thinking and making - endless cycles

Thinking happens in the mind, while making happens with the body. Most of the time thinking is considered higher than making. But I believe that one does not happen without the other...

This blog will document my experiments with making as I go through the project over the next 4 months.

My Hypothesis

“Discernment can be approached through making. Engaging with material through the body can develop this capability more strongly than engaging with the idea intellectually and strengthens it in other spheres. Making improves discernment.”

Why do we make?

The most obvious reason to make is functionality or need. We need a table, so we make one. We need lunch, so we cook it. If we do this professionally, then we do it for a livelihood as do artisans. Designers make to communicate their ideas through prototypes and models. Many people take things apart and put them together out of curiosity, to understand how they work, and this leads to making too. They construct things with instruction, following a recipe or manual. Designers and artists explore material to see what it can do. Often they doodle with material, they think in 3D. Lego Serious play is an example of this.[1] Many people make as a hobby, to relax, for self-expression; in fact a lot of artisanal craft has its origins in this. Basketry, kantha and cooking are some examples of this.

There are many kinds of maker movements all over the world, including critical making. This project will explore some of these to understand basic principles and frameworks.

Where does making happen?

Obviously making does not happen in a vacuum, but is situated in a context. How does this affect making? Culture, tradition, materials, technologies, peoples all affect making.

Agency or the freedom or lack of it also affects what and how things are made. Hannah Arendt proposes in her book ‘The Human Condition’ that there is a distinction between labour and work – ‘between working hands and a laboring body is somewhat reminiscent of the ancient Greek distinction between the cheirotechnes, the craftsman, to whom the German Handwerker corresponds, and those who, like "slaves and tame animals with their bodies minister to the necessities of life," or in the Greek idiom, to somati ergazesthai, work with their bodies’[2]

Studying closely at least three different contexts where making happens, will help in understanding the different elements that go into it. This could be in an old part of the city where there is complexity in the form of old and new practices, a professional space like a kitchen in a hotel and a production space where people labor without much agency.

[1] https://www.lego.com/en-us/seriousplay

[2] Arendt, Hannah, Danielle S. Allen, and Margaret Canovan. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.