“We don’t need more tools to make publishing faster. I can check in on foursquare with two taps of my thumb and it automatically generates a full sentence that’s streamed to my twitter. I can reblog a gif with a line of commentary on my tumblr while I’m waiting in line for a sandwich. What is scarce on the web are human-made, intentionally thought-out experiences. My stream is a rush of links all competing for my attention, and for most of them, I know what they’ll look like before I even click.”
A Handcrafted Web
“I believe the Japanese people have a basic artisanal disposition. There is a word in Japanese — kodawari — meaning being obsessed with the details, and it guides almost everything here.”
Hideaki Miyahara, as quoted in The Spirit of Craftsmanship

A man, a ball, a hoop, a bench (and an alleged thread)

I absolutely devoured this profile of Teller (of Penn and Teller fame) from 2008 that John Gruber posted on Daring Fireball earlier this week. There is so much to glean about craftsmanship, the creative process, collaboration, and respecting your audience—just the things I think about most!

The profile centers around Teller’s exploration of a 100 year old trick called involving a simple red ball and they actually reveal how it’s done, yet still surprise people. I love how hard and how long Teller worked to perfect it; he’ll spend hours on an empty stage after a show getting it just right. He says:

When the theater is empty I like to go out on stage. It’s lonely and beautiful. I look at your empty seat and think about you being in it. … Then I practice. I often practice stuff you’ll never see. For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a hundred-year-old trick called the David P. Abbott Ball. It is a very, very hard trick, almost like juggling. I put in an hour almost every day. I try to get the tricky moves so deeply into my muscles and brain that I can forget I’m doing a trick. Soon I’ll know whether the ideas I have for this trick are possible. But I won’t know that till I learn all the moves and invent my own. If the trick doesn’t work out, you’ll never see it, and I won’t be sad. I had fun every second I was working. I love the stuff you never see.

This obsession with his craft makes it obvious how he became one of the masters in the field, yet he is never satisfied and is always thinking about how to improve, perfect, and add to:

[R]ather such total dedication to craft and art in a Las Vegas show causes me to admire the incredible focus Teller still has on improving, revising, thinking over this one brief trick. More than two years since he first began playing with the Abbott ball, he is still professionally obsessed with it and he loves every moment spent practicing and pondering improvements. How long will this last? Near the end of his lecture he says, “In six months or a year, it will start to settle into my bones. … In 10 years it’ll be perfect.”

And then the piece ends with a great quote from Teller that made me want to jump right out of me seat:

I am never bored. I never understand people who say they are bored. I wish they could just wrap up those hours and give them to me.

Me too, Teller. Me too.

“There are too many shoddy, unconsidered things in the world already. Given the widespread distribution of today’s digital production tools, it’s remarkably simple to make nearly anything, especially things claiming to critique design through the rejection of formal rigor. Making things well, making them beautifully, making them with craft, making them with an excess of effort, demonstrates a respect for one’s own labor and an expression of love for the world that dissolves perceived categories of work and pleasure.”
WHAT IS DESIGN? A Manifesto for the Gwangju Design Biennale 2011 by Project Projects (via viafrank)

An Archive for Interaction Design

Khoi Vinh has a great piece over on Subtraction on archiving digital work. It’s a great read, especially related to my recent post on craftsmanship on the web.

Even if we could capture the full experience of the web, digital design is expanding beyond the relatively discrete confines of a “Web site.” The total experience of visiting Facebook isn’t just the site you see at Facebook.com, but also the countless sites that serve up Facebook’s widgets every day. Likewise, Twitter is barely represented by Twitter.com, as most users access the service through third-party clients like TweetDeck and Echofon, or on apps installed on their smart phones. Location-based network applications such as Foursquare and Gowalla reside almost entirely on mobile devices, which requires roaming in the real world in order to be fully experienced. It’s impossible to capture the entirety of these experiences.

The real question is, what do we want to save, and for what purpose? Do we need to merely document the typical interactions within a digital design, so that the most salient aspects of today’s Facebooks and Twitters make it into future history (e-)books relatively intact? Or do we need to take an architectural approach and try to preserve designed online spaces, so that students of history can themselves be immersed in the experiences as they exist today?

Perhaps that’s the reason craftsmanship on the web is harder to define and why we’ve yet to create anything lasting. Maybe the parts worth caring about and the parts worth keeping for future generations is more about the interaction, more about the conversation that occurs within these spaces we create. It’s hard enough to archive digital design as it is with ever-changing technologies, but it’s even harder to keep the interactions that our work produces.

Craftsmanship in a Digital World

I’ve been thinking a lot about craftsmanship over the past year. I’ve become obsessed with well-made products and the people that make them. I’ve also been trying to figure out how to take these ideas I learned from the craftsman and apply them to the work I do and the things I make.

You can recognize quality craftsmanship. You can see solid oak table and you know it will stand the test of time. It’s possible for a good pair of boots to last longer than their owner. Craftsmanship is about making something lasting.

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The Olduvai handaxe is largely believed to be the first great invention. A stone handaxe is like a prehistoric Swiss Army knife—an essential tool with multiple uses like drilling, cutting trees and meat or scraping bark. What’s most interesting about the handaxe, however, is that it is obvious there was a thoughtfulness and care put into it’s construction. It was intentional. Maybe you could put it this way: the handaxe is the first glimpse in history of conceptual thought. Humans and animals have used found tools since the dawn of time, but with this axe, someone had to imagine something useful within a rough stone. And then craft it. Looking at a handaxe, Sir James Dyson of Dyson vacuum cleaner fame observes: What interests me about this is that it’s not really very practical. It’s double-sided, it has a sharp edge both sides, and it’s symmetrical. It’s almost as though it’s an object of beauty rather than a practical object. So I wonder actually if it’s a decorative thing, or even something like a ceremonial sword to make you look brave, powerful, and maybe to pull women. The handaxe, of course, does have a practical use and has been found all over the world from Africa to Europe to East Asia to the Middle East. The handaxe shows human’s ability to see potential in the world around us but it also shows a desire for beauty, for decoration, for aesthetics. The handaxe is the first great invention and maybe, just maybe, the beginning of art. See Also: The BBC’s History of the World in 100 Objects episode on the Olduvai Handaxe.

The Olduvai handaxe is largely believed to be the first great invention. A stone handaxe is like a prehistoric Swiss Army knife—an essential tool with multiple uses like drilling, cutting trees and meat or scraping bark. What’s most interesting about the handaxe, however, is that it is obvious there was a thoughtfulness and care put into it’s construction. It was intentional.

Maybe you could put it this way: the handaxe is the first glimpse in history of conceptual thought. Humans and animals have used found tools since the dawn of time, but with this axe, someone had to imagine something useful within a rough stone. And then craft it.

Looking at a handaxe, Sir James Dyson of Dyson vacuum cleaner fame observes:

What interests me about this is that it’s not really very practical. It’s double-sided, it has a sharp edge both sides, and it’s symmetrical. It’s almost as though it’s an object of beauty rather than a practical object. So I wonder actually if it’s a decorative thing, or even something like a ceremonial sword to make you look brave, powerful, and maybe to pull women.

The handaxe, of course, does have a practical use and has been found all over the world from Africa to Europe to East Asia to the Middle East. The handaxe shows human’s ability to see potential in the world around us but it also shows a desire for beauty, for decoration, for aesthetics. The handaxe is the first great invention and maybe, just maybe, the beginning of art.

See Also: The BBC’s History of the World in 100 Objects episode on the Olduvai Handaxe.

This is my printing press. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My press is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My press, without me, is useless. Without my press, I am useless. I must ink my press true. I must print more beautifully than new technology that is trying to kill me. I must ink them before they pixelate me. I will.

Fantastic video from Gestalten.tv on Studio on Fire, a letterpress and design company. I love the craftsmanship here and the blending of modern design with traditional technique and production. Making a letterpressed design is high on my career goals list.

This is a beautiful documentary on metal fabricator Neil Youngberg and is full of everything I’m about. This quote really stuck out for me, in particular:

I’m still learning and I always will be. That’s just how it is. That’s what makes you good at what you do. You want to learn more—how to be better or quicker. When you don’t learn, that’s when you have a problem. That’s when you’re through.

I love watching craftsmen like this talk about their craft. They are passionate about what they do and they know so much about what they do. And what’s really great about Mr. Youngberg is that he wants to pass on that knowledge. He wants to share what he knows of his craft. We need people like this—people working with their hands, people keeping dying crafts alive, and people who love what they do.

(Via visualarmory)

One of my favorite recent hobbies is watching (and reading about) craftsman working on their craft. I tend to post a lot of these videos on the blog because I find them endlessly fascinating and inspiring, fitting with something I’ve often thought: passionate people are interesting people. This one on Tartine bakery in San Fransciso is no different.

I think at times it can be hard to think of design as a craft. With more and more work being moved to the computer, we aren’t working with out hands as much. We aren’t becoming as physically attached to our work. I’ve been trying to embrace the craft of my work more and more this past year and I think it’s allowed me to do my best work yet. More craft, please!

(via the ever-interesting Kitsune Noir who also posted a great video on ink-making today fitting right in with these ideas.)

I could watch videos on craftsmanship all day long (as you probably already know) and here is another great one. This one features Optimo Hat Company, purveyors of quality, handmade hats. Quote: “It’d be nice if 50 years from now, our hats show up and people look back and say ‘This was the benchmark of quality.’” Now that’s a goal.

(via A Continuous Lean. Of course. Oh, what? You’re not reading ACL? Shame on you.)

Cool Hunting has a great video piece on the Levi’s Workwear and Billy Reid collaboration:

For both the neo-Americana-obsessed and denim-heads, menswear designer Billy Reid’s collaboration with Levi’s is a holy brand pairing marrying Levi’s workwear roots with Reid’s modern cuts, fabric choices, and finishes. This behind-the-scenes video (a Cool Hunting exclusive) visits Reid at work on the craft of deconstructing garments for the 10-piece collection, as inspired by a visit to the legendary Levi’s archive.

Love it! I’m a big fan of Billy Reid’s work and his thoughts on craftsmanship here fit right in with the direction this blog has been heading in recently. I love that he used the word “heirloom.” That’s the perfect word for how I’d describe quality craftsmanship and the type of products I want to spend my money on. Something that’ll last and that I can pass on to the next generation.

This short video on Oxxford Clothes is everything I’m all about. Oxxford Clothes has been making suits since 1916 and it the only company in the United States that still tailors their suits completely by hand.

“In a short period of time it became clear that the apparel business is incredibly entrepreneurial—the barriers to entry are really low, probably even more so now. All these stores and magazines are desperate for new, great things. If you have something honest and interesting and personal and cool and relevant and well-made, you can at least get started.”
Fashion entrepreneur Scott Sternberg on the ease of getting into the fashion business, but I don’t think it just applies to fashion. If you are making something “honest and interesting and personal and cool and relevant and well-made,” there will be market for it somewhere. The key then, is to find that market.
I am completely blown away by these micro-pencil-tip-sculptures from Dalton Ghetti:  Brazilian born, Connecticut based, Dalton Ghetti carefully crafts the tips of pencils into amazing micro sculptures. These miniature masterpieces are a side project for the professional carpenter, who has been perfecting this art for the last 25 years. Dalton uses a razor blade, sewing needle, a sculpting knife, a steady hand and lots of patience to meticulously carve the graphite which can take anywhere between a few months to a few years. Over time he has broken many works in progress and keeps them in what he calls the cemetery collection. One of the most fascinating things about these tiny works of art is that he has never sold them, only given away to friends as gifts. Every example on the site is incredible. Just considering the scale Mr. Ghetti is forced to work in and then looking at the attention to detail is unbelievable. Simply amazing.

I am completely blown away by these micro-pencil-tip-sculptures from Dalton Ghetti: 

Brazilian born, Connecticut based, Dalton Ghetti carefully crafts the tips of pencils into amazing micro sculptures. These miniature masterpieces are a side project for the professional carpenter, who has been perfecting this art for the last 25 years. Dalton uses a razor blade, sewing needle, a sculpting knife, a steady hand and lots of patience to meticulously carve the graphite which can take anywhere between a few months to a few years. Over time he has broken many works in progress and keeps them in what he calls the cemetery collection. One of the most fascinating things about these tiny works of art is that he has never sold them, only given away to friends as gifts.

Every example on the site is incredible. Just considering the scale Mr. Ghetti is forced to work in and then looking at the attention to detail is unbelievable. Simply amazing.

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