Was reading a book recently on woodworking and the author suggested that 17th and 18th century woodworkers required significantly fewer tools than today because their skill levels were simply higher. They knew how to build furniture in ways that have been mostly forgotten. This makes sense. As a growing number of specialized tools to accomplish very specific tasks were made, our skills and knowledge shrank. Now today, much of woodworking is done via machines that can cut, shape, and work wood at far greater speeds and quantities than older, less efficient methods.

It's an interesting thing to consider how the very knowledge of how to do a thing changes over time due to our innovations. Most craft, in generations past, relied on obedient submission to a master's teaching and guidance. You learned through immersive repetition, doing the thing over and over again until you embodied it. This is something Sennett refers to as tacit knowledge. Machines have offered us a shortcut to this process. But I can't help but wonder if it's a good thing. We are replacing the very concept of learning.

Anyways, this past weekend I spent a bunch of time in the garage making some benchhooks and a crochet.

Writing about computer assisted design in city planning, Sennett makes a fascinating statement on how it fails to consider the incomplete.

"The calculations draw a false inference about how well the finished object will function. Overdetermined design rules out the crinkled fabric of buildings that allow little startup businesses, and so communities, to grow and vibrate. This texture results from underdetermined structures that permit use to abort, swerve, and evolve."

It's hard not to think about AI while reading this book and there's something in this idea that I am intrigued by. Computer driven responses tend to deal in the complete or finished. We ask a question and we get an answer. Yet Sennett's point here is that the real world is harder to predict. Life happens in the unfinished parts of the structures or rules we design.

I think of it as potential, something perhaps machines are incapable of considering.

"Bedded in too comfortably, people will neglect the higher standard; it is by arousing self-consciousness that the worker is driven to do better."

Continuing in the Craftsman, Sennett is asking what it is that gets people to do good work. He explores several problems in oversimplifying an answer and then draws us to what he calls a "liminal space between problem solving and problem finding." It is here, he seems to say, that self-awareness elevates craft.

Perhaps what makes a craftsman great is thoughtfulness, a cyclical and perhaps even obsessive reflection on what you're making. It sits in you, inhabits you. You consider it, then do, then reflect, and do again.

Took a bit of a Richard Sennett detour and decided to go back and read the other two books in this trilogy first. So I'm going through The Craftsman right now.

First, I love this way he talks about Hannah Arendt as a teacher.

"The good teacher imparts a satisfying explanation; the great teacher — as Arendt was — unsettles, bequeaths disquiet, invites argument."

In a book about craft, I appreciate the nod to what skilled teaching is a capable of. A significant portion of my interest in reading this book in particular is in thinking about craft and skill in the age of AI. I think it is Sennett's separation here between good and great that we risk losing.

"People move through a space and dwell in a place."

In Building & Dwelling, Sennett draws this interesting relationship between spaces and places in terms of the speed at which people travel through them. He makes an interesting note around the way in which we can take in more liminal visual information when we are walking as opposed to being in a vehicle. This speaks to the role of a place in nurturing a desire to slow down and take in all the sights and sounds that it has to offer.

He also noted how the anxiety or frustration around the speed at which we are able to move through a city is a relatively new thing that came as we attempted to "improve" it. Slow movement through cities used to be the norm and this kept people in a far more relaxed state. Now, as sought to make moving through cities at greater speeds a goal, when it slows down it feels as though something with the city is broken.

Mobility then became a core goal or urban planning. And in the process, places to linger were reduced to spaces to get through.