the lost art of making

The embodied cognition researcher and ceramics artist Camilla Groth calls this ‘making sense through the hands.’

Making, for Groth, is ‘a form of thinking through actions, tools, things, and materials.’1 Lambros Malafouris, an archeologist who studies how materials affect the mind, has a sillier name for this — he calls it ‘thinging’:

“Cognition and

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We don’t need to define ourselves by the things we make, but we can still make them. This goes back to the idea of handiness, right? This isn’t a book about becoming an expert in any one thing. It’s about trying lots of things and becoming increasingly capable as a result. It’s about getting comfortable experimenting with something you’ve never... See more

“If you want a new world, start making it right now, in whatever you are doing.” This is the best advice I ever had, it came from Brian Eno. If you imagine the world you would like to be in and start making objects, systems and collaborations that belong to that world, that world comes into being.

It’s true that a farm family of the 1930s had to depend on their material intelligence for survival, while today’s city dwellers and office workers can get away with ignoring their physical environment and making a fine living. Maybe this feels like a sort of progress. But basic necessity is only one side of our relationship to materials. There are... See more

As we’ve shifted so entirely from a making economy to a buying economy, we’ve lost a lot of inherited skills that we might have learned from doing or from observing rather than from formal instruction.

the more we have the confidence and ability to make things from what we already have, the less we feed the capitalist system that doesn’t care about us or the people making our stuff or the planet that our rampant consumerism is actively making uninhabitable.