Emma Hogbin, letterpress printer, on single-origin ink:

Not every colour is available in every season, but across the year most are possible. In spring, nettles, docks and gorse petals yield green and yellow inks. In summer, Molinia grass produces a shocking green. In autumn, the berries of rowan, holly and hawthorn create reds, browns and oranges. Ivy berries, elderberries, blackcurrants and blackberries produce short-lived pinks, blues, purples and greens. Woody material, including windfallen willow and Sitka spruce bark, produces varying shades of warm brown.

We conceive of ecological change in myriad ways: the extent of the forest, the abundance of species, the level of pollution. Rarely do we think of it in terms of colour.

Emma is working on a special pigment from alder trees, taking her time because of their relative scarcity in the area:

My hope is to one day make ink from this alder: a bottle of colour that will capture this stretch of the moor. I store the dried fruit, which look like little pine cones, in a jam jar. Once it is full, I should be able to make a small vial of caramel liquid that can be shifted to black and grey by the addition of iron.

I anticipate it will take several years to collect enough.

Bryan Macomber, explaining how pull-back toy cars work:

Gears are all around us. Clocks, cars, bikes, even your printer has countless gears! For the purposes of this analysis, we’ll focus on two properties of gears: gears can be used to multiply torque and used to change speeds.

Why is torque important here? Winding the spring in this toy requires significant torque. But this is product for kids, so how can we make it easier for them? The answer is gears! Gears give the kids a mechanical advantage.

Detailed, animated, interactive illustrations (Bryan is a mechanical engineer and artist) make this and Bryan’s other explanations very clear. But maybe more impressive is the careful attention he gives to deciding what exactly to explain, step by step. Art is everywhere.

Jögge Sundqvist, from “Karvsnitt,” on practicing chip carving:

A good way to practice cutting patterns is to make a bunch of key fobs. The main purpose of a key fob is to indicate which lock the key is for.

Beautiful work. Exercises like this are perfect — approachable, relatively quick, and theoretically you end up with a useful artifact. When you want to get into something new, to learn, finding the right small scope is half the battle.

Thea Applebaum Licht on Maine’s fire tower maps:

In the summer of 1956, the Beat writer Jack Kerouac ascended the North Cascade Mountains, climbing up through the glacial crests of Washington State to Desolation Peak, where he would assume a summer post as a fire lookout for the United States Forest Service. […] The images featured here are versions of what Kerouac calls his “panoramic”: circular maps custom-made for the fire towers that once dotted the American wilderness like land-bound lighthouses.

Go look at those fire tower maps. What beautiful artifacts! And what useful tools they must have been — purpose-built for use from a specific perspective.

Henrik and Johanna Karlsson, How not to forget what matters:

During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation, in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. […] The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.

Looking forward to my Readwise routine this week.

Pam Houston on developing a practice of noticing:

The honest answer is I don’t spend a lot of time evaluating [small things that catch my attention] because I think that’s counterproductive to the process. The process is really about collection and having them at my disposal if I need them later.

And then using those “glimmers” when she writes:

How it usually works is that I just start writing something and I don’t worry about it. I don’t worry about whether it’s an essay or a story. I’m usually just playing a shell game with glimmers, and then they sort of fall into connection to each other.

Brad Reiser, 79, on a small jig he uses for every chair project:

I call this my “stick stop.” The slots hold one end of the stick. On short sticks, the other end is usually held in your off hand. Long sticks work best pressed against your abdomen.

He sits on a tall stool to shape his sticks, and the jig steadies them.

Years ago, I worked alongside an old man in the basement of an old house, on furniture. I would take it apart, and he would put it back together. You had to watch out for pipes in the ceiling or you’d hit your head, but the old man was short so he didn’t need to worry. He would joke all day, until the afternoon when he realized he was behind on his tasks, and then work quietly and furiously until closing time.

I remember the sound, a kind of a quork, that the pliers would make as I pried staples out of hard wood. Ripping chairs and sofas apart, you had to be careful not to damage the finer elements of a piece. It was important to decide where to get leverage with the pliers. The old man had various tricks for doing this well, which he often claimed he had patented (one of his recurring jokes).

I remember the feeling of the metal tacks in my mouth. The old man taught me how to pour a bunch in like sunflower seeds, and bring out one at a time with my tongue. This is when I started helping him put the furniture back together. We would use tacks to hold webbing in place, the supportive fabric inside some chairs and sofas. It was nice to finish the webbing on a sofa and then take a nap on it. The business shut down each day for a nap. The old man would sometimes sleep across three dining room chairs.

Craft is human, and real, and you can feel it every day if you pay attention.

Back in a bit.

Patrick Rhone on being a spotter:

Part of my Circus Rigging duties include “spotting”, which in many cases means simply making sure that if a performer does fall, they do so safely and land on a mat.

A spotter pays careful attention so someone else can do the hard thing. They watch one person, in one moment, and do nothing until and unless needed.

Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows:

Lacquerware decorated in gold is not something to be seen in a brilliant light, to be taken in at a single glance; it should be left in the dark, a part here and a part there picked up by a faint light. Its florid patterns recede into the darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, of overtones but partly suggested.

Context is critical for craft. This passage is just brilliant, emphasizing how limited amounts of light and time create a deep impression.

Tatiana Apráez on Barniz de Pasto, a Latin American decorative lacquer technique she uses to design jewelry:

Each of my pieces emerges during a process of contemplation, challenge and desire, but it’s also […] intended to be a creative process that can endure.

Apráez emphasizes maintaining the expertise involved in traditional practices, connecting “ancestral inheritance with the future we want as a creative community”:

This goal requires extensive research to consolidate traditional knowledge, sometimes combining it with new technologies or rediscovering lost knowledge. It hasn’t just been a process of doing things, it’s meant adapting to uphold our beliefs, doing everything with greater rigour and excellence.

Stewart Brand, Maintenance: Of Everything:

Traditional systems (like wood-plank keeled boats) have an advantage over innovative systems (like the then-novel plywood trimarans) in that the whole process of maintaining traditional things is well explored and widely understood. Old systems break in familiar ways. New systems break in unexpected ways.

When things break, it’s important to know how to fix them so you can take care of other people.

Don Norman, from The Design of Everyday Things:

Engineers and businesspeople are trained to solve problems. Designers are trained to discover the real problems. A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.

These days, we are encouraged much more loudly and forcefully to make than to listen, observe, reflect.

Let’s take a walk.

Jim Nielsen, Speed is Not Conducive to Wisdom:

Wise people I’ve met seem unhurried. I don’t think it’s because they’re slow thinkers or actors. I think it’s because they’ve learned that important things take the time they take, no amount of urgency changes that.

Truth. There’s also a meaningful distinction to consider, between speed and initiative. A person can be unhurried, but still approach important tasks with urgency and agency.

Ben Brignell on knowing when to stop designing:

In music, knowing when to stop is just as important as knowing what to play. The pause gives structure to the sound. Without it, everything becomes noise. […] These principles for knowing when to stop are not about slowing down for the sake of it. They’re about recognising when a decision has already been made.

Design, music. In any deliberate and artful practice, it helps to pause.

Our tools, too, create noise. Recognizing when to set one down and pick up another is a matter of wisdom.

Takashi Homma, on the books he keeps:

I don’t like things that feel too authoritative or prestigious, like they were made by an important person. Overseas, they call these coffee-table books. In the end, they just become interior decorations that sit on a fancy living-room table.

AI-generated artifacts – outlines, diagrams – often feel like coffee-table books. Like their goal is to seem substantial rather than to be genuinely useful.

(Takashi keeps the thin books.)

Ted Chiang from 2024, on writing with generative tools:

We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

We are now in this era. Being given noisy documents is quite difficult, because using language models to condense or analyze them is not always reliable, and reviewing manually is arduous. Although, maybe only difficult for people who care enough not to pass the problem onward like a hot potato.

Pico Iyer, The Everyday Miracles of Rinko Kawauchi:

The first time I visited Teshima, I wondered why I had to walk around the hillside, taking a long, roundabout course before entering the empty cave. Now I realize that the walk is a form of preparation, a way of slowing down and emptying yourself out so as to receive most fully all that awaits you.

Absorbing information, too, is more meaningful after a bit of preparation.

Matt Webb on reading The Wind in the Willows out loud:

It’s not the lengthy sentences that makes this prose work for me. It’s the rhythm. And I don’t really get that from reading it dead on the page.

Matt takes a cue from Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the Craft: the basic elements of language are physical — the noise words make, the rhythm of their relationships. So he reads out loud, again and again, to get a feel for the text.

This practice helps when processing all kinds of text. It separates what makes sense from what feels confusing, awkward, or unnatural.

Steven van Gemert on nothing:

The problem is that the world is chaotic. You cannot organize everything. Therefore, before you begin working, create a small space of the purest order there is: nothing. This is commonly called a “work surface.”

You use a work surface to temporarily place things while you’re working on them. If something is on your work surface, it needs action. When the work is done, you put items in storage, like a closet or folder.

Managing noisy AI outputs is much easier when you bring small chunks, like sections of an outline, onto a work surface.

David Epstein on monotasking:

In a frantically paced world, the literal and figurative space to think long thoughts requires curation and constraint.

Research shows that multitasking hurts. I get the same feeling when colleagues share AI-generated outlines, diagrams, and prototypes that are dense with information-noise, like I need to multitask just to process the thing.

Guy Jenkins on craft:

There is a joint in woodworking called the dovetail. It requires no glue. No screws. Just two pieces of wood cut with such precision that they lock together through geometry alone - tight, strong, beautiful. A master joiner can cut one by hand in minutes. An apprentice might spend a whole afternoon and still produce something that rocks.

The dovetail cannot be faked. You either cut it true or you don’t.

I think about the dovetail a lot when I watch AI generate interfaces. […] There’s little geometry underneath. No locked joints. Just the appearance of craft without the knowledge that produced it. […] It gives me an appreciation for precision, for tooling and for patience.

Using AI skillfully involves recognizing what it lacks, which means spending significant time studying and critiquing its outputs.