The previous sessions’s worth can be summarized as follows:
- We have always been making: How the intensive, in fact obsessive, making has been the thing that actually makes the human separate from other species. This was discussed through a brief historical review.
- Our needs are yet not met: How technology provides solutions to the masses and how the cost of making technology through an organized fashion diminishes the need-diversity it can cater to, so that many people use almost similar technologies. With this background it was established that there are many needs that are not met, just because A) Not many people have such a need at the same time (diversity problem) B) Even if a common need is established, it may not be worth the effort to get a company paying attention because of lack of economic returns.
How can we understand this disparity? On one hand we are obsessed with tools and even after being so good at it we seem to never be satisfied? We have so much technology around, but still majority suffer from lack of shelter, food, comfort of the weather, diseases, happiness. Why? Why not have a discussion on this?
We never stop making new tools, even if we don’t need so many tools. Or is it that we have broken the definitions of need in itself? Anyways, we make and make a so we go farther and farther away from the being we started from. No other animals has ever behaved this way. We are unique and alone in this. No examples to follow, directionless we move about, obsessed with tools and making new ones just for the heck of it. Since making tools is time and resource consuming, we as a species have evolved a very elaborate self-fooling mechanism that “generates” needs and therefore continues to create souls who need others to make new tools for them – called the growth economy. Harari (Sapiens) does a brilliant job of explaining this concept. In fact, the most consuming part of our species is this new tool-in-itself, consumerism, that has so brilliantly captured our hearts and minds. Is consumerism a disease, like an addiction or is it a “social organism” / parasite? As Harari discusses – parasites are the biggest success story of the spectrum of life – they dwell in the minds and bodies of their hosts and multiply, irrespective of the happiness or quality of life of the hosts. But there is a slight pause here, tool makers are fewer than users of such tools. Much fewer are the need manipulators who use who use the ignorance and weaknesses of the masses to feed the need making engine, they themselves consumed in the way. A perfect parasite dominated world – only we the humans are its best and most loyal carriers! This parasite looks like a pyramid, tool users are the base, tool makers are above them and the manipulators on the top with strings that control the down-belows. Nice puppetry. All this reflects the past few couple of centuries of human history – a very strange and drastic development. And all this still does not lead anywhere to the disparity between availability of tools and the needy.
Maybe this may lead somewhere: Tools are a means to an end. Shouldn’t the end decide the tool? Do we know the desired end well enough before we choose the tool? Do all ends need tools, are tools the only way? Does availability of a tool automatically decide the direction of life, irrespective of whether we wish for it to go that way or not? – I don’t know all these, but this could be a very deep discussion – would have been apt for a Society and Science class, not a practical one like this.
Anyways, come to practical stuff, 2 questions:
- How does one go about making stuff? Who are the tool makers?
- Has tool making evolved over the past?
A general discussion will throw about engineers, scientists, mechanics, etc. I would then ask what’s the difference between a scientist and an engineer? Then what’s a difference between innovation and invention? Invention typically implying a drastic development while innovation being incremental in nature.
A trick question would be to identify what is not a tool? What fun that would be!! The question would then again be: what’s a tool?
- A material object
- Has a history of evolution
- Without which the achieving an end is more difficult in terms of time required, skills and resources of material and energy.
A followup question would be why the students have not chosen to do engineering? Most of the responses will be the stigma of studying math, or the rigidity of the scientific ‘processes’ or the lack of emotionally simulating content in all this science and engineering. The latter will be hard to get from students, but is the most fundamental difference i suppose, which i feel almost never gets tossed about. Only a few relate or take active interest and pursue to see beneath the dull and dry every-day surface of the non-human/material world. Still others take active interest in manipulating the material world’s elements – the tool makers. Coming back to the question – how does one become a maker these days?
It would be interesting here to talk about how makers were some centuries past. Something that one may have forgotten: Making tools for others to use was very common – almost every human settlement had a blacksmith, a carpenter, potter, tailor, agriculturalist, doctor, etc. The needs were met by local people, for local people by using mostly local resources. But then what happened? Trade. Local stuff was no longer as fancy or as useful as outside stuff, or that there was simply no local substitute for the particular need. So with trade, makers went not-local. Trade brought in competition and need for the makers to improve on their skills. How does one develop a skill – an interesting question worth a discussion – simple answer is many many hours of fumbling around. Complicated answer is that since A) we are lazy B) Other’s who are more advanced than us are available for help, provided we work for them a bit. The latter is the basis of education – a shorter path than fumbling around in the dark for a lifetime. So how did education begin? Apprentice model comes to mind- (A beautiful book on this subject – “The Craftsman” by Richard Sennett talks about all this. I only read a part of this which i try to recollect here..)
- An apprentice works with an expert while the expert is fully conscious that the apprentice will one day become his own competitor.
- But what can an expert do, he/she needs hands to service the needs and get paid to survive as a maker!!
- Once an apprentice is somewhat trained, he/she can get recommended to travel to another expert for a more varied training.
- With enough variety of experiences had, the apprentice settles down where he/she is needed and eventually becomes an expert who hires more apprentices 🙂
This was the first hand experience model, talked about in the first lecture. Then the trader mind figured out that, why go the slow and expensive (time consuming) way of first hand experience? Everyone starting at the bottom and very slowly growing to the top, all the while aging? No wonder the top looks very old!!! How about a shortcut? This, stepping aside from the apprentice ‘1st hand’ model to a ‘n-th’ hand model (my take on it, not Sennett’s ) en mass was the education revolution. This latter development was possible thanks to this amazing property of materials and its handling called patterns, or repeatability in science. Once you learn how an iron piece can be heated red hot and hammered into a tool, say in South India, we don’t need to send this tool all the way to Europe (eg. Damascus steel) – instead we send in the recipe book of how this process works and makers there can replicate it. One time investment to pick up the new skills! Who made the first Damascus steel is unknown today (and i talk about it having never seen or felt, forget making, a Damascus steel – hence n-th hand knowledge), but it was the basis for a revolution in weapons making, thanks to the many makers who took the seed (recipe) seriously and made and improved on it.
As more and more recipe books came about, it because hard to do both the exhaustive first hand work while at the same time do the very abstract kind of n-th hand learning. But the latter was easier, cost-wise (books are cheaper than a foundry) and cognitive-ly (easier for the mind to pick up things than the hand-mind simultaneous learning). Thanks to repeatability of materials and their properties, we now have a huge huge chunk of minds working successfully using n-th hand information and producing amazing technologies. Of course aided by the craftsman/technician. But now the problem is – there are so many managers around, hardly any first-hand experts to be found, apart from the technicians. Two drastically indifferent types of people work in technology today – engineers/scientists Vs technician. How this impacts tool making is a thing worth discussion, but too advanced and irrelevant probably for my class.
Concluding the problem in short: Engineers and scientists today work on the knowledge of others and then do a minimal of first hand work. But the heavy education also limits them to A) Recovery of fees and time invested during education and also B) retaining the capability of only using the n-th hand tools as a starting point to solve even generic problems. The former thing forces them to work as part of big corporations that retain many such “peg in the wheel” people – each loosing their identity and freedom to pay for security of the big and simplicity of routine. The latter makes them useless to solve emerging problems that need first hand interpretation and exchange – the maker way.
So we have 2 things from the previous session and this one – A) companies who can’t cater to diverse needs which have no economic value and B) Well-trained potential makers handicapped/bottle-necked with the tools they have so invested in learning. Add to it the growth economy which tries to sustain companies by recreating/reinforcing the mass common needs that keep both A) and B) happy.
All this forms the basis of the maker movement. Makers are not tool-centric, but are in it for the sake of passion for making. They are the true amateurs. (Thanks to may maker friend Sandipan Das for explaining this beautiful but often misunderstood word). We love problems in all shapes and sizes, and more than that we love to learn and play with tools, new and old.
But why maker movement now? All the above was also true say 50-100 years back? So many people must have written about the industrial world, the sadness of it and so on. Maybe i am just not aware (also i was only born recently so dont hold this grudge on me).
Modern making is transformed. Unrecognizable because it has made available n-th hand information without going through the rigor of school/college/pass-fail system which focused on the method and traditions and irrelevant administration and the omnipresent lack of love for the work one does. That is what internet did, and a wave of first-hand makers came in to help the to-be first hand makers. In apprentice model, one had to find, cajole, plead an expert – often an egoistic obnoxious bum (true even now but separated by kind formal words and ‘professionalism’). Not now, now we have a range of experts to choose from, happily sharing away!
As a real first hand example: My father used to make film cameras. I have seen him slog for 20-25 years trying to make complicated parts, gear and lever mechanisms, bodies, plastic parts (using soldering iron to mold, yes i saw it!), all by hand and with only a handful of hand-tools in a small room (beautiful in its disorganization) in our home. Tool noise was as common as when the evening sets in, similar to the one from the kitchen, or of the general neighborhood. There were hardly any books which taught pa how Pentax or Canon made their cameras, or what were the latest trends or how to make some thing using better tools. My father was no engineer or scientist, but a B.Arts! For learning and keeping a community touch – pa used to repair cameras of professional photographers. All was the very genuine maker in the works. Ultimately, his prototypes (many 100s he made) didn’t work out very well in the end because of the immensely daunting task of product making and then commercialization and so on, all the while pa being a full time government service employee! Now, contrast this with my story as a maker – i make designs on a computer, read and take inputs anonymously from so many forums/blogs/scientific papers from so many kind-hearted and great makers (first-hand experimenters many of them), have near my workplace such unthinkable machines as a LASER cutter, 3d printers, lathes, etc, etc, etc. If i have questions, who do i go to? I ask in a forum and get an answer from total strangers. Isn’t this simply amazing? I feel, when i look back at how may father worked, like a cheat! My father must be so jealous of me (but he seems not, maybe ’cause he’s having a good laugh that despite all benefits, this bugger still makes engineering blunders with amazing grace and alarming regularity 😉 ). Technology, especially the internet, has transformed, more than anyone can comprehended, a maker’s journey. Thus we have makers as small as school kids who use 3d printers as they learn 2+2 in parallel.
Thus this maker revolution can be attributed to:
- Companies not able to cater to diversity of needs.
- Trained makers not able to steer away from the complicated growth-economy governed tools. (Can’t teach an elephant to dance among the flowers, can you?).
- Internet has connected first-hand makers together and also drastically cut the time/effort required to transfer 1st-nth hand information through videos and images, etc.
- Modern machines have become available that do not require much skills to begin with.