The image on the cover looks like a photograph, but it’s not. Artist Alan Magee, renowned for his realist paintings, crafted that palette brushstroke by brushstroke. His handiwork, a word not chosen lightly, represents what we’re thinking about in this issue — the tactile, the manual, the physical creation of and tangible interaction with . . . stuff.
We don’t do that so much anymore, work with our hands. I never have. Digital technology has only widened the chasm between me and any understanding of the things I use. God help me if I have to fix something — by which I mean nothing more elaborate than changing the microwave and stove clocks twice a year. Advanced appliances these days are “smart” enough to change themselves, anyway. If not, YouTube tutorials help in a pinch.
Even the need to search for something like that feels inconvenient now. Our devices are supposed to be “intuitive,” foreclosing any need for instruction. If a problem requires more than turning a thing off and on again, I’ll be muttering in aggravation about why that thing doesn’t “just work.” I wouldn’t dare undertake so much as an IKEA assembly.
Don’t mistake this for a Luddite’s manifesto against technology; I’m grateful for the ease. I just have a nagging sense that something important has gone missing along the way. And a recognition of the meaning and value in making things, in fixing them, in noodling out problems or designing new products through real-world trial and error.
Inside, design professor Ann-Marie Conrado ’93 describes class exercises that encourage digital-native students to shed their evident aversion to hands-on prototyping — and why it matters, maybe especially these days. Linda Przybyszewski, a historian and dressmaker who has long studied the craft she practices, instructs her students in the dexterous techniques she knows so well.
Mel Livatino celebrates the ingenuity of the people he has hired over the years to repair what he — unlike his resourceful, fixer-upper father before him — could not. And Ken Garcia ’08Ph.D. chronicles retirement woodworking projects that connect him to the cosmos in ways even his rich intellectual life has not.
This may, of course, be the ultimate first-world problem, this hand-wringing over too much convenience, our turning physical labor once done out of necessity into a niche hobby like collecting albums on vinyl. Livatino’s father didn’t repair his boiler as a self-conscious act of “soulcraft.” Yet it was that, too.
We have another motivation today: a resistance to the planned obsolescence of devices, the cheap whims of mass-produced fast fashion and flimsy furniture and the discard-and-replace default setting we apply to so much of our lives. Pope Francis has lamented this modern development as “throwaway culture.”
On the job, meetings and emails often define “knowledge work” — a cringy term made even cringier when you give two seconds’ thought to the vast knowledge and deep creativity needed to build, tinker and repair. Ever listen to Car Talk? (There’s still a “best of” podcast — reason enough to appreciate technology.)
Those of us without the knowledge to construct and fix things for a living, without the creativity to devise solutions unavailable through an internet search, often avow our personal satisfaction from amateur effort. That’s a worthwhile end in itself, a reentry into the earth’s atmosphere from the zero-gravity drift among satellite-beamed messages.
Like Magee’s artwork, the things of this world take on a little more color and vibrancy, a little more weight and meaning, when we make them ourselves.
Jason Kelly is editor of this magazine.