What If You’re Not Meant to Sit Behind a Desk?

Some people think by doing, not by planning, and we’ve built a world that forgets that

Who is allowed to make things?

The smell of sawdust and clay. That was my introduction to a workshop.

My grandfather was a caretaker at an adult education college, and on Saturday mornings he had the run of the place. He would take me in with him. Machines, benches, tools, kiln, all sitting there waiting.

I loved it. I didn’t want to design anything. I didn’t want to sit down and plan it out. I just wanted to get cracking.

Looking back, I was thinking. Just not in the way school expected.

Thinking by making

At school, I should have been good at design technology, but I found it frustrating. Everything started on paper and had to be planned in advance. That never felt natural to me.

I don’t think I’m alone in that. Some people don’t think first and then make something. They think by making. They need to try things, adjust, respond. The ideas don’t come fully formed, they emerge in the process.

That’s how I’ve worked for the last 25 years building bicycle frames. Yes, I start with an idea, some measurements, a rough plan. But the real thinking happens at the bench.

What counts as real thinking?

I’m someone who can use design tools. I can sit down and plan things in advance. I can justify decisions with drawings and reasoning. But that doesn’t make me feel alive.

What I really want to do is get to the bench and work it out with the material in front of me, to think through doing.

Is that invalid? No one would question it if I were an artist. But because I’m a craftsman, it’s treated as if I’m doing it wrong.

The quiet exclusion

To me, this is the core of the problem. People like me, who think through our hands, are increasingly not given the opportunity to make things at all.

I stumbled into it, out of stubbornness more than anything. But how many potential craftspeople never get that chance?

We talk about craft disappearing, and usually the explanation is economic. And that’s true, up to a point. But what if that’s not the whole story?

What if craft is disappearing because we’ve removed the opportunity for people to make? For some people, making doesn’t come after the thinking. It is the thinking.

If you force design to come first, you don’t just change the process. You exclude the kind of person who needs to get stuck in before they understand what they’re doing.

Progress, and what it removes

It looks like progress. You can use CNC machines, design everything in CAD, 3D print parts, press a button, and out comes a frame.

We can remove the hard, messy parts, the so-called drudgery. But no one stops to ask whether that was the part that made some of us feel alive.

Back to the classroom

It feels like going back to school, being forced to do everything on paper when all you want to do is get stuck in and figure it out as you go. And it’s just assumed that you wouldn’t want to do it any other way.

I think that’s why I resisted it for so long, because it felt like being told I was wrong. Wrong for wanting to work with the material. Wrong for thinking through doing.

As if the goal is to figure out how to make things without labour at all.

What if this isn’t living?

Be happy, pal. You don’t have to work with your hands. You can get a nice office job instead.

But what if that doesn’t feel like living?

The real loss

We haven’t just changed how things are made. We’ve quietly removed a whole way of thinking, and the people who rely on it.

What if the problem isn’t that craft doesn’t fit the modern world, but that the modern world doesn’t fit all of us?

This is where a lot of my thinking on craft starts.

If you want to go deeper into it, I wrote a piece on what craft actually is, beyond the usual definitions:

What is craft, really?