Making & Creating
Its place in the web of nature
Entropy
The way it has been made
Follow the brush
v0.crap
The discoveries you make in the making
Expressing ideas helps to form them
Between the two spaces
The game discovering itself
The act of creation
No more than a sketch
I'm reminded of their faces
The patience of a craftsman
So that its destruction cannot begin
Some secret stirring in the world
Embracing the mess
Less, but better
Tracing paper into palimpsest
Blueprints
Blueprints lead to the making of things that are abstract, not always based on reality. Once something becomes abstract, it breeds disconnectedness — separation and the inability to connect with our surroundings. People buy houses from blueprints, but then don't like the actual house: "What on earth is this? I had no idea it was going to be like this...etc."
Freedomless freedom
The beauty of kasuri is received as a gift. As long as the laws of nature are upheld, the beauty of kasuri remains intact. This demonstrates the curious principle that the artisan is deprived of technical freedom but works in the freedom of nature.
In this sense, kasuri can be said to be created in a state of freedomless freedom.
From body to body
During the design process, the architect gradually internalizes the landscape, the entire context, and the functional requirements as well as his/her conceived building: movement, balance and scale are felt unconsciously through the body of the observer, the experience mirrors the bodily sensations of the maker. Consequently, architecture is communication from the body of the architect directly to the body of the person who encounters the work, perhaps centuries later.
Modularity
One of the most pervasive features of these buildings is the fact that they are “modular.” They are full of identical concrete blocks, identical rooms, identical houses, identical apartments in identical apartment buildings. The idea that a building can - and ought - to be made of modular units is one of the most pervasive assumptions of twentieth-century architecture.
Nature is never modular. Nature is full of almost similar units (waves, raindrops, blades of grass) - but though the units of one kind are all alike in their broad structure, no two are ever alike in detail.
The same broad features keep recurring over and over again. And yet, in their detailed appearance these broad features are never twice the same.
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".
Skill vs. knowledge
We should say that anybody has skill enough to build a good dry-stone wall but that few know how to design one, for the placing of the stones is a matter of knowledge and judgment, not of dexterity.
More real than living man
He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom
Nor heed, nor see, what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man.The Idea
The design is thus the mental formulation, which Sayers calls “the Idea,” and it can be complete before any realization is begun. Mozart’s response to his father’s inquiry about an opera due to the duke in three weeks both stuns us and clarifies the concept.
For most human makers of things, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation. Thus it is that writing, experimentation, “working out,” are essential disciplines for the theoretician.
Needs more love
He held the phone to his chest, looked at me, and simply said, “Needs more love.” He pushed the portfolio back across his desk, smiled warmly, and shooed me out of his office.
I still think about this advice, and what exactly he might have meant when he said my work needed more love. At the time, I took it to mean that I should improve my craft, but I’ve come to realize that he was speaking of something more fundamental and vital. My work was flat, because it was missing the spark that comes from creating something you believe in for someone you care about. This is the source of the highest craft, because an affection for the audience produces the care necessary to make the work well.
We have been given a standard
We have been given a standard to use. It is there, handy daily: things as they are, or Nature itself. This makes good sense, the only sense really—Nature should be our model.
Process vs. product
...more concerned with process than with product, with the actual construction of a self than with self-expression.
The categories of good
We need to turn to a fresh page. We can do so simply by asking—though the answers are anything but simple—what the process of making concrete things reveals to us about ourselves. Learning from things requires us to care about the qualities of cloth or the right way to poach fish; fine cloth or food cooked well enables us to imagine larger categories of 'good'.
The narrative of its making
Getting things in perfect shape can mean removing the traces, erasing the evidence, of a work in progress. Once this evidence is eliminated, the object appears pristine. Perfection of this cleaned-up sort is a static condition; the object does not hint at the narrative of its making.
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
What's the difference?
I well remember an occasion in 1962 when in a remote Iranian village I asked a blacksmith famous for his superior penknives to tell me the difference between iron and steel. “What’s the difference?” he replied. “What’s the difference between an oak tree and a willow — they have different natures and one must adapt to them.” He did not accept the suggestion that some material absorbed from the fire’s charcoal might have something to do with it, and he would not have understood a word of any lecture I could have given him on diffusion, crystal structure, and phase transformations; yet he could make a good knife and I could not.
Reproduction
The success of a mechanic’s, or a machine’s, reproduction of a thing depends on his, or its, sensitivity to whatever qualities are important, just as the skill of the designer lies in the proper appreciation of surface qualities in terms of structure and shape variation that come from the intended means of production.
Flurry and lapse
"The process in creating that kind of canvas was like—what?—10 percent action and 90 percent ass scratching. First you prepared yourself, cleaning up and arranging your palette and tools, sweeping the floors, and then finally, when you were ready, you faced the empty white expanse of white canvas and made your first stroke."
Oil
Irwin even disdained artificial products when polishing the wood frame, confining himself solely to the natural oils of his hands, his forehead, the sides of his nose, and so forth.
Perfection
It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.
The center of the way
The advice I’ve received from those who are close to the center of this timeless way of building is to start small. Like with a piece of tile, or a tea tray. And to then imagine along with Christopher Alexander:
What it would be like
to live in a mental world
where one’s reasons
for making something
functionally
and one’s reasons
for making something
a certain shape,
or in a certain
ornamental way
are coming
from precisely
the same place
in you
.Asking yourself some questions
All of the moves that we make in space will tend toward being in accord with this phenomenon of wholeness / beauty / life if we’re willing to bring the requisite level of care to the doing of our work.
Alexander says that each of us possess the means for accessing this order within ourselves and — here’s where he loses most other architects and many in the so-called sciences in academia — he contends that what we’re connecting with inside of ourselves is an objective criterion for what good means.
Applying the criterion is easy: you ask yourself some questions:
With any action you might take with regard to placement, and with regard to the situatedness of things in space you ask yourself: does this move increase wholeness / beauty / life?
Does the intervention you’re taking intensify the feelings of wholeness in you as the maker when you are performing the work?
How does your work on this one part enhance what’s going on among wholes at the system level?
A Search for Structure
A Book by Cyril Stanley SmithThe Timeless Way of Building
A Book by Christopher Alexander- Mind of no mind
- The quality without a name
- An objective matter
- Bitterness
- The most precious thing we ever have
The Design of Design
A Book by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.The Nature and Art of Workmanship
A Book by David PyeThe Craftsman
A Book by Richard SennettInventing on Principle
A Talk by Bret VictorIn Praise of Shadows
A Book by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki & Thomas J. Harper- Things that shine and glitter
- A naked bulb
- The Japanese toilet
- Empty dreams
- Most important of all are the pauses
A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams
A Book by Michael PollanThe Nature and Aesthetics of Design
A Book by David PyeEinmal Ist Keinmal
An Article by Dan KlynWrite the books you want to read
An Article by Austin KleonA few nights ago, I was looking at the moon and I thought, “I’d like to read a cultural history of the moon.” I googled, and there it was. My friend Matt said, “Ideally, that is exactly how one should find everything they read…and write.”
It’s really that simple. You find the books you want to read… and if you can’t find them, you write them.
Stop Drawing Dead Fish
A Talk by Bret VictorBackground textures of work
An Article by Lucy KeerOne thing I've been enjoying about working as a technical writer is that the minute-by-minute texture of the work feels right. Something about formatting text, faffing about with SVGs, trying to rewrite a sentence more clearly... it's just enjoyable in itself, and I feel at home with it.
...Working as a programmer was very much not like that. There's something in the rough vicinity of professional dev work that I do like, which I could probably label as 'iterative hobbyist tinkering with websites'. I like working on something with a strong visual component, and I like to be inside of a fast feedback loop, and I'm mostly interested in just somehow bodging through until it works. I'm not very interested in either the computer-sciencey side of programming — data structures, algorithms — or the software-engineerey side of making things run reliably at scale in a maintainable way. So maybe it's not surprising that the minute-by-minute texture of professional programming was just... kind of bad. Occasional fun bits when I got into something, but the background experience was not fun.
Say yes and never do it
A Quote by Mel BrooksYou have some wonderful stories of basically getting away with stuff at the studios.
I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes…You say yes, and you never do it.
That’s great advice for life.
It is. Don’t fight them. Don’t waste your time struggling with them and trying to make sense to them. They’ll never understand.
Make Free Stuff
At its very core, the rules of the web are different than those of “real” markets. The idea that ownership fundamentally means that nobody else can have the same thing you have just doesn’t apply here. This is a world where anything can easily be copied a million times and distributed around the globe in a second. If that were possible in the real world, we’d call it Utopia.
…Resource Scarcity doesn’t make sense on the web. Artificially creating it here serves no other purpose than to charge money for things that could easily have been free for all. Why anyone would consider that better is beyond me.
Makers and Making
An Article by Alan JacobsThe [Silmarils] are good; their making was at least potentially innocent; but afterward arose a lust for owning and controlling that led to great tragedy… The aspect of humanity which the elves represent most fully – both for good and ill – is the creative one.”
And this is why “making” in and of itself is not the answer to our decadent moment. “Love of things, especially artificial things, could be seen as the besetting sin of modern civilisation, and in a way a new one, not quite Avarice and not quite Pride, but somehow attached to both” – and this is the Fëanor Temptation. It is in light of this temptation that I advocate repair, which is a mode of caring for what we have not made, but rather what we have inherited. We will not be saved by the making of artifacts — or from the repair of them, either; but the imperative of repair has these salutary effects: it reminds us of our debt to those who came before us and of the fragility of human constructs.
How I Build
An Article by Pirijan KetheswaranIn 2014, I wrote about my belief that design and engineering are best when tightly woven together. That’s truer now than ever.
If I’m feeling confident, I’ll jump right into my text editor…From here, more functionality is added and the code is tweaked until the feature looks and feels right to me. Whether it’s something simple like this, or prototyping a new interaction like multi-connect, there’s no substitute for designing with real code.
In rare cases when I have ideas or plans that I’m less confident about, it’s time to break out the paper, pens, and markers,
Because the Kinopio interface elements and aesthetic are full-grown, I almost never use traditional design software anymore.
Primitive design
An Article by Matt Webb- I want it to feel intuitive
- I want any new features to be platform features, not one-offs.
And the second of those is weird, right? It’s like sketching out a toy spaceship, having a list of rules about play, and attempting to simultaneously invent the shape of the Lego brick.
That’s platform design I suppose. Redesigning a newspaper will mean bouncing between comps and style guides, designing both. Inventing the iPhone user interface will have seen apps and app paradigm evolving together.
Weinberg's Law
A Quote by Gerald WeinbergIf builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
A Research Paper by Andy Matuschak & Michael NielsenConventional tech industry product practice will not produce deep enough subject matter insights to create transformative tools for thought.
...The aspiration is for any team serious about making transformative tools for thought. It’s to create a culture that combines the best parts of modern product practice with the best parts of the (very different) modern research culture. You need the insight-through-making loop to operate, whereby deep, original insights about the subject feed back to change and improve the system, and changes to the system result in deep, original insights about the subject.
When I was 22
A Quote by Nicholas Ashe BatemanWhat's really challenging for me working on something on an idea level for close to 8 years, it's really hard to not look at yourself. The decision-making process includes a conversation with myself: sometimes I'm going to side with 2015 version of Nick, sometimes the 2017 Nick isn't the right guy for this, etc... So much of the process of making the movie has changed the movie. I really just tried to make the movie I wanted to make when I was 22. When I serviced that, it worked really well.
Everything has been composed
A Quote by Wolfgang Amadeus MozartEverything has been composed, just not yet written down.
Game feel
An Article by Dave RupertHow do you make a game that’s fun? ...You have to focus on gameplay. In order for the final product to be fun and exciting, the core game play needs to be fun and exciting. The creator of Mario calls this 手応え (tegotae), which is often translated as “game feel”. To find this game feel, you need to build small prototypes around a single idea, play test them, and then follow the fun. Nintendo does this, indie game devs do this; this is the not-so-secret of the gaming industry.
The tools matter and the tools don't matter - Austin Kleon
An Article by Austin KleonThough you might not think it from the comic, I’m actually sympathetic to questions about tools and process, as I myself am a kind of process junky. I love hearing about how other writers work.
I’m also not someone who dismisses questions about tools with the line “the tools don’t matter.” In fact, I think tools matter so much that if you don’t talk about them correctly you can do some damage.
...What I love about John Gardner and Lynda Barry is that they believe that the tools you use do matter, but the point, for them, is finding the proper tools that get you to a certain way of working in which you can get your conscious, mechanical mind out of the way so that your dreaming can go on, undeterred.
You have to find the right tools to help your voice sing.
Designer, implementor, user, writer
A Fragment by Donald KnuthThus, I came to the conclusion that the designer of a new system must not only be the implementor and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual. The separation of any of these four components would have hurt TeX significantly. If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important.
Jacob Leech, Digital Craftsman
A Profile by Jacob LeechI'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.
Designer + Developer Workflow
An Article by Dan MallThe way designers and developers work together today is broken. It’s too siloed and separate; “collaboration” is a fantasy that few enjoy.
The state of advertising in the 1940s was similar. All of that changed when copywriter Bill Bernbach met art director Paul Rand. Their collaborative working style led to the birth of the idea of “the creative team,” the mutual respect and partnership between art director and copywriter that tended to yield unique results. Bob Gage, an art director that worked for DDB, the agency Bernbach co-founded, described it like this:
“Two people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, then to another. The art director might suggest a headline, the writer a visual. The entire ad is conceived as a whole, in a kind of ping pong between disciplines.”
Isn’t that what we all strive for in our jobs? True collaboration with equals and partners? Ideas that build off one another? Why does this seem so far away for some of us?
The saddest designer
An Essay by Chia AmisolaI am tired of the premise that creation means productivity––especially in the laborious sense...Creation has become mangled with labor in a world that demands man to monetize all of their hobbies and pursuits. In return, it seems empty, almost sad, really––to be the designer spending weekends again on the screen.
To tell you what I like to do in the weekends, I like to do the sad thing...The ‘good’ people tell you to detach your life from your workspace, but this summer, I think I’ve just realized how much I adore what I have the luxury of working on everyday.
In the weekend, I make. I make not because it’s the only thing I have ever known, but because it’s the most certain way forward.
Enjoying the garden together
A Quote by Brian EnoAnd essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life.
What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included.
Two types of work
An Article by Jorge ArangoThere are two types of work: growth work and maintenance work.
Growth work involves making new things. It can be something big or small. In either case, growth work often follows a loose process.
Maintenance work is different. Maintenance work involves caring for the resources and instruments that make growth work possible. This includes tools, but also body and mind.
Maintenance is ultimately in service to growth. But effective growth can’t happen without maintenance. As with so many things, the ideal is a healthy balance — and it doesn’t come without struggle.
1,000 True Fans
An Essay by Kevin KellyTo be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.
A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.
When we were all together in-person
A Quote“We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future,” said Deirdre O’Brien, senior vice president of retail and people, in a video recording viewed by The Verge. “If we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person.”
Poioumenon
A DefinitionA specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation (sometimes the creation of the story itself).
How am I doing, wonder?
A Quote by Louis KahnForm comes from wonder. Wonder stems from our 'in touchness' with how we were made. One senses that nature records the process of what it makes, so that in what it makes there is also the records of how it was made. In touch with this record we are in wonder. This wonder gives rise to knowledge. But knowledge is related to other knowledge and this relation gives a sense of order, a sense of how they inter-relate in a harmony that makes all things exist. From knowledge to sense of order we then wink at wonder and say How am I doing, wonder?
The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy)
An Article by Nicholas ZakasWe do say “no” very quickly, not just to designs, but to everything. That led me into thinking about the psychology of software engineers and what makes us the way we are.
Are We Really Engineers?
An Essay by Hillel WayneWhat the prototype tells you
A Fragment by Matt WebbAs soon as I make something, I think of the 100 things I want to have next. That’s why prototyping is good. You don’t need to have much imagination, you just listen to what the prototype tells you.
The Craftsman
The great teacher
The good teacher imparts a satisfying explanation; the great teacher unsettles, bequeaths disquiet, invites argument.
The categories of good
We need to turn to a fresh page. We can do so simply by asking—though the answers are anything but simple—what the process of making concrete things reveals to us about ourselves. Learning from things requires us to care about the qualities of cloth or the right way to poach fish; fine cloth or food cooked well enables us to imagine larger categories of 'good'.
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.
The details of construction
The housing developments in the Moscow suburbs were built mostly in the decades after the Second World War. Laid out as enormous chessboards, the suburbs stretch to the horizon across flat land sparsely planted with birch and aspen. The architectural design of the suburban buildings was good, but the state had not been able to command good-quality work. The signs of poorly motivated workers appeared in the details of construction.
The technology shelf
Motorola developed what it called a 'technology shelf', created by a small group of engineers, on which were placed possible technical solutions that other teams might use in the future; rather than trying to solve the problem outright, it developed tools whose immediate value was not clear.
The lure of inspiration
The lure of inspiration lies in part in the conviction that raw talent can take the place of training.
I don't think you understand
The physicist Victor Weisskopf once said to his MIT students who worked exclusively with computerized experiments:
When you show me that result, the computer understands the answer, but I don't think you understand the answer.
Impossibly coherent
...what gets lost mentally when screen work replaces physical drawing.
Drawing in bricks by hand, tedious though the process is, prompts the designer to think about their materiality, to engage with their solidity as against the blank, unmarked space on paper of a window.
Computer-assisted design impedes the designer in thinking about scale, as opposed to sheet size. The object on-screen can indeed be manipulated so that it is presented, for instance, from the vantage point of someone on the ground, but in this regard CAD is frequently misused: what appears on-screen is impossibly coherent, framed in a unified way that physical sight never is.
Head and hand
The blueprint signaled a decisive disconnection between head and hand in design: the idea of a thing made complete in conception before it is constructed.
Bodily reality
To do good work means to be curious about, to investigate, and to learn from ambiguity.
In the Fordist model of medicine, there must be a specific illness to treat, the evaluation of a doctor's performance will then be made by counting the time required to treat as many livers as possible and the number of livers that get well. Because bodily reality doesn't fit well inside this classifying model, and because good treatment has to admit experiment, a not insignificant number of doctors create paper fictions to buy themselves time from the bureaucratic monitors. Doctors in the NHS often assign a patient a disease in order to justify the time spent on exploring a puzzling body.
Awareness and knowledge
In the higher stages of skill, there is a constant interplay between tacit knowledge and self-conscious awareness, the tacit knowledge serving as an anchor, the explicit awareness serving as critique and corrective.
The journeyman
The apprentice goldsmith was place-bound while learning how to smelt, purify, and weigh precious metals. These skills required hands-on instruction from his master. Once the apprentice had locally presented his chef d'oeuvre, however, he could move from city to city as a journeyman, responding to opportunities. The traveling goldsmith journeyman made his presentation élevé to the corporate body of master craftsmen in foreign cities. Through his managerial talents and moral behavior he had to convince these strangers that he could become one of them. This migratory dynamism was built into medieval goldsmithing.
Sedentary guilds, by contrast, appeared to him insert and 'corrupt'. The good master, in his words, "presides over a traveling house."
Building generations
How did the builders of Salisbury Cathedral achieve this astonishing construction? There was no one single architect; the masons had no blueprints. Rather, the gestures with which the building began evolved in principles and were collectively managed over three generations. Each event in building practice became absorbed into the fabric of instructing and regulating the next generation.
A thousand little moves
Missing in these analyses is a reconstruction of the workshops of the master—more precisely, one element that has irretrievably gone missing. This is the absorption into tacit knowledge, unspoken and uncodified in words, that occurred there and became a matter of habit, the thousand little everyday moves that add up in sum to a practice.
The most significant fact we know about Stradivari's workshop was that he was all over it, popping up unexpectedly everywhere, gathering in and processing those thousand bits of information that could not signify in the same way to assistants who were doing just one part.
Mirror tools
A mirror-tool is an implement that invites us to think about ourselves. There are two kinds of mirror-tools. These are the replicant and the robot.
A quiet and contented mind
The Encyclopedia sought to get its readers out of themselves and into the lives of artisan craftsmen in order to clarify good work itself. Throughout, the volumes illustrate people engaged sometimes in dull, sometimes in dangerous, sometimes in complicated labor; the expression on all the faces tends to the same serenity. About these plates the historian Adriano Tilgher remarks on the "sense of peace and calm which flows from all well-regulated, disciplined work done with a quiet and contented mind."
The limits of language
The question of human limits was posed to Diderot the moment he, as it were, rose from his armchair. His method for finding out how people worked was, like a modern anthropologist, to ask them:
We addressed ourselves to the most skilled workers in Paris and the kingdom at large. We took the trouble to visit their workshops, to interrogate them, to write under dictation from them, to follow out their ideas, to define, to identify the terms peculiar to their profession.
The research soon ran into difficulty, because much of the knowledge craftsmen possess is tacit knowledge—people know how to do something but they cannot put what they know into words. Diderot remarked of his investigations: "Among a thousand one will be lucky to find a dozen who are capable of explaining the tools or machinery they use, and the things they produce with any clarity."
What we can say in words may be more limited than what we can do with things. Language is not an adequate 'mirror-tool' for the physical movements of the human body.
The wisdom of the apprentice
Diderot's solution to the limits of language was to become himself a worker.
Become an apprentice and produce bad results so as to be able to teach people how to produce good ones.
This is how I lived
Rather than convey "be like me," better parental advice should be more indirect: "This is how I lived" invites the child to reason about that example. Such advice omits "Therefore you should..." Find your own way; innovate rather than imitate.
Entropy
Imperfect, handmade glass has virtues: these are irregularity, distinctiveness, and what the writer refers to vaguely as 'character'. The two sets of images for glassblowing are thus inseparable; only by understanding how something might be done perfectly is it possible to sense this alternative, an object possessing specificity and character. The bubble or the uneven surface of a piece of glass can be prized, whereas the standard of perfection allows no room either for experiment or for variation.
Against the claim of perfection
We should not compete against the machine. Rather, against the claim of perfection we can assert our own individuality.
Seven lamps
Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture provided seven guides, or 'lamps', for the troubled craftsman, guides for anyone who works directly on material things. These seven are:
- The lamp of sacrifice: The willingness to do something well for its own sake.
- The lamp of truth: The truth that 'breaks and rents continually'; Ruskin's embrace of difficulty, resistance, and ambiguity.
- The lamp of power: Tempered power, guided standards other than blind will.
- The lamp of beauty: Which for Ruskin is found more in the detail, the ornament—hand-sized beauty—than in the large design.
- The lamp of life: Life equating with struggle and energy, death with deadly perfection.
- The lamp of memory: The guidance provided by the time before machinery ruled.
- The lamp of obedience: Obedience to the example set by a master's practice rather than by his particular works; otherwise put, strive to be like Stradivari but do not seek to copy his particular violins.
I am here
I am here, in this work.
A maker's mark is a peculiar sign. Ancient brickwork established presence through small details marking 'it': the detail itself.
The great historian of bricks, Alex Clifton-Taylor, observes that what most counts about them is their small size, which just suits the human hand laying a brick. A brick wall, he says, "is therefore an aggregation of small effects. This implies a human and intimate quality not present to the same extent in stone architecture."
Get a grip
The hand is the window on to the mind. — Immanuel Kant
American slang advises us to "get a grip"; more generally we speak of "coming to grips with an issue." Both figures reflect the evolutionary dialogue between the hand and the brain.
Focal awareness
The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes what she experienced as "being as a thing." The philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it "focal awareness" and recurs to the act of hammering a nail:
When we bring down the hammer we do not feel that its handle has struck our palm but that its head has struck the nail.
We have become the things on which we are working.
Sublime tools
Getting better at using tools comes to us, in part, when the tools challenge us, and this challenge often occurs just because the tools are not fit-for-purpose. In both creation and repair, the challenge can be met by adapting the form of a tool, or improvising with it as it is, using it in ways it was not meant for.
The all-purpose tool seems a special case. In its sheer variety, a flat-edged screwdriver admits all manner of unfathomed possibilities; it, too, can expand our skills if only our imagination rises to the occasion. Without hesitation, the flat-edged screwdriver can be described as sublime—the word sublime standing, as it does in philosophy and the arts, for the potently strange.
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.
When history moves on
Much twentieth-century urban planning proceeded on the principle: demolish all you can, grade it flat, and then build from scratch. The existing environment has been seen as standing in the way of the planner's will. This aggressive recipe has frequently proved disastrous, destroying many viable buildings as well as ways of life bedded into urban fabric. The replacements for these destroyed buildings have also, too often, proved worse: big projects suffer from overdetermined, fit-for-purpose form; when history moves on, as it always does, tightly defined buildings can soon become obsolete.
Details first
The identification a good craftsman produces is selective, that of finding the most forgiving element in a difficult situation. Often this element is smaller, and so seems less important, than the larger challenge. It is an error in technical as in artistic work to deal first with the big difficulties and then clean up the details; good work often proceeds in just the opposite fashion.
Walls and membranes
All living things contain two sites of resistance. These are cell walls and cell membranes. The cell wall is more purely exclusionary – a boundary; the membrane permits more fluid and solid exchange – a border.
Most pervasive in the modern city is the inert boundary established by highway traffic, cutting off parts of the city from each other. Working with resistance means, in urbanism, converting boundaries into borders.
The ground plane
Whereas Corbusier relegated streets to traffic functions, the ground plane represented to Van Eyck the realm in which people 'learn' cities. The placement of benches and bollards, the height of stepping-stones, the ill-defined separations of sand, grass, and water are all tools in that learning, an education in ambiguity.
Most cities were mostly built by improvisation
In Architecture Without Architects, Bernard Rudofsky documented the ways in which most cities were mostly built by improvisation, following no consistent formal design. Building was added to building, street to street, their forms adapting to different site conditions in the process of extension.
Rudofsky thought that this hidden order is how most settlements of poor people develop and that the work of improvising street order attaches people to their communities, whereas 'renewal' projects, which may provide a cleaner street, pretty houses, and large shops, give the inhabitants no way to mark their presence on the space.
The aspiration for quality
To arouse the aspiration for quality and make good on it, the organization itself has to be well crafted in form. It needs, like Nokia, open information networks; it has to be willing to wait, as Apple is, to bring its products to market until they are really good.
Oddity and peculiarity
The experienced doctor, as one would expect, is a more accurate diagnostician. This is due in large part to the fact that he or she tends to be more open to oddity and peculiarity in patients, whereas the medical student is more likely to be a formalist, working by the book, rather rigidly applying general rules to particular cases.
Relentlessness deformed it
I am not interested in erecting a building, but in presenting to myself the foundations of all possible buildings. — Ludwig Wittgenstein.
But in a note of 1940 to himself he wrote that the building "lacks health" or "primordial life".
In the construction of a house for his sister in the Kundmangasse, Wittgenstein's striving for an ideal perfection rendered the object lifeless. Relentlessness deformed it.
Necessity
Loos's need to respond positively to the difficulties he encountered appeared in the errors that occurred during the construction of the Villa Moller. When the foundations were not laid as specified, he could not afford to dig them up and start again; instead, Loos thickened the form of one side wall to accommodate the mistake, making the thickened wall and emphatic side frame for the front. The formally pure properties of Villa Moller were achieved by working with many similar mistakes and impediments Loos had to take as facts on the ground; necessity stimulated his sense of form. Wittgenstein, knowing no financial necessity, had no such creative dialogue between form and error.
The narrative of its making
Getting things in perfect shape can mean removing the traces, erasing the evidence, of a work in progress. Once this evidence is eliminated, the object appears pristine. Perfection of this cleaned-up sort is a static condition; the object does not hint at the narrative of its making.
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.Your life adds up
Weber's German word for a vocation, Beruf, contains two resonances: the gradual accumulation of knowledge and skills and the ever-stronger conviction that one was meant to do this one particular thing in one's life.
An English locution roughly conveys what he meant: your life 'adds up'.
To do just one thing well
The skills society is bulldozing the career path; jobs in the old sense of random movement now prevail; people are meant to deploy a portfolio of skills rather than nurture a single ability in the course of their working histories; this succession of projects or tasks erodes belief that one is meant to do just one thing well.
Manual labor
Artisanal craftsmen have proved particularly promising subjects for job retraining. The discipline required for good manual labor serves them, as does their focus on concrete problems rather than on the flux of process-based, human relations work. For this very reason it has proved easier to train a plumber to become a computer programmer than to train a salesperson; the plumber has craft habit and material focus, which serve retraining. Employers don't often see this opportunity because they equate manual routine with mindless labor.
Multiple choice
Intuitive leaps that open up a problem are impossible to test using multiple-choice questions. These leaps are an exercise of associating unlikely elements. There is no correct answer to the question "Are city streets like arteries and veins?"
Hephaestus
The clubfooted Hephaestus, proud of his work if not of himself, is the most dignified person we can become.