A slow book. An excellent meditation on the relationship of humans, culture and matter (things), through an analysis of craftsmanship.
Quotes:
Making is Thinking.
I make two contentious arguments: first, that all skills, even the most abstract, begin as bodily practices; second, that technical understanding develops through the powers of imagination.
We are more likely to fail as craftsmen, I argue, due to our inability to organize obsession than because of our lack of ability.
Craftsmanship is certainly, from an ethical point of view, ambiguous. Robert Oppenheimer was a committed craftsman; he pushed his technical skills to the limit to make the best bomb he could.
Material culture provides in sum a picture of what human beings are capable of making. This seemingly limitless view is bounded by self-inflicted harm whether occurring innocently, by intent, or by accident. Retreat into spiritual values is unlikely to furnish much help in coping with Pandora. Nature might be a better guide, if we understand our own labors as part of its being.
about ten thousand hours of experience are required to produce a master carpenter or musician
"Sing clear-voiced Muse, of Hephaestus famed for skill. With bright-eyed Athena he taught men glorious crafts throughout the world-men who before used to dwell in caves in the mountains like wild beasts. But now that they have learned crafts through Hephaestus famous for his art they live a peaceful life in their own houses the whole year round."
Plato observed that although "craftsmen are all poets ... they are not called poets, they have other names."
the experimental rhythm of problem solving and problem finding makes the ancient potter and the modern programmer members of the same tribe.
skill is a trained practice
The medieval craftsman's authority rested on the fact that he was a Christian. Early Christianity had from its origins embraced the dignity of the craftsman. It mattered to theologians and laymen alike that Christ was the son of a carpenter
In terms of practice, there is no art without craft; the idea for a painting is not a painting.
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries European children first began to enjoy an abundance of toys.
The recipe for making a steam engine became entirely codifiable by 1823 in documents; the master-and Watt himself behaved like a Stradivari of engineering-no longer had secrets to keep.
In the nineteenth-century steel industry, skilled artisans faced two potential futures because of technological change: deskilling or dismissal.
a kindred problem was faced in 1995 by programmers displaced from working on mainframe machines to personal computers and gaming devices. The norms of the workplace rather than computation formed the difficulty of change.
From the origins of classical civilization, craftsmen have suffered mistreatment. What has kept them going humanly is belief in their work and their involvement with its materials.
The hand is the window on to the mind.
One of the myths that surround technique is that people who develop it to a high level must have unusual bodies to begin with. As concerns the hand, this is not quite true.
The calluses developed by people who use their hands professionally constitute a particular case of localized touch. In principle the thickened layer of skin should deaden touch; in practice, the reverse occurs.
Diminishing the fear of making mistakes is all-important in our art, since the musician on stage can't stop, paralyzed, if she or he makes a mistake.
Still, in chopping food, as in sounding chords, the base line of physical control, the starting point, is the calculation and application of minimum force.
in 1400 knife fights might have been a normal event at a supper party but that by 1600 these eruptions were frowned on
The apprentice is often expected to absorb the master's lesson by osmosis; the master's demonstration shows an act successfully performed, and the apprentice has to figure out what turned the key in the lock. Learning by demonstration puts the burden on the apprentice; it further assumes that direct imitation can occur. To be sure, the process often works, but equally often it fails.
When I've taught writing, I've thus asked my students to rewrite the printed instructions that accompany new software. Perfectly accurate, these nefarious publications are often unintelligible.
To expand her readers' horizons, Julia Child wrote down procedures she learned professionally in Paris as a young woman. She reimagined these procedures for the foreign novice; crossing that cultural divide prompted her to transform the denotative recipe. [...]
Child's recipe reads quite differently than Olney's precise direction because her story is structured around empathy for the cook; she focuses on the human protagonist rather than on the bird.
The patience of a craftsman can thus be defined as: the temporary suspension of the desire for closure.
working with resistance is the key to survival
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.
Improvisation occurs in workshops, offices, and laboratories as much as on streets. As in jazz, other forms of improvisation involve skills that can be developed and improved. Anticipation can be strengthened; people can become better at negotiating borders and edges; they can become more selective about the elements they choose to vary.
We share in common and in roughly equal measure the raw abilities that allow us to become good craftsmen; it is the motivation and aspiration for quality that takes people along different paths in their lives. Social conditions shape these motivations.
What most stimulated workers to achieve higher productivity, Mayo found, was simply being noticed as human beings.
the experienced doctor thinks in larger units of time, not just backward to cases in the past but, more interestingly, forward, trying to see into the patient's indeterminate future
Nothing ever feels good enough to the person measuring who he or she is against who he or she should be.
The craftsman's focus on concrete objects or procedures runs contrary, moreover, to the narcissist's complaint, "If only I could."
The good craftsman understands the importance of the sketch-that is, not knowing quite what you are about when you begin.
The good craftsman learns when it is time to stop.
Perhaps the greatest difference between Loos and Wittgenstein was that Adolph Loos possessed a work story; each building project was like a chapter in his life. Wittgenstein lacked a narrative of that sort; when his all-or-nothing gamble disappointed, he never built another house.
In old English a "career" meant a well-laid road, whereas a "job" meant simply a lump of coal or pile of wood that could be moved around at will.
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
I've kept for the end of this book its most controversial proposal: that nearly anyone can become a good craftsman.
No one could deny that people are born or become unequal. But inequality is not the most important fact about human beings. Our species' ability to make things reveals more what we share.
when utility rules, adults lose something essential in the capacity to think; they lose the free curiosity that occurs in the open, felt-fingering space of play
The innate abilities on which craftsmanship is based are not exceptional; they are shared in common by the large majority of human beings and in roughly equal measure. [...] Three basic abilities are the foundation of craftsmanship. These are the ability to localize, to question, and to open up.
The person with an IQ score of 100 is not much different
in ability than the person with a score of 115, but the 115 is much more likely to attract notice. There's a devil's answer to this question: inflating small differences in degree into large differences in kind legitimates the system of privilege.
The capacity to work well is shared fairly equally among human beings; it appears first in play, is elaborated in the capacities to localize, question, and open up problems at work. The Enlightenment hoped that learning to do good work would make human beings more capable of self-governance.
"Both work and play are equally free and intrinsically motivated, apart from false economic conditions which tend to make play into idle excitement for the well to do, and work into uncongenial labor for the poor. Work is psychologically simply an activity which consciously
includes regard for consequences as part of itself; it becomes constrained labor when the consequences are outside of the activity, as an end to which activity is merely a means. Work which remains permeated with the play attitude is art." (Dewey)
Good craftsmanship implies socialism.
Arendt's reproach to democracy is that it demands too much of ordinary human beings; it might be better said of modern democracy that it demands too little. Its institutions and tools of communication do not draw on and develop the competences that most people can evince in work.
