Making is a prerequisite for designing

Recently I came across a post on LinkedIn from Carlo Navato about the book “Why We Make Things & Why It Matters - The Education of a Craftsman” by Peter Korn’s. In the book Korn quotes the architect John Pardey; "If you're going to write, you need vocabulary. If you're going to make, you need to know what things go together and how."

I have always championed the idea that in design you need to make to think. But Pardey's observation clarifies it; making provides the foundational vocabulary, the grammar and syntax needed to move from making to designing. 

Unfortunately most designers reduced making to things like post-it notes and white board sketches. Or assembling components from pattern library like Colorforms. But making is more fundamental than that. Pardey used to work with his father building boats. I used to work with my own father building barns, remodeling our house and later at a local lumber mill, making cabinets and custom windows. By the time I went to design school, I had the basic vocabulary for making. 

But making doesn’t require you to build a boat or a barn, it could be as simple as shaping clay into a bowl. Learning the techniques for shaping and finishing, and the various glazes and how they respond when you fire the work. Or sewing a shopping bag or jacket; working from whole cloth and a pattern, learning the various stitches, and fabrics and their different bias. Or baking the perfect pain de campagne, or baguette, with its hollow thud and perfect crust and crumb. The idea of taking commodity materials and making them into something that has value, if to no one other than yourself.

Making requires understanding how things fit together, transforming raw material into something intentional, with meaning and purpose. It’s also learning how to sequence the steps for both efficiency but also to ensure the strength and stability of what you are making.  Making requires you plan out the materials, and after a dozen trips to the hardware store and lumberyard, or tracking down the perfect flour or that special fabric. And what tools you will need, how to use them. And perhaps most importantly learning what not to do, or when its really finished. Making removes any gap between your efforts and the intentions of those who will, hopefully, enjoy what you have made. 

Because they lack the ability to effectively describe what is on the other side of that anxiety, the internal fear of failing and knowing others may judge their efforts, most people stop before they ever begin. Sharing what you make expands your vocabulary, learning to name your own perceptions as you mentally magnify each detail, learning not to let the shouts of each mistake—even if they go unnoticed by others, overwhelm your accomplishments.  Sharing what you make gives a name to every decision, to every touch, and to what you thought was good enough. Sharing what you make is the root of expressing why craft matters. 

Realizing that it will take multiple attempts to make something that does both what you intended and with the level of fit and finish you desire, is the crux of craft; That moment of knowing you can either commit to leaning into the ambiguity, learning something new and knowing that you will likely face risk, and work to overcome frustration and failures, or you can simply walk away and never learn to make. Never learn the vocabulary necessary to design. 

Learning anything starts with the basics. In language begins with simple words and basic phrases in order to learn the grammar and syntax that make everything else possible. Eventually that foundation allows you to move past correct sentences into something more ambitious: metaphor, poetry, the kind of writing that bends the rules because it understands them completely. 

The same is true for making, it starts by learning the foundational vocabulary and grammar of your material.  Learning what works, what fails, and why means you know which rules can be broken and which ones can’t, allowing you to separate innovation from accident.  Eventually it leads to knowing how to ground a radical idea so it feels both inevitable and surprising, at the same time utterly new and somehow already understood.

Design leaders who have never made something from raw material, never felt the gap between their intention and the execution created by their own hand, can never really understand quality. Craft is not a credential. It’s the knowledge gained from making something from the inside out, through repetition and refinement, and learning what makes something good.