The myth of Pandora’s box is the defining metaphor of the last few years. We have heads of large technology companies warning us of the dangers of the things they have built quickly escaping the orbit of human control. Punished by our own hubris (or curiosity), this has presented a moral quandary: just because we can build something, does it mean we should?  One way out of that dilemma, or at least to productively reframe the question, is to better understand the nature of what it means to make things.

    A thought experiment: let’s say you have a deadline for a project that involves designing a company’s rebrand. You’re capable of meeting it doing it the old-fashioned way – working with your hands to make graphic elements, making custom type forms, writing the copy, stylizing the photography – all of the things that go into a rebrand. Let’s then say, for argument’s sake, you have a second option. You can jam the prompts through an LLM and, for the purpose of this experiment, you get the exact same results. But you get it done much faster. Minutes, hours, days are saved. Which option would you choose?

    For a culture bent towards optimization, there are a good deal of people who might pick the second option. For those who chose the first option, you would probably be accused of being a Luddite. Out of touch and clinging to an increasingly defunct world of working. 

     I am being deliberately unfair here. In reality, there is no “press button for rebrand” option, nor do craft purists avoid some of the efficiencies afforded by AI tools. The drift, however, is obvious for anyone paying attention to where the money is going: that certain processes that, in the past, would require human work, are fighting against an AI-induced coup which promises faster results and zero human capital. 

     My central question here, however, is not whether optimization is good for the bottom line, but is it good for the existential condition of the people making things, and the people consuming things? I’ve posed this same sentiment elsewhere, but are there instances in which time saving is a pyrrhic victory? What are the real, non-fiduciary costs to delegating craft and expertise to someone or something else?

     If we were to create a spectrum where on one end sits machine-driven optimization, the furthest thing to the other side would be the Rube Goldberg machine. Goldberg (1883 - 1970) was a cartoonist by trade, but his influence gradually extended beyond the syndicated pages. His drawings often depicted extremely elaborate contraptions and chain-reaction devices designed to perform the simplest tasks you could imagine, like picking up a napkin. The genius of his visual imagination was in creating the most useless, convoluted, yet mechanically ingenious wastes of time ever sketched.  Goldberg gained a cult following, and, to this day, you can find competitions where groups of amateur and professional inventors alike fight to create the most elaborate, uneconomical solution to humanity’s simplest problems. 

      (In 6th grade my entire class was tasked with creating a Rube Goldberg machine – mine involved some sort of marble-based energy transfer that would cut a line via a knife that was  suspended in air by a string which somehow resulted in a knife being popped into the air and into an awaiting hand. A lot of sharp objects being launched into the strastophere. I was 12.)

     The Rube Goldberg machine confirms a central insight that the early 20th century child psychiatrist Karl Groos, author of The Play of Man, observed in infants: they express extraordinary happiness when they first discover their ability to create predictable effects in the world. Groos would later coin this as “the pleasure of being the cause,” and a central component to psychological well-being. We like being the cause of effects. We like having agency. 

     Groos thought that this sense of agency was the central basis of play, and the precondition for our ability to experience delight. Delight is the interplay between something we’ve made, and how the world responds to it. Delight has nothing to do with time-saving, as someone like Rube Goldberg might illustrate, and everything to do with seeing the evidence of our own handiwork creating predictable effects in the world, even if by the most convoluted, ridiculous path possible. 

     Goldberg vs. automation is ultimately just a heuristic I am using to make an argument about what it means to care about craft and the ends towards which we are designing. There are plenty of instances in which something is poorly designed and causes a waste of time that makes the veins in your head pulsate with anger (being on hold? Lotion being put behind a lock at the drugstore?). But this is not a monolithic experience. 

      In the 1950s General Mills introduced the Betty Crocker cake mix. The easiest cake you could ever make. All the dry ingredients were already there, you just needed to pour it into a bowl, mix it with water, stick it in the oven and voila: a cake. 

     Despite the ease, the convenience, the well-regarded recipe that produced a good cake, the mix sold poorly. When General Mills did research with its team of psychologists, they realized they’d made a crucial error. They had made the cake baking process too easy. The home chefs were feeling guilty about having done so little to produce the dessert centerpiece, and dissatisfied at having played so little role in its creation. 

     So General Mills replaced the powdered egg from the previous mixture, and instructed its users to “Add an Egg.” They made the process more difficult and sales of the mix immediately increased. It was a simple change – adding an extra step the chef would need to do himself, but it dramatically increased the feeling of ownership he had in his own work. If we take this as a short, but revealing case study, we see that Groos is right in at least one regard: we want to have a hand in the things we make, even if it’s a small, but meaningful swap. Just add an egg.

     Discussions about making often revolve around the hands (though they need not to), and the materials with which we are working. In Richard Sennett’s book The Craftsman he defines the term “material consciousness” as an artisan’s “own field of consciousness; all his effort to achieve good quality work depend on his curiosity about the material he has in his hands.” In the feedback loop between hand and eye, there’s an extended rhythm of repeated tasks that develop specific skills which make us alert rather than bored because “we have developed the skill of anticipation.” 

    What’s crucial in this feedback loop is the role of difficulty. In taking up the world’s materials we expose ourselves to resistance – objects that fight back. We realize the limits of our creative omnipotence when the piece of clay or metal or even our own bodies don’t do what we want them to, don’t actualize the picture we have of them in our mind. It can be a frustrating experience, but one that leaves room for a more open-ended view of skill development. We learn irregularly and sometimes take detours, because what we’re learning is a two-way interaction: how to comport ourselves to the world around us, and express ourselves through its materials. In working with tangible things, we learn that creativity is as much about accepting the limits of the material we work with as it is about willful and deliberate acts of craftwork. 

     Craftwork doesn’t have the zaniness of the Rube Goldberg machine, but they both indicate a deeper human need than “efficiency at all costs.” Particularly the centrality of delight as an empowering and agentive experience. Delight, in this sense, is more than just a happy feeling. It’s the end result of seeing one’s work reflected back to oneself, of a learned mastery that takes time, that is not optimized nor predictable, and ends in a productive friction that provides a feeling of a non-omnipotent form of agency. 

     We are surrounded by material reality, so it only makes sense that creating things with materials grounds us more healthily in our environment. But we can zoom out even further, examining the ethical development of craftsmanship, how anchoring us in this material reality and “the craft of making physical things provides insight into the techniques of experience that can shape our dealings with others.” 

     Put more simply: there’s a connection between human relationships and making things in the difficulties and possibilities attendant in both of them. The real material challenges like working with resistance or with managing ambiguity are instructive not just in building things, but in understanding and in healing resistances people harbor towards each other. 

Becoming better craftspeople makes us better people because we are more at ease in a world that doesn’t immediately give us everything we want. This is not something we learn easily. It requires a patient deliberation of where and how we can make something fit for our purpose, and what to do when we cannot. We’ll never escape the difficulty inherent in dealing with real material things and with people. Craft teaches us that’s not a bad thing. That it leads to a more august sanity than thinking we can will our way into a frictionless existence, that it shows us that such an existence is not something we want (Just add an Egg). 

     Craft covers a wide range of things – Linux coding, metalworking, glassblowing, roofing, writing, painting, and so on. The only requirement is the desire to do a good job well for its own sake. An impulse and invitation that’s open to anyone. 

     There are far greater dangers than spending more time than is absolutely necessary on a task. And  we also don’t need to bury our heads in the sand and pretend there are not many, many noisome and annoying tasks that we would be more than fine with passing along to an automated machine. The plea here is to know when to pick our spots, and to at least realize what happens when we remove and outsource the difficulty, the resistance, the repetition inherent in learning how to do something well. 

This is a mindset shift that extends well beyond producing something that looks better than a machine, but has implications that cut to the core about our relationship to the world around us, and to the people who inhabit it. When we lose that sense of time-taking, we risk living in a world with less delight, less agency, and less connection. 

     But how does this square with money-making and innovation? I’ve laid out the existential case for denying optimization its assumed supremacy, but is there a business case, as well? 

     The workplace – from medieval guild houses to Stravidari’s workshop to the modern corporation pose a dilemma between autonomy and authority that puts it at its center the problem of knowledge transfer. How can good work be done, and who is teaching it?

     The guild house was modeled on the patriarchal family, its master a surrogate parent who stood in as loco parentis to the journeyman and apprentices who often lived under their benches while honing their craft. Knowledge was passed top-down, authority was based on the transference of skills and the ethical demands of doing the work the right way. This was a markedly different arrangement than the craftsman as celebrity, or lone master. 

     Stravidari’s violin-making skills were legendary, and though his workshop was filled with the same type of apprentices you might’ve found in a medieval guild house, where the mastery of an individual or an idiosyncratic genius reigns supreme, tacit knowledge is most likely to dominate. All the thousands of quirks, moves, and insights that can’t be reconstructed. You can’t ask to make the tacit knowledge explicit (why it’s an obvious dictum that just because you are a great athlete doesn’t mean you’ll make a great coach. There are things that might come naturally to you that you can’t explain to others). 

     The corporation organizes these problems in a different, more distributed way. In 1970s Japan the country became especially recognized for the quality of the products it produced. Cheap, high-quality cars, radios, stereos, superb steel and aluminum, and more. Part of the success of postwar Japanese manufacturing was owed to what W. Edward Demmings deemed “total quality control” – superiors would get their hands dirty on the shop floor, and subordinates felt free to speak frankly and openly to their bosses. Hierarchy might’ve been the rule, but frankness needed to cut through in order to pass along the message if something wasn’t good enough. 

    The importance of  knowledge transfer is illustrated clearly in the invention of the mobile phone. The product of two connected technologies – the radio and the telephone – the technological basis behind the mobile phone lay in the switching technology of the landline. It was a problem with a clear solution – the switching technology amalgamating  the radio with the telephone – but no one understood how to connect the two. 

     In studying the discovery of the phone, the economists Richard Lester and Michael Piore, found that the technology firms like Nokia and Motorola, which emphasized internal knowledge sharing, cooperation, and collaboration, made much faster headway than a company like Ericsson which was much more rigidly structured as different offices within the company held their turf. 

     In distinguishing the craft-led approach of a Nokia or Motorola, then, we would say they created an open-ended line between the experimental rhythms of problem solving and problem finding. You solve one problem, and immediately see new possibilities to explore. The principles of competition, however, need to see closure in order to measure out achievement and dole rewards. A problem solved doesn’t lead to the next horizon of a problem found. The flow of communication is shut off like a leaky valve. Doing good work for its own sake necessitates a mindset that the exciting part of a job well done is that, well, it isn’t ever really done. Solving a problem merely allows you to step inside the next room in the maze, preferably with a community of collaborators with whom you are in free and open exchange. 

     Rediscovering the existential benefits of a craft is more than firing a salve in a world made more boring by optimization. Making things and understanding the conditions under which good work can take place, put us at the beating heart of an approach to work that makes us more human and more collaborative. It solves for the existential malaise that befalls us when we outsource expertise, and the innovation flatlines that occur when we forget that all of us workers are people who possess an innate desire to do good work. To be agents of their own actions. And that we are collectively responsible for creating the social conditions under which that can happen. To design a worker’s guild of the future.

I can’t imagine less of a waste of time than that.