howies®

Over the last mumble-mumble-something-months myself and two friends (Russell Davies and Henry Holland) have been making a machine for howies.

It’s a machine that doesn’t really have a point, but that’s kind of the point. We’ve taken a long while, and spent very little money doing it all in our spare time. It’s what Russell calls a ‘Slow Project’ – a bit like slow food, it’ll be all the better for the time taken on it. If that sounds a bit like an excuse, you’re right…

But – this way of doing things discovers stuff that you don’t find in meticulous planning and breakneck, ruthless execution. Both of which, normally, come as second nature to me, of course.

First of all, there’s just the pleasure of tinkering. Tinkering and discussing some of the niceties of the machine, in a kind of more genteel, smaller, slower version of ‘Scrapheap Challenge’.

With cake.

But aside from the social side of such an activity, there’s something deeper that it unlocks. I’m a designer that mainly works with digital materials, and while the pleasure of tinkering with a machine is something that I get quite a lot in software, to tinker in hardware and software (especially Meccano) is a rarer thing.

It seems to activate a way of thinking with the eye, the mind and the hand that is entirely natural, and the playful problem-solving instincts of childhood come rushing back.

Kevin Kelly writes in an essay about Artificial Intelligence that problem-solving is not just an abstract process of the mind, but something that happens in the world, and brands those who don’t believe this as indulging in ‘thinkism’.

The intelligence of the hand, and the eye, and the body, working with material things in the world, instead of abstract symbols in a computer you might call ‘Do-ism’.

The tactility of a piece of a material, the forces it will accept, the way it will behave can be assessed in an instant by someone with years of Do-ism behind them, and applied expertly. Those with less experience can still experiment by doing and playing – as the design agency IDEO says ‘building to think’.

We’re building the machine (slowly) to think, and have fun, but mainly to see what we can achieve and learn with Do-ism.

Words and illustration: Matt Jones