    6. ​​The Finish Fetish Artists​​
    7. ​​Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface​​
    • art
    • life
    • craft
    • seeing
  • The Beauty of Everyday Things

    A Book by Yanagi Sōetsu
    1. ​​What is Folk Craft?​​
    2. ​​The Beauty of Miscellaneous Things​​
    3. ​​A Painted Karatsu as Food for Thought​​
    4. ​​Okinawa's Bashofu​​
    5. ​​Seeing and Knowing​​
    • craft
  • On Greatness

    What’s important to you in the development of a product?

    One of the things that really hurt Apple was that after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease — I’ve seen other people get it too — it’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can just go off and make it happen.

    The problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts, because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it, and you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs you have to make, there are just certain things you can’t make electrons do, there are certain things you can’t make plastic, or glass, or factories, or robots do. And as you get into all these things, you find that designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, and just fitting them all together and continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover a new problem or a new opportunity to do it a little differently. And it’s that process that is the magic.

    Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview
    1. ​​The idea grows as they work​​
    2. ​​The Design Squiggle​​
    3. ​​The Nature of Product​​
    • ideas
    • craft
  • Whose eyes had seen and whose fingers had felt

    Aristotle’s 18 qualities of homoeomerous bodies that he chose to explain in detail in his Meteorologica, are just those fine points of behavior that would be noticed in a workshop. They are:

    solidifiable
    meltable
    softenable by heat
    softenable by water
    flexible
    breakable
    fragmentable
    capable of taking an impression
    plastic
    squeezable
    ductile
    malleable
    fissile
    curable
    viscous
    compressible
    combustible
    capable of giving off fumes

    This redundant list of properties is not the neat classification of a philosopher. It reads more as if it were based on a conversation with a workman whose eyes had seen and whose fingers had felt the intricacies of the behavior of materials.

    Matter versus Materials: A Historical View
    • craft
    • material
    • texture
    • collections
  • Technical excellence and good design

    Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

    Manifesto for Agile Software Development
    • craft
  • More than the Graces and less than the Muses

    The Sukiya consists of the tea room proper, designed to accommodate not more than five persons, a number suggestive of the saying "more than the Graces and less than the Muses..."

    The tea room is unimpressive in appearance. It is smaller than the smallest of Japanese houses, while the materials used in its construction are intended to give the suggestion of refined poverty. Yet we must remember that all this is the result of profound artistic forethought, and that the details have been worked out with care perhaps even greater than that expended on the building of the richest palaces and temples. A good tea room is more costly than an ordinary mansion, for the selection of its materials, as well as its workmanship, requires immense care and precision. Indeed, the carpenters employed by the tea masters form a distinct and highly honored class among artisans, their work being no less delicate than that of the makers of lacquer cabinets.

    Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea
    • details
    • material
    • craft
  • The idea grows as they work

    As they work, the experience of the material under the artist's fingers subtly interacts with the idea in their mind to give the finished work some quality that was rarely fully anticipated. A few artists seem to have such a feeling for their materials that the prevision needs little modification; most say that the idea grows as they work experimentally.

    Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure
    1. ​​On Greatness​​
    2. ​​The situation talks back​​
    3. ​​The discoveries you make in the making​​
    4. ​​When I was 22​​
    • craft
    • material
    • art
  • Self-publishing, self-exemplifying

    I sought to design [my first book] so as to make it self-exemplifying – that is, the physical object itself would reflect the intellectual principles advanced in the book. Publishers seemed appalled at the prospect that an author might govern design. Consequently I decided to self-publish the book.

    ...[Howard Gralla and I] spent the summer in his studio laying out the book, page by page. We integrated graphics into the text, sometimes in the middle of sentences, eliminating the usual segregation of text and image – one of the ideas Visual Display advocated.

    My view on self-publishing was to go all out, to make the best and most elegant and wonderful book possible, without compromise. Otherwise, why do it? The next 4 books were financed by the previous books. I have never written a grant application.

    Edward Tufte, Seeing With Fresh Eyes
    1. ​​To enact visually the message​​
    • craft
  • All the way to the last bolt

    "Quality is only there," Irwin explained, "if you pursue it all the way to the last bolt." Consequently, how joints are finished must be specified in the contract. "And believe me," he added ruefully from experience, "there is a real discrepancy here. The difference [in] how we interpret the word finish or this word quality is really disparate."

    "When you bring them in and get them to be part of it," he noted, "the workmen themselves start to take pride in it. And when they start taking that pride in this idea of quality, ...it starts becoming theirs, something important to them, that they in fact do know what we are talking about."

    Robert Irwin, Robert Irwin: A Conditional Art
    • quality
    • craft
  • The business case for craft

    macOS software that adheres to craft — Things or Carbon Copy Cloner or BBEdit or Sublime Text (which, despite not being “native native” feels so solid and so responsive you’re willing to overlook its quirks) or Bear or Alfred or iA Writer or Keynote (arguably one of the best pieces of macOS software of all time) or anything by Panic, heck, even Terminal or Quicken (which, against all rational expectations is just a joy to use)5 — exists in troves, the existence of such proves to the Slacks or Twitters or Adobes of the world that it’s not impossible nor rare to produce craft-oriented software in service to user fluency, and still make a profit.

    In fact, there’s a business case to be made for being craft- and fluency-focused. We’ve seen entire companies with business models that could be summarized as “Bloat-Free X” emerge in recent years. Affinity is bloat-free Adobe. Install Adobe Creative Cloud on your laptop and marvel at the no fewer than a dozen processes whirling around in the background for unknown purposes. It’s no surprise Affinity Photo and Publisher and Designer have taken off. Sketch’s main feature for many years was simply: Not Adobe.

    And the web! When you care — when you really give a shit — the web is awe inspiring. I still can’t believe Figma is web-native (also born from the Not Adobe camp). That an application can feel so powerful, so fast, so well-crafted and be fully web-based should be a kind of lighthouse-archetype for all other sites lost in a sea of complexity and muck and unnecessary frameworks.

    Craig Mod, Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump
    1. ​​More profitable and a better buy​​
    • craft
    • business
    • www
  • Finished on the inside

    "Those stretcher bars were finished on the inside in ways no one will ever know; I spent days, weeks, months finishing things no one is ever going to see. But it had much more to do with the fact that I couldn't leave them unfinished. I just had this conviction that in the sense of tactile awareness, if all those things were consistent, then the sum total would be greater, even though that might not be definable in any causal, connected way."

    Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
    1. ​​All the way through​​
    2. ​​Invisible substance​​
    3. ​​Completing work properly in unseen areas​​
    • craft
  • A sense reflected in the plans

    image.png

    When a space resonates with our humanity, when it feels really pleasant or splendid and beautiful—when you place yourself in such an environment, I've always believed that people will be drawn in. So I guess you could say it's this sense that I try to reflect in the plans; I believe that this will lead in the right direction, to an honest lifestyle.

    Akinori Abo, Kigumi House
    1. ​​When our forces are resolved​​
    • craft
    • beauty
    • place
    • humanity
  • Completing work properly in unseen areas

    If you consider the inheritance of skills, we can keep this heritage by having young people do the work properly, as they did in the past. If you don't do this, or you become too practical, you'd only make simple things. It's very low tech, this inheritance of skills—using carpentry tools to do manual work. We deliberately put effort into these things, completing work properly in unseen areas.

    Akinori Abo, Kigumi House
    1. ​​Finished on the inside​​
    • craft
  • The patience of a craftsman

    Here there is no mastery of unnameable creative processes, only the patience of a craftsman, chipping away slowly; the mastery of what is made does not lie in the depths of some impenetrable ego; it lies, instead, in the simple mastery of the steps in the process, and in the definition of these steps.

    Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
    • making
    • craft
    • patience

    On the process of making a Samoan canoe.

  • For its own sake

    'Craftsmanship' may suggest a way of life that waned with the advent of industrial society—but this is misleading. Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.

    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
    1. ​​To see the fulfillment of the work​​
    • craft
  • To see the fulfillment of the work

    It is true that [the artist], like everybody else, derives remuneration from his work (though not, strictly speaking, profit in the financial sense, of the word, since what he invests in his work is not money but time and skill, whose returns cannot be calculated in percentages). The remuneration is frequently beyond the amount necessary to enable him to go on working. What is remarkable about him is the way in which he commonly employs the escape-from-work which the extra remuneration allows him. If he is genuinely an artist, you will find him using his escape-from-work in order to do what he calls “my own work”, and nine times out of ten, this means the same work (i.e. the exercise of his art) that he does for money. The peculiar charm of his escape is that he is relieved, not from the work but from the money.

    What distinguishes him here from the man who works to live is, I think, his desire to see the fulfilment of the work.

    Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
    1. ​​For its own sake​​
    2. ​​The saddest designer​​
    • craft
  • Shortlist of interesting spaces

    Nick Trombley, barnsworthburning.net
    • craft
    • work
    • walking
    • www
    • notetaking
    • words
    • euphony
    • melancholy
    • zen
    • darkness
    • gardens
  • It begins with craft

    Something strange is happening in the world of software: It’s slowly getting worse. Not all software, but a lot of it. It’s becoming more sluggish, less responsive, and subtly less reliable than it was a few years ago.

    In some ways this is hyperbole. Objectively, we’ve never been able to do so much, so easily with our smartphones and laptops and tablets. We’ve never pushed more data between more places more readily. But while the insidious “worseness” I mention falls only in part on the engineering side of things, it falls harder on the more subjective, craft side of things, making it all the more worrisome.

    Why should we care about this? Because the majority of our waking hours take place within the confines of applications. A truth recently amplified by the covid pandemic.

    And I believe software used by millions (if not billions) has a moral duty to elevate the emotional and intellectual qualities of its users. That elevation begins with craft.

    Craig Mod, Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump
    craigmod.com
    1. ​​Apps Getting Worse​​
    • performance
    • craft
    • software
  • You'll know it's there

    Jobs's father had once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board inside the Apple II. He rejected the initial design because the lines were not straight enough.


    In an interview a few years later, after the Macintosh came out, Jobs again reiterated that lesson from his father: "When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."

    Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
    1. ​​All the way through​​
    • craft
    • quality
  • To love deeply a world of things

    Care brings the worlds of action and meaning back together, and reconnects the necessary work of maintenance with the forms of attachment that so often (but invisibly, at least to analysts) sustain it.

    ...What if we care about our technologies, and do so in more than a trivial way? This feature or property has sometimes been extended to technologies in the past, but usually only ones that come out of deep folk or craft traditions, and rarely the products of a modern industrial culture.

    ...Is it possible to love, and love deeply, a world of things?

    Steven J. Jackson, Rethinking Repair
    • care
    • craft
    • products

    There's a bit of irony in the realization that, at least as I read this in 2021, what are often the most deeply appreciated technological things—e.g. Apple's products—are often the least repairable.

    This is in stark contrast to, say, the car-tinkering and fixit culture of those who grew up in 1950's and 60's. Irwin's cherry hot rods and Pirsig's motorcycles.

  • It was all change until the very last second

    Every work of literature is the result of thousands and thousands of decisions.
    Intricate, minute decisions—this word or that, here or where, now or later, again and again.
    It's the living tissue of a writer's choices,
    Not the fossil record of an ancient, inspired race.

    Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing
    1. ​​A concept of style​​
    • decisions
    • craft
  • The natural thing to do

    All folk artisans, regardless of their lack of academic knowledge concerning their craft, are still capable of producing works of merit. They work as if this were the natural thing to do; they create as if this were the natural thing to do; they give birth to beauty as if this were the natural thing to do. They have entered the way of salvation through unconscious faith. It is a path open to all.

    Yanagi Sōetsu, What is Folk Craft?
    1. ​​Until we leave the gate behind​​
    2. ​​Ordinariness​​
    • craft
  • What's love got to do with it?

    Slack embodied the belief, so common in Silicon Valley, that the best product would win in the end. “Building a product that allows for significant improvements in how people communicate requires a degree of thoughtfulness and craftsmanship that is not common in the development of enterprise software,” the company wrote in its open letter to Microsoft. “How far you go in helping companies truly transform to take advantage of this shift in working is even more important than the individual software features you are duplicating.”

    And yet, if there’s a lesson of the past four years, it’s that thoughtfulness and craftsmanship only got the company about 10 percent as far as Microsoft did by copy-pasting Slack’s basic design. In its open letter, Slack famously told Microsoft: “You’ve got to do this with love.” In 2020, looking at Slack’s size, the idea seems laughable. What’s love got to do with it?

    How Microsoft crushed Slack
    www.theverge.com
    1. ​​Copying (is the way design works)​​
    2. ​​Dear Microsoft​​
    • craft

    Emphasis here is mine.

  • It's not the features that matter

    First, and most importantly, it’s not the features that matter. You’re not going to create something people really love by making a big list of Slack’s features and simply checking those boxes. The revolution that has led to millions of people flocking to Slack has been, and continues to be, driven by something much deeper.

    Building a product that allows for significant improvements in how people communicate requires a degree of thoughtfulness and craftsmanship that is not common in the development of enterprise software. How far you go in helping companies truly transform to take advantage of this shift in working is even more important than the individual software features you are duplicating.

    Dear Microsoft
    • features
    • craft
  • You feel this when you start to design things

    Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it's not true. You feel this when you start to design things.

    As in any job, as you continue to design things, you'll get better at it. Your tastes will change. And, like anyone who gets better at their job, you'll know you're getting better. If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse. Poof goes the axiom that taste can't be wrong.

    Paul Graham, Taste for Makers
    • craft
  • Stage sets for the eye

    With the loss of tactility, measures and details crafted for the human body – and particularly for the hand – architectural structures become repulsively flat, sharp-edged, immaterial and unreal. The detachment of construction from the realities of matter and craft further turns architecture into stage sets for the eye, into a scenography devoid of the authenticity of matter and construction. The sense of 'aura', the authority of presence, that Walter Benjamin regards as a necessary quality for an authentic piece of art, has been lost.

    Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
    • craft
    • construction
  • Conversations, not commandments

    Good software comes from a vision, combined with conversations not commandments. In a craft-focused environment, care for efficiency, simplicity, and details really do matter. I didn’t leave my last job just because I wanted to make something new. I left because I wanted to make it in a way I could be proud of.

    Pirijan Ketheswaran, Why Software is Slow and Shitty
    pketh.org
    • details
    • craft
    • simplicity
    • efficiency
  • A great painting has to be better than it has to be

    This sounds like a paradox, but a great painting has to be better than it has to be. For example, when Leonardo painted the portrait of Ginevra de Benci in the National Gallery, he put a juniper bush behind her head. In it he carefully painted each individual leaf. Many painters might have thought, this is just something to put in the background to frame her head. No one will look that closely at it.

    Not Leonardo. How hard he worked on part of a painting didn't depend at all on how closely he expected anyone to look at it. He was like Michael Jordan. Relentless.

    Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible. When people walk by the portrait of Ginevra de Benci, their attention is often immediately arrested by it, even before they look at the label and notice that it says Leonardo da Vinci. All those unseen details combine to produce something that's just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune.

    Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too.

    Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters
    1. ​​All the way through​​
    • art
    • software
    • craft
  • Taylorism in software

    Interestingly, just as software people were talking about how we need to kind of follow this very Taylorist notion as the future of software development, the manufacturing world was moving away from it. The whole notion of what was going on in a lot in manufacturing places was the people doing the work need to have much more of a say in this because they actually see what's happening.

    Martin Fowler, The State of Agile Software in 2018
    martinfowler.com
    • craft
    • work
  • Holistic and prescriptive technologies

    Holistic technologies are normally associated with the notion of craft. Artisans, be they potters, weavers, metal-smiths, or cooks, control the process of their own work from beginning to finish. Using holistic technologies does not mean that people do not work together, but the way in which they work together leaves the individual worker in control of a particular process of creating or doing something.

    The opposite is specialization by process; this I call prescriptive technology. Here, the making or doing of something is broken down into clearly identifiable steps. Each step is carried out by a separate worker, or group or workers, who need to be familiar only with the skills of performing that one step. This is what is normally meant by "division of labor".

    Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology
    1. ​​That which requires caring​​
    • craft
    • process
    • making

    In this sense, the modern agile software shop has more in common with an industrial-era factory than a carpenter's workshop or mechanic's garage.

  • Curiosity spurred on

    Methodically noting and filing resources is a sign of a mature and deliberate craftsman—it is an investment into future learning and projects. Before long, you will begin to reach the point where this collection generates projects and ideas with minimal effort; previously isolated ideas are consolidated and curiousity spurred on.

    Will Darwin, Building a knowledge base
    www.willdarwin.com
    • commonplace
    • craft
    • ideas
    • learning
    • connection
    • notetaking
  • Crafting repair

    Repair is a neglected, poorly understood, but all-important aspect of technical craftsmanship. The sociologist Douglas Harper believes that making and repairing form a single whole; he writes of those who do both that they possess the "knowledge that allows them to see beyond the elements of a technique to its overall purpose and coherence. This knowledge is the 'live intelligence, fallibly attuned to the actual circumstances' of life. It is the knowledge in which making and fixing are parts of a continuum."

    Put simply, it is by fixing things that we often get to understand how they work.

    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
    1. ​​Its place in the web of nature​​
    • craft
    • repair
  • The good craftsman

    The good craftsman...

    ...understands the importance of the sketch—that is, not knowing quite what you are about when you begin.
    ...places positive value on contingency and constraint.
    ...needs to avoid pursuing a problem relentlessly to the point that is becomes perfectly self-contained.
    ...avoids perfectionism that can degrade into a self-conscious demonstration.
    ...learns when it is time to stop.

    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
    • craft
  • A pattern of understandings

    The clock has no finished design and it has been made without any careful drawings or mathematical calculations. The pieces are only made if I can hold their details in my head as I make them, without reference to any set of external measures. I do make rough sketches of some parts as a path to understanding them, but never use these during the making of the parts. The clock gradually grows through trial and error and lots of physical work with metal, but out of this has come a set of principles of making that were not clear to me before doing the clock. I have finally realized that what I am actually making is a pattern of understandings of the process of making rather than the things that are actually being made. — Richard Benson

    Richard Saul Wurman, Understanding Understanding
    • making
    • craft
  • Resonances

    The resonances arising in workmanship are often very subtle. The fact that the material itself guides the tool differently in different processes of working introduces changes in the overall relationship of curvatures. The smooth curves of surfaces approaching the edge of a jade axe that come about from innumerable abrasive particles moving against a slightly yielding and mechanically unconstrained backing would seem incongruous if other surfaces or outlines were present that had come from cleavage or from the geometric motions of a machine. These could be produced easily enough, but the eye would not establish larger resonances among them.

    Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure
    • tools
    • technique
    • craft
  • True artistry

    The best of all examples of a satisfactory art form based upon the inner nature of a metal is provided by Japanese swords.

    Our perception of beauty seems to involve the interaction of several patterns having origin and significance at many different levels of space, time, matter, and spirit. In the Japanese sword blade there is heterogeneity in both the macrostructure and the microstructure. The manner of forging, the heat treatment, and the final polishing operation are all uniquely Japanese techniques, and all make necessary contributions to the final quality of the blades. The shape along would be simplistic form; the forged texture of the steel without heat treatment would at best faintly echo the beauty of grained wood; the outlines of the quench-hardened zone at the edge would be sharp and uninteresting if it depended only on the control of cooling rate during quenching; and the polish would be uniform glitter if the metal were homogeneous. With true artistry all these are made to interact.

    Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure
    • beauty
    • craft
  • Defining craftsmanship

    By craftsmanship I refer to a style of work and a way of life having the following characteristics:

    1. In craftsmanship there is no ulterior motive for work other than the product being made and the processes of its creation.
    2. In craftsmanship, plan and performance are unified, and in both, the craftsman is master of the activity and of himself in the process. The craftsman is free to begin his working according to his own plan, and during the work he is free to modify its shape and the manner of its shaping.
    3. Since he works freely, the craftsman is able to learn from his work, to develop as well as use his capacities.
    4. The craftsman’s way of livelihood determines and infuses his entire mode of living. For him there is no split of work and play, of work and culture. His work is the mainspring of his life; he does not flee from work into a separate sphere of leisure; he brings to his non-working hours the values and qualities developed and employed in his working time.
    C. Wright Mills, Man in the Middle: The Designer
    • craft
    • work
  • The central value for which they stand

    What I am suggesting to you is that designers ought to take the value of craftsmanship as the central value for which they stand; that in accordance with it they ought to do their work; and that they ought to use its norms in their social and economic and political visions of what society ought to become.

    C. Wright Mills, Man in the Middle: The Designer
    • design
    • craft
  • Our responsibility


    As makers of buildings, we architects must start now,
    with a fundamental change of direction.
    For the last hundred years or so, we have understood
    building to be an art in which an architect draws a building,
    and a contractor then builds that building from the
    architect's plans.
    But a living environment cannot be built
    successfully this way.

    To achieve a successful building — one that has life — we
    must focus our attention on all the crafts and processes,
    and then, as architects, ourselves take direct charge
    of the making.
    We must take full responsibility
    for the entire building process, ourselves.

    Christopher Alexander, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth
    • craft
  • A Search for Structure

    A Book by Cyril Stanley Smith
    mitpress.mit.edu
    1. ​​Apologia​​
    2. ​​Grain Shapes and Other Metallurgical Applications of Topology​​
    3. ​​Structure, Substructure, and Superstructure​​
    4. ​​The Interpretation of Microstructures of Metallic Artifacts​​
    5. ​​Matter versus Materials: A Historical View​​
    1. ​​Results of a search​​
    • making
    • material
    • craft
    • style
  • Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

    A Book by Samin Nosrat
    www.saltfatacidheat.com
    1. ​​Research, empathy, simplicity, speed​​
    • food
    • craft
  • The Nature and Art of Workmanship

    A Book by David Pye
    www.bloomsbury.com
    1. ​​That which requires caring​​
    2. ​​Mass production of variable products​​
    3. ​​From hands to machines​​
    4. ​​Employs nothing at all​​
    5. ​​What is Folk Craft?​​
    • design
    • making
    • craft
    • style
  • The Craftsman

    A Book by Richard Sennett
    yalebooks.yale.edu
    1. ​​The great teacher​​
    2. ​​The categories of good​​
    3. ​​For its own sake​​
    4. ​​The details of construction​​
    5. ​​The technology shelf​​
    • craft
    • making
    • material
    • style

    The intimate relations between problem solving and problem finding, technique and expression, play and work.

  • The Real World of Technology

    A Lecture by Ursula M. Franklin
    www.amazon.com
    1. ​​Technology is a system​​
    2. ​​Fish and water​​
    3. ​​Defining activities​​
    4. ​​Holistic and prescriptive technologies​​
    5. ​​That which requires caring​​
    1. ​​From hands to machines​​
    2. ​​The design systems between us​​
    3. ​​Stress systems​​
    • technology
    • work
    • society
    • craft
  • The vanishing designer

    An Article by Chuánqí Sun
    uxdesign.cc

    Visionary designers have lost their conceptual integrity to an industrial complex optimized for consensus, predictability, and short-term business gain. The rise of customer-obsession mantra and data-driven culture cultivated a generation of designers who only take risk-free and success-guaranteed steps towards the inevitable local maxima of design monotony.

    1. ​​The same, the same, the same​​
    2. ​​Design as an engineering problem​​
    3. ​​The heat death of design​​
    4. ​​Design with courage​​
    • ux
    • monotony
    • craft

    This essay is so good I basically had to quote the whole thing.

  • Chef's Table

    A Documentary
    www.netflix.com
    1. ​​Chef's Table: Jeong Kwan​​
    • food
    • craft
    • beauty
  • The Nature and Aesthetics of Design

    A Book by David Pye
    books.google.com
    1. ​​Any imaginable shape​​
    2. ​​Useless work on useful things​​
    3. ​​Presentable​​
    4. ​​The principle of arrangement​​
    5. ​​The minimum condition​​
    1. ​​More real than living man​​
    2. ​​That which requires caring​​
    3. ​​The informing idea of functionalism​​
    • design
    • aesthetics
    • making
    • style
    • craft
    • beauty
  • Einmal Ist Keinmal

    An Article by Dan Klyn
    blog.usejournal.com
    1. ​​Jacked in​​
    2. ​​Immer wieder​​
    3. ​​But what if it is?​​
    1. ​​104. Site Repair​​
    2. ​​66. Holy Ground​​
    3. ​​109. Long Thin House​​
    4. ​​135. Tapestry of Light and Dark​​
    5. ​​239. Small Panes​​
    • beauty
    • craft
    • making
    • design
    • architecture
  • The Shape of Design

    A Book by Frank Chimero
    shapeofdesignbook.com
    1. ​​Near and far​​
    2. ​​Why we should read​​
    3. ​​We hear a voice whisper​​
    4. ​​Needs more love​​
    5. ​​One candle can light another​​
    • design
    • craft
  • Ensuring Excellence

    An Article by Marty Cagan
    www.svpg.com

    …in so many of the best product companies there is an additional dimension that goes beyond individual empowered product teams, and even goes beyond achieving business results.

    It has to do with ensuring a level of what I’ll refer to here as “excellence” although that is clearly a very ambiguous term.

    Over the years, this concept has been referred to by many different names, always necessarily vague, but all striving to convey the same thing: “desirability,” “aha moments,” “wow factor,” “magic experiences,” or “customer delight,” to list just a few.

    The concept is that an effective product that achieves results is critical, but sometimes we want to go even beyond that, to provide something special.

    Maybe it’s because we believe this is needed to achieve the necessary value. Maybe it’s because the company has built its brand on inspiring customers.

    Often this dimension shows up most clearly in product design, where functional, usable but uninspiring designs can often achieve our business results, but great design can propel us into this realm of the inspiring.

    1. ​​Do they really need it?​​
    • quality
    • craft
    • products
    • software
  • Delight is constraints, joyfully embraced

    An Article by Craig Mod
    craigmod.com
    Image from craigmod.com on 2021-12-06 at 8.18.04 PM.jpeg

    And what is delight? For me, delight is born from a tool’s intuitiveness. Things just working without much thought or fiddling. Delight is a simple menu system you almost never have to use. Delight is a well-balanced weight on the shoulder, in the hand. Delight is the just-right tension on the aperture ring between stops. Delight is a single battery lasting all day. Delight is being able to knock out a 10,000 iso image and know it'll be usable. Delight is extracting gorgeous details from the cloak of shadows. Delight is firing off a number of shots without having to wait for the buffer to catch up. Delight is constraints, joyfully embraced.

    • photography
    • constraints
    • joy
    • craft
  • Software Engineering as a Craft

    An Article by Thomas Wilson
    thomaswilson.xyz

    The decreasingly tangible product of code, i.e. that all we have are files on a hard-drive, may make it easy to forget that writing software produces a thing. If you produce a wonky chair or an overly long fork, it’s easy to see the quality of work was not great. By calling for a perception of software as a craft, we fight against that ability to forget or not notice the final quality of the product. You could watch two software engineers with different levels of experience, or in different domains, and it wouldn’t necessarily be so easy to guess which is which, at least from a distance.

    So maybe there is something to be said for the value of software as a craft, for sometimes focusing on the practice of making better, or at least different, software just for the sake of it.

    • craft
    • software
  • LoveFrom,

    A Website
    www.lovefrom.com
    Screenshot of www.lovefrom.com on 2021-10-16 at 3.56.21 PM.png
    LoveFrom,
    is a creative
    collective.
    • microsites
    • craft
    • art
  • Things that don't scale

    An Article by Benedict Evans
    www.ben-evans.com
    Image from www.ben-evans.com on 2021-10-10 at 10.23.17 AM.jpeg

    Maybe the internet is due for a wave of things that don’t scale at all. In that light, I’ve been fascinated by ‘Morioka Shoten’ in Tokyo - a bookshop that sells only one book at a time. This is retail as anti-logistics - as a reaction against the firehose, and the infinite replication of Amazon. Before the internet that would only work in a very dense city, but, again, the internet is the densest city on earth, so how far do we scale the unscalable?

    1. ​​Morioka Shoten​​
    2. ​​Stepping out of the firehose​​
    • scale
    • www
    • business
    • craft
    • microsites
  • Jacob Leech, Digital Craftsman

    A Profile by Jacob Leech
    jacobleech.com
    Screenshot of jacobleech.com on 2021-09-27 at 11.37.21 AM.png

    I'm Jacob — a designer and coder who creates things with computers (Fig 1) 'Digital Craftsman' best describes my skill set.

    Digital projects thrive when designers understand how they will be built. Just as an architect understands how a structure is created, the same should be true on the web.

    1. ​​nicktrombley.design​​
    • craft
    • www
    • making

    I like this portfolio/profile page – Jacob does a great job articulating the unconventional position of being somewhere between the worlds of design and development. For a while my LinkedIn bio has read Digital Designer-Builder, but Digital Craftsman conveys the same idea. Maybe I'm just not ready to assume the label of "craftsman" for myself. I consider it instead a perpetual aspiration.

  • Learning About Work Ethic From My High School Driving Instructor

    An Essay by James Somers
    www.theatlantic.com

    Should we really demand that the guy who checks ticket stubs at the movie theater hones his craft?

    Well, yes. No job is too low to not warrant care, because no job exists in isolation. Carelessness ripples. It adds friction to the working of the world. To phone it in or run out the clock, regardless of how alone and impotent you might feel in your work, is to commit an especially tragic—for being so preventable—brand of public sin.


    Bob [the driving instructor] oozes concern; he wants to infect the state of New Jersey with good driving habits. He respects his public role, the fact that the minute he's done with these kids they head straight for their parents' car keys and out onto the roads we share. When I asked him what he likes to do outside of work, he laughed: "This is my life."

    His reward is the pleasure of depth itself.

    • craft
    • work
    • ethics
  • Craft and Material in Digital Design

    An Article
    1. ​​A little bit more about the stone​​
    2. ​​It is how we come to understand our medium​​
    • craft
    • material
    • software

    I saved this brief essay to my notes a while ago. The source has since been taken down, so I will not name the author or provide other details, but the message is worth preserving. If you wrote this and prefer I remove it from the site, please contact me and let me know.

  • At least everything was important

    A Quote by Mads Mikkelsen
    www.vulture.com

    My approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.

    1. ​​The most important thing you do​​
    • work
    • craft
    • goals
  • Apprenticeship: An Internship Replacement

    An Essay by Ivana McConnell
    louderthanten.com

    Universities are often too large, dulling the student-educator relationship. Internships are often transitory and involve large volumes of work without context or learning: building web pages or presentations from pre-built components to meet a deadline, for example. It’s work that people need to do, but it doesn’t require learning or understanding the client or the project. Thankfully, there is a middle ground that we seem to have forgotten about in tech: the apprenticeship.

    • craft
    • learning
    • work
  • Senior craftsperson

    A Fragment by Wilson Miner
    staff.design

    The thing that you’re talking about though, which I’ve never seen a mature company really have a sustainable space for, is the “senior craftsperson.” They’re not pivoting at some point in their career to saying “I’m going to take what I know and leverage it through other people.” They’re saying “I want to get better infinitely at the thing that I do.” I believe that that’s possible.

    You see it more in pure-art kind of careers. Like “I’m an illustrator” or “I’m a concept artist” or something, and there’s a need for that person being really fucking good at that one thing, and continuing to do that one thing. I think a lot of people can intuitively understand why that would be really satisfying for someone as a career path.

    1. ​​The dual ladder​​
    • craft
    • work

    From an interview with Miner (a designer at Apple) on the Individual Contributor career path.

  • 80/20 is the new Half-Ass

    An Article by Shawn Wang
    www.swyx.io

    The Pareto Principle is making you lazy.

    Let me be more precise: The Pareto distribution is a useful model of power law effects in real life. But people are using it poorly, primarily as an excuse to be lazy.

    ...People forget that the devil is in the details. The first 20% everyone knows to say on Twitter. The remaining 80% is the ugly, nasty, hacky, unglamorous shit nobody talks about unless you've got time to sweat the details.

    1. ​​The Pareto principle​​
    • details
    • craft
  • On onion cutting

    An Article by Ana Rodrigues
    ohhelloana.blog

    In the television show Masterchef there was an episode where the judges did a test on what they call “basic skills”. One of the judges often says that in order to be a “true chef”, you must know how to quickly and finely cut onions.

    ...This was really bothering me and I am stubborn so I wanted to win this fake argument really badly so I looked up why the way one cuts onions is important: as it turns out, the shape and even the surface area affect the end flavour. I thought the whole “chop chop chop” was about performance in the kitchen. Cut quickly to serve quickly! I was wrong.

    • craft
    • food
    • www
    • skill
  • Putting Thought Into Things

    An Essay by Oliver Reichenstein
    ia.net

    Building structure requires serious listening, serious reflection, and serious imagination. All this requires experience, and no matter how experienced you are, it costs you. We spend our time and nerves to save users their time and nerves. Well-designed things give us the invaluable present of time. Well-designed products do not just save us time, they make us enjoy the time we spend with them. They make us feel that someone has been thinking about us, that a nice person took care of the little things for us. This is mainly why we perceive well-designed things as more beautiful the longer we use them, and the more used they become.

    1. ​​By the handling of human hands​​
    • craft
    • products
    • age
  • Figma's Engineering Values: Craftsmanship

    An Article
    www.figma.com

    Craftsmanship is about thoughtfulness and care in the work we do. It means being deliberate about what we build and how possible it will be to maintain and extend in the future. A solution that will require revisiting in a month — because it’s not scaling, because it has a ton of bugs, because it doesn’t support all the use cases it needs to — is not useful to us and ultimately will generate pain for our users.

    What we trade off by living this value is (sometimes) day-to-day speed. It’s easy to imagine an engineering team that emphasizes moving fast over keeping things stable and bug-free -- like a team building a product that isn’t responsible for important user data and doesn’t support anyone’s livelihood. But given the role the Figma product plays in the lives of our users, we feel it’s worth it to ensure we hold a high quality bar for them. And in the long run, being thoughtful about how we build often reduces the complexity of ongoing development and new features regardless.

    • craft
    • software
    • quality

See also:
  1. making
  2. work
  3. material
  4. software
  5. beauty
  6. design
  7. www
  8. art
  9. style
  10. quality
  11. food
  12. details
  13. products
  14. ideas
  15. learning
  16. notetaking
  17. business
  18. microsites
  19. process
  20. repair
  21. patience
  22. texture
  23. collections
  24. tools
  25. technique
  26. commonplace
  27. connection
  28. objects
  29. performance
  30. architecture
  31. life
  32. seeing
  33. aesthetics
  34. technology
  35. society
  36. simplicity
  37. efficiency
  38. construction
  39. walking
  40. words
  41. euphony
  42. melancholy
  43. zen
  44. darkness
  45. gardens
  46. features
  47. age
  48. decisions
  49. skill
  50. goals
  51. ux
  52. monotony
  53. care
  54. ethics
  55. place
  56. humanity
  57. scale
  58. photography
  59. constraints
  60. joy
  1. Richard Sennett
  2. Cyril Stanley Smith
  3. Robert Irwin
  4. Lawrence Wechler
  5. Craig Mod
  6. C. Wright Mills
  7. Ursula M. Franklin
  8. Christopher Alexander
  9. David Pye
  10. Paul Graham
  11. Yanagi Sōetsu
  12. Akinori Abo
  13. Will Darwin
  14. Richard Saul Wurman
  15. Dan Klyn
  16. Samin Nosrat
  17. Frank Chimero
  18. Martin Fowler
  19. Steve Jobs
  20. Pirijan Ketheswaran
  21. Juhani Pallasmaa
  22. Nick Trombley
  23. Ivana McConnell
  24. Oliver Reichenstein
  25. Wilson Miner
  26. Verlyn Klinkenborg
  27. Ana Rodrigues
  28. Shawn Wang
  29. Mads Mikkelsen
  30. Chuánqí Sun
  31. Steven J. Jackson
  32. Walter Isaacson
  33. Dorothy Sayers
  34. James Somers
  35. Jacob Leech
  36. Edward Tufte
  37. Benedict Evans
  38. Okakura Kakuzō
  39. Thomas Wilson
  40. Marty Cagan