Much of the material world we inhabit today was born in computer simulation. From an idea to a design to a manufacturing process to a shipping order, it all exists in a software world before it is real.
But before the software, there was hardware. And before hardware there were tinkerers.
The pioneers of the computer revolution - Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard of Hewlett-Packard, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple - were fabled for the prototypes they built by hand in Silicon Valley garages.
Now there are signs of that more tactile world’s return. People are making things. With their hands.
Designers and engineers who rely on computers to do much of their work are rebelling against their disconnection from the physical world, G. Pascal Zachary writes in an article on this week’s Gadgets page. (Page 6.)
“The hands-on part is for me a critical aspect of understanding how to design,” Michael Kuniavsky, a consultant in San Francisco, told Mr. Zachary. For the last three years, Mr. Kuniavsky has organized a conference of designers called “Sketching in Hardware.” participants build devices, and in the process learn the lost skills that electronics hobbyists once practiced routinely.
Stanford University in California introduced such hands-on learning when professors of engineering, architecture and design realized their best students had never taken apart a bicycle or built a model airplane.
“A lot of people get lost in the world of computer simulation,” said Bill Burnett, Stanford’s executive director of the product design. “All your intelligence isn’t in your brain. You learn through your hands.”
Across the continent, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, a class titled “How to Make (Almost) Anything” teaches the use of hand tools.
Designers at Adobe, the software company in San Jose, California, attend workshops where they use plastic beads, tiny sensors and electronic displays to create motion games.
“Some people thought we were crazy,” Michael Gough, a vice president for design at Adobe, told Mr. Zachary. “But for others, the experience has started to inform how they work.
Technology is not the only field where people have a need for the hands-on approach.
Faythe Levine was described as the “patron saint” of the handmade nation by Penelope Green in The Times on September 4. Ms. Levine, who has had success selling stuffed toys on the Internet, has a store and gallery in her home city, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and next year will be showing a feature length documentary film at festivals and museums. She traveled 30,000 kilometers across America to tell the stories of people, mostly women, who are keeping alive lost arts of sewing, knitting, needlepoint and beadwork (www.
handmadenationmovie.com).
It’s a veritable movement. As Lawrence Downes suggested in an opinion article in The Times on August 25, the trend may reflect a need for people to assert some control over lives filled with impersonal complexities like cellphones, computers and appliances.
A handful of journals, like ReadyMade , Make and Craft, and an array of blogs and events called Maker Faires, attract people who want to share ideas about nifty tools, toys and tricks of the trades.
Mister Jalopy (real first name: Peter), who lives in Los Angeles and runs a store that sells antiques, hardware, purified water and rebuilt bicycles, told Mr. Downes that companies should start selling products that consumers could maintain, repair, repurpose or reinvent. That, he argues, is where collector’s items and legendary brands come from.
“I really want companies to start thinking about shared innovation,” he said. “To realize that they’re not selling to customers, but to collaborators.”