Ulla-Maaria Mutanen lives in San Francisco and is CEO of Social Objects, Ltd., founder of Thinglink ( thinglink.org), and author of the HobbyPrincess blog ( hobbyprincess.com).
Remember how full of enticing questions the world was when you were little? What if you could fly like a bird? Or, how could you breathe underwater? Many of us spent hours or even days building our own flying machines from materials we could find (umbrellas and a hair dryer in my case). So did Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest crafter of all time.
Da Vinci wasn’t just a painter and sculptor. He was a scientist, mathematician, anatomist, musician, and architect. Most importantly, though, he was an unparalleled inventor and craftsman. His inventions included the helicopter, the submarine, and the ball bearing, just to name a few.
Recently, I had the chance to visit an exhibition showcasing reproductions of da Vinci’s many inventions at the Metreon in San Francisco. As I drifted through the exhibition, I found myself wondering how it had been possible for one person to accomplish so much with so little.
His knowledge of physics was superficial, yet he managed to design an experimental helicopter. He had read less than a first-year medical student about physiology, yet he discovered arteriosclerosis. Where are the da Vincis of our day and age, I wondered. What is it that makes a person so creative?
Lev Vygotsky, one of the founders of modern psychology, had an interesting answer. He suggested creative accomplishments were not due to superior intelligence. Neither were they the product of high formal education. Rather, Vygotsky connected creativity with something deceptively simple: the ability to play. He considered play the most genuine and effective form of creative activity. “In play, a child is always above his average age, above his daily behavior; in play, it is as though he were a head taller than himself,” Vygotsky wrote.
Play is open-ended. It is about improvisation,
surprise, and switching roles — just the things our
schools and workplaces are built to resist. We think
problems today are so complicated that they’re better left for buildings full of specialized scientists to solve. True enough, individuals can’t master all knowledge like they could in da Vinci’s day. But maybe our specialization is preventing us from seeing the big picture. Maybe it keeps us from asking the sorts of questions only children would ask.
Craft is a form of play. It makes us ask those kinds of practical questions. “How can I make yarn?” “How can I grow my own food?” Crafty questions trigger projects that, once we embark on them, make us smarter than we were before.
The more interesting the question, the more motivated we are to solve it, and the more we learn by trying out different possible solutions. Crafters follow da Vinci’s method. Working with the materials and knowledge they’ve got, they sometimes surprise with ingenious solutions.
The generation after us is faced with the most basic questions of all, those of survival. We are raising that generation now. Crafting brings potential solutions to smaller and bigger problems within our reach. More than being about academic knowledge, it’s about a can-do attitude. When planning their curricula, schools would do well to remember da Vinci and the power of play. ×
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