As a product designer who has worked with artisans over 25 years, I have a deep connection with materials and making and I can go so far as to say that everything I have learnt has been through this engagement. But there is a growing distance between people and material. Intellectual work is seen as being superior to hands-on work. As the world became digitized, this distance increased further

There is a lack of respect for people working with their hands, especially in India, and technicians are seen as lower in the hierarchy. This lack of respect extends to materials and technologies too. When something goes wrong with an electric switch or the plumbing, the educated Indian will not dirty his hands to fix it. He will call a plumber or electrician. We have armies of people servicing and repairing everything in our home, and we don’t do anything with our hands ourselves. Why should this matter? This lack of respect matches with the throwaway culture propagated by Industry. While historically we have been frugal – there are numerous examples of this frugality and some still survive – many of our craft practices, eg. Quilting in all parts of India, many agricultural practices, today our lack of respect for making and material has lead to our large scale adopting of harmful use and throw practices and we can literally see the mountains of garbage growing daily in our immediate surroundings. In the field of product design too, as production moved away from sight to distant factories, design became more about the market and the user, and the maker was edged out of the picture. This has lead to the cascading effect of overdesign, of products with very short lifecycles, waste of resources, overflowing landfills and the destruction of our environment.

There is clearly a lack of ownership and responsibility; there is a lack of understanding of cause and effect, of value – input and output.

I believe if more people engaged with making in a routine way, there would be a gradual building of consciousness to the material world and a discernment of what is essential and what is superfluous at different levels.

Why do people find it difficult to make? In early childhood, we all happily make mud pies or their equivalent. And yet we loose this ability along with most other forms of expression as we grow up. In the words of Seymour Papert ‘Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can't, anything can be painfully difficult.’[1]  As texts take over physical materials, we seem to lose those mental models and later if and when we make, it becomes difficult. Playful thinking and making is lost, almost forever. Even cooking, that most of us do regularly becomes part of routine and bound by the recipe.

 

[1] Papert, Seymour. Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. New York: Basicbooks.