kenfrederick: Hands On

Hands On

i was reading this phenomenal article by matthew crawford The Case for Working With Your Hands, a couple of weeks ago in sunday's new york times magazine.

what a great article, i love to work with my hands, whether it be taking apart the vcr at age seven, or letterpressing in college, or nowadays burning myself soldering stuff with arduino.

this is one trend i hope everyone gets on board with, lets get people breaking open their stuff and seeing how it works. for example if you're hard-drive needs replacing or your bike's derailleur needs adjusting, do it yourself, it's so easy access information these days. everyday should be like a day at exploratorium. with magazines like make, bringing d.i.y. ethic to everybody there's no excuses any more.

it makes me sad that within design, that hand skills have gone away. i remember in drafting class using t-squares, triangles, and french curves to create, an albeit boring, drawing of a clamp. or when my boss talks about the elation he had when he mastered the rapidograph.

nothing can top the experience of using your hands and doing, or even better learning by failing from doing. let's not be afraid to draw, get dirty, cut stuff out, xerox stuff, then xerox some more, nothing is precious.

my good friend eugen sent me a clip of his multi-touch experimentation. granted it's nothing new in the sense that multi-touch tables appear all over the web, but it shows that the separation between digital and physical worlds is becoming ever blurrier.

i hope that one day we'll sit at desks which are essentially multi-touch surfaces and create using our hands.

no more mouse clicks, and i can't wait.

*thanks to eugen for letting me share his multi-touch project

Labels: misc.