“What sort of personality does one need to have, as a twenty-first-century mechanic, to tolerate the layers of electronic bullshit that get piled on top of machines?”

Analog = good, digital = bad. He states in his introduction that his book “is in part a cultural polemic.” More like he’s trying to pick a fight with his colleagues from the University to better fit in with his machine shop and biker buddies. I’m 95 pages in and it is not annoying me enough to stop, yet.

Cheers,
John.

Wow, thanks for the thoughtful comment, John. I guess it is no small surprise to find our overlapping perspectives and interests and things-that-resonate. I’d be curious about your thoughts on this Crawford book. When I first initially and accidentally stumbled upon the NPR radio interview, I added-to-cart on my mobile. When I took time to review all the things I had shoved in my cart before making a purchase, I read some reviews that made me think — well…I’ll wait for the paperback. The New Yorker review made me skeptical again and less eager, although I suppose at some point I will get it, just not as excitedly as my initial imaginary of what it might contain — secrets of to creating new, more habitable worlds through values-based design, etc., etc.

Looking forward to some smartsurfaces course action!

“I want to avoid the kind of mysticism that gets attached to “craftsmanship” while doing justice to the very real satisfactions it offers… So I want to avoid the precious images of manual work that intellectuals sometimes traffic in. I also have little interest in wistful notions of a “simpler” life that is somehow more authentic, or more democratically valorous for being “working class.” p5-6.

Crawford makes the distinction that his book is concerned with “manual competence” and “trades” rather than the practice of “Japanese sword makers.” According to the index, Crawford makes reference to Pirsig exactly twice p96 (go figure, it would be on the page after the one I am on) and p114. This is surprising as there is an obvious relationship between the books (down to the subtitle ‘An Inquiry into the Value of Work’ which has to be a tacit reference to Pirsig’s sequel ‘Lila: An Inquiry into Morals’.

This is for me also related to the core message in ‘FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop – From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication’ by MIT’s Neil Gershenfeld:

“Starting out with skills more suited to arts and crafts than advanced engineering, they routinely and single-handedly managed to design and build complete functioning systems… the learning process was driven by the demand for, rather than supply of, knowledge. Once students mastered a new capability, such as waterjet cutting or microcontroller programming, they had a near-evangelical interest in showing others how to use it. As students needed new skills for their projects they would learn them from their peers and then in turn pass them on. Along the way, they would leave behind extensive tutorial material that they assembled as they worked. This phase might last a month or so, after which they were so busy using the tools that they couldn’t be bothered to document anything, but by then others had taken their place. This process can be thought of as a “just-in-time” educational model, teaching on demand, rather than the more traditional “just-in-case” model that covers a curriculum fixed in advance in the hopes that it will include something that will later be useful.

These surprises have recurred with such certainty year after year that I began to realize that these students were doing much more than taking a class; they were inventing a new physical notion of literacy. The common understanding of “literacy” has narrowed down to reading and writing, but when the term emerged in the Renaissance it had a much broader meaning as a mastery of the available means of expression. However, physical fabrication was thrown out as an “illiberal art,” pursued for mere commercial gain. These students were correcting a historical error, using millions of dollars’ worth of machinery for technological expression every bit as eloquent as a sonnet or a painting.

… quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music) and the three part trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric). These Latin terms refer back to four- and three-way road intersections, the latter notable as a place where people would congregate and share knowledge that naturally came to be known as trivial. or trivia. The trivium and the quadrivium together make up the seven “liberal arts.” Both of these words warrant comment. “Liberal” in this sense is not the opposite of “conservative”; it referred to the liberation that the study of these subjects was thought to bring. And “art” did not mean just creative expression; it meant much more broadly the mastery that was developed over each of these domains. Liberal arts originally has this rather rousing meaning as a mastery over the means for personal liberation. They’re now associated with academic study that is remote from applications, but they emerged in the Renaissance as a humanist pathway to power.

Unfortunately, the ability to make things as well as ideas didn’t make the cut; that was relegated to the artes illiberales, the “illiberal arts,” that one pursued for mere economic gain. With art separated from artisans, the remaining fabrication skills were considered just mechanical production. This artificial division led to the invention of unskilled labor in the Industrial Revolution.”

This is the same thing we are trying to address with our new course at Michigan http://www.smartsurfaces.net/

Cheers,
John.