Making Trouble

MAKERS VS.

SHAKERS

MAKE IT BEAUTIFUL, MAKE IT LAST, OR DON’T MAKE IT AT ALL.

By Saul Griffith

JUST BEFORE THE NEW YEAR, AN EDITOR at MAKE asked contributors for their New Year’s resolutions (see makezine.com/go/resolutions).

I glibly responded, “to only make things worthy of lasting 100 years.” A few months into 2007, I’ve already broken my resolution, but I’ve thought more about the reasons behind it, and why I’m still aiming at it.

I was recently in London and visited the British Museum. While standing there in front of a magnificent carved stone piece of the Acropolis, I had to reflect that what we makers are creating isn’t particularly impressive. We might be making things, but we are not always being craftsmen — stewards of the materials that have so radically been torn from the earth.

It made me think that the readers of CRAFT magazine ( craftzine.com) have the right approach. The average maker is perennially in a state of prototyping. The crafter is making a finished item, lovingly created, designed to last a lifetime or more. It is the difference between spoiled technophile children and Shakers, who built such beautiful furniture that collectors now pay exorbitant prices for simple chairs and tables made 150 years ago.

Why should we care about this distinction? I care because the more prototypes that go to landfill, the worse off the world is. I care because with the loss of craftsmanship, we accept an Ikea world. My father made a teak dinner table for my mother before I was born. More than 30 years later, it’s only more beautiful than it was originally. Years of oiling, wine spilling, small hands pawing at it, and countless projects being hammered out on top of it have left it with a loved patina of memory. It would take

54 Make: Volume 10

a dozen Ikea dining tables to last the same abuse, and that would be a dozen dining tables going to landfill. My father’s table will last at least another 70 years with a little love, and a little repair.

So I set myself the task, for this article, to write about something I would make designed specifically to last longer than my own lifetime. I settled on creating for myself a table and benches as functional and beautiful as the table my father built.

The process made me think a lot about electronics, because I couldn’t really imagine building anything with a circuit board that could last 100 years, let alone that I’d want to last 100 years. It was a troubling conclusion, and I’m still unresolved regarding the dilemma of making electronic things that will be fun for a month, then fragile and broken for a lifetime.

I had recently built all my office furniture out of bamboo ply, leaving a dozen or so scraps 12"× 96" and ¾" thick, so these scraps served as my inspiration and raw materials. At the Squid Labs workshop, with various people looking curiously over my shoulder, I labored over the CAD design for 4– 6 hours until the “cartoon” — my colleague Robert “Danny” Daniels’ description of CAD — appeared as I wanted it. This was something I didn’t want to revise, for to make the “improved version” was to defeat the purpose. Also, to make it in CAD was to leave a digital path that could be followed by others, improved upon, a design I could give away to see perfected by other, brighter minds.

I took my CAD files to the water jet cutter. I could have used more traditional craft techniques, such as pull-saw and chisel artisanry, but my first test attempts showed me that I had neither the patience