Digital Designers Rediscover Their Hands
GEVER TULLEY has only one qualification for training software designers how to become more creative. He teaches children how to build objects like gravity-powered wooden roller coasters with their hands, at his Tinkering School in Montara, Calif., south of San Francisco.
Now Mr. Tulley does the same thing for dozens of adults who are in the front ranks of software design at Adobe, the big software supplier based in San Jose, Calif. In daylong workshops, about 100 Adobe designers wrestle with plastic beads, small electronic displays, Ikea water glasses and tiny sensors to create wacky motion games. Usually, about the only thing these folks touch on the job is a computer mouse.
“Some people thought we were crazy to do this,” says Michael Gough, a vice president for design at Adobe. “But for others, the experience has started to inform how they work,” giving them a better appreciation of how customers experience Adobe’s programs.
“So we’re going to keep pushing it,” Mr. Gough says.
Mr. Tulley’s transformation highlights a little-noticed movement in the world of professional design and engineering: a renewed appreciation for manual labor, or innovating with the aid of human hands.
“A lot of people get lost in the world of computer simulation,” says Bill Burnett, executive director of the product design program at Stanford. “You can’t simulate everything.”
Using computers to model the physical world has become increasingly common; products as diverse as cars and planes, pharmaceuticals and cellphones are almost entirely conceived, specified and designed on a computer screen. Typically, only when these creations are nearly ready for mass manufacturing are prototypes made — and often not by the people who designed them.
Creative designers and engineers are rebelling against their alienation from the physical world. “The hands-on part is for me a critical aspect of understanding how to design,” said Michael Kuniavsky , a consultant in San Francisco who for three years has convened a summer gathering of leading designers, called “Sketching in Hardware.”
At last month’s session, at the Rhode Island School of Design, attendees broke into small groups, wielding soldering irons and materials their grandfathers probably knew more about.
Such experiences hone instinct and intuition as opposed to logic and cognition, advocates say, and bring the designer closer to art than science.
“I’m not sure employers are recognizing the importance of hands-on,” Mr. Kuniavsky says.
Mr. Gough began to appreciate the possibilities of Mr. Tulley’s “learn by making” idea for Adobe only after his own children attended the Tinkering School.
Part of corporate resistance to experimenting with hands-on activities comes from the difficulty of measuring the value of paying employees to, say, build a go-cart or a radio set while in the office. Yet educators say the benefits, even if intangible, are clear. “All your intelligence isn’t in your brain,” Mr. Burnett says. “You learn through your hands.”
At Stanford, the rediscovery of human hands arose partly from the frustration of engineering, architecture and design professors who realized that their best students had never taken apart a bicycle or built a model airplane. For much the same reason, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a class, “How to Make (Almost) Anything,” which emphasizes learning to use physical tools effectively.
“Students are desperate for hands-on experience,” says Neil Gershenfeld, who teaches the course.
Paradoxically, yearnings to pick up a hammer — or an oscilloscope — may deepen even as young people immerse themselves in simulated worlds. “People spend so much time in digital worlds that it creates an appetite for the physical world,” says Dale Dougherty, an executive at O’Reilly Media, which is based in Sebastopol, Calif., He manages a magazine, Make, that is devoted to building digital-era gear.
Fifty years ago, tinkering with gadgets was routine for people drawn to engineering and invention. When personal computers became widespread starting in the 1980s, “we tended to forget the importance of physical senses,” says Richard Sennett, a sociologist at the London School of Economics.
Making refinements with your own hands — rather than automatically, as often happens with a computer — means “you have to be extremely self-critical,” says Mr. Sennett, whose book “The Craftsman” (Yale University Press, 2008), examines the importance of “skilled manual labor,” which he believes includes computer programming.
EVEN in highly abstract fields, like the design of next-generation electronic circuits, some people believe that hands-on experiences can enhance creativity. “You need your hands to verify experimentally a technology that doesn’t exist,” says Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s photonics technology lab in Santa Clara, Calif. Building optical switches in silicon materials, for example, requires engineers to test the experimental switches themselves, and to build test equipment, too.
Bringing human hands back into the world of digital designers may have profound long-term consequences. Designs could become safer, more user-friendly and even more durable.
At the very least, the process of creating things could become a happier one. While working in simulated computer worlds has undeniable appeal, Mr. Tulley says, “the physical act of making things helps the whole person.”
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