SHOP CLASS & DEEP ENERGY
In 1980, when Hurricane Bob ripped through Martha’s Vineyard, it tore down a big hickory tree alongside Humphrey’s Bakery in West Tisbury. We took the butt log, hauled it to our yard, and milled it into planks. Until a few months ago they sat on stickers somewhere deep in our wood storage building waiting for my son Pinto to make a rocking chair for me and my wife Chris.
No more. He just finished the rocker. I’d show a picture but I don’t have one yet that does it justice 
(I do have a picture of a prototype reclaimed wood SMC floor lamp he made; here it is).
Pinto’s a superb woodworker (and one of my fellow owners at South Mountain), a sublime musician, a great Dad, and many other things that make me proud. (No bias here, of course). The rocker is so artfully crafted that to look at it takes your breath away and to sit in it makes you sink into reverie and wonder who will be sitting in that chair in 200 years.
Pinto grew up watching and helping my colleagues and me build. He wandered around the shop. He made stuff all the time. I didn’t grow up with that. But I did have shop class in seventh grade with Mr. Eddy. I built a slalom water ski out of mahogany. To bend the tip I had to slice it with a bandsaw, glue in lots of small pieces and bend it on a form. I wasn’t that good with a bandsaw, so if you look at the edge of the ski in the picture below (I still have it today; it’s gathering dust in the rafters of our shop) you’ll see that the laminations wander.
Can you tell?
The laminations may wander, but the ski is true and the experience of shop class was so memorable that I remember it clearly almost 50 years later. The thought of that shop class – which is a dying part of our educational system – leads me to the juxtaposition of craftsmanship, factory-produced housing, and the work ahead.
In a 2006 essay called “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” (which has become a book of the same name that I haven’t read – the subtitle is “An Inquiry into the Value of Work”) the author, Matthew Crawford, makes a case for the importance of manual work and craftsmanship:
“Skilled manual labor entails a systematic encounter with the material world, precisely the kind of encounter that gives rise to natural science. From its earliest practice, craft knowledge has entailed knowledge of the “ways” of one’s materials – that is, knowledge of their nature, acquired through disciplined perception and a systematic approach to problems.”
Eliminating shop class assumes that it is a good idea to herd everyone into college and get them busy in front of a screen as soon as possible. It assumes that there is little to be learned from manual labor and little value to society. But who’s to say that the “jobs of the future” in a “post-industrial” economy are more fulfilling or more valuable?
Meanwhile, Inga Saffron wrote an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer in January called “City’s Green Groundbreakers” about the Philadelphia Four, a group of rising design firms that see architecture “as a weapon in the battle to stave off environmental ruin.”
The four are convinced that conventional building methods are as obsolete as “hunting and gathering.” Building takes too long, wastes too much, and costs too much. “Rather than attempting to make our system greener, these architects are bent on overthrowing it,” says Saffron.
It’s all about digitizing what we build, electronically sending models to factories, building under controlled conditions, and snapping together components on a site.
Doesn’t sound so new, does it? It’s the old modernist call to arms, which has been going on for a century, and still nobody’s figured out a way to do it better than the Sears Roebucks kit homes of the early 1900’s, which combined craftsmanship with factory production and automation.
(Between 1908 and 1940, Sears customers ordered about 75,000 houses from the Sears Roebuck mail-order catalogs. The houses were shipped by rail all over the country. Each kit home contained 30,000 pieces, including 750 pounds of nails and 27 gallons of paint and varnish. A 75-page instruction book showed homebuyers, step by step, how to assemble the pieces. Many of those houses still exist.)
Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake, the elders of the Philadelphia Four, wrote a manifesto called Refabricating Architecture in 2003 that says that buildings should be produced like airplanes and cars.
I’m not convinced. A large part of the process of building has already found its way to the factory – building is more a process of assembling manufactured parts than ever before. Maybe most of what can successfully be produced in factories already is.
This is especially true of the big work ahead in the building realm, which (in the times of diminishing resources and declining population to come) will be about fixing the buildings we’ve got in transformative ways. Deep Energy Retrofits for profound energy use reduction, increased comfort, and greater durability.
Here on Martha’s Vineyard there are 18,000 existing buildings. Each will – at some point – need to be brought into the 21st century, or just thrown away. This is true of the entire developed world (in the developing world the story may be different).
This work is not going to happen in a factory. It is going to happen with teams of well-trained designers, engineers, technicians, analysts, craftspeople, tradespeople, and laborers.” The digital information will flow from studio to site rather than from office to factory. Much of the digital information will be collected at the site, in the same way that a craftsperson collects information “through disciplined perception and a systematic approach to problems.”
Craftsmanship is the practice of staying with a pursuit for a long time and boring deeply into it to get it right. That’s not something we want to disappear; it’s something we want to encourage. We’re trying to learn to do Deep Energy Retrofits this way. Let’s bring back Shop Class, get the kids away from the screens for a bit, and let them make their own wandering saw cuts which will, in due time, straighten out. Mine did. Sort of.
BUYING BOOKS
I love to buy books and read books. I don’t often use the library. I don’t own a Kindle. I buy books. But I’ve noticed that I end up reading only about two thirds of the books I buy. Not a good percentage. Each of those I don’t read wastes stuff: paper, ink, money, time, and space. I’d like to raise the percentage.
My family and I (wife, kids and grandkids) visited my parents in Palo Alto, California over New Year’s. We stayed at the Stanford Faculty Club in the middle of the very quiet – on recess – Stanford campus. The Stanford Bookstore – one of my favorite bookstores anywhere, and I rate bookstores like food critics rate dinner – is a three minute walk away. 
So I decided to spend time in the bookstore every day, and carefully evaluate books for reading. I looked at a lot of books. I was trying to look at each one carefully enough, and read enough of it, to determine whether once I got it out of the store, it would grab my attention deeply enough – and for long enough – that I would actually read it. The goal is to get my percentage up, way up.
Among the books I spent time with were:
• Tracy Kidder’s most recent book, Strength in What Remains, an against-all-odds story about a kid fleeing to New York to get away from the genocidal war in his native Burundi;
• Kurt Vonnegut’s new collection of previously unpublished stories, Look at the Birdie – I don’t read much fiction these days, but I love Kurt Vonnegut;
• Journalist Amanda Little’s book Power Trip, an account of a cross-country road trip to discover the impact of fossil fuels (and the need for alternatives).
• Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s latest intellectual tour-de-force full of radical solutions to our current economic predicaments;
• Glimmer, written by Warren Berger and subtitled How Design Can Transform Your Life (and Maybe the World), in which he collaborates with celebrated Canadian designer Bruce Mau to explore the power of design to solve business and social problems.
• The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs, Michael Belfiore, a look under the hood of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—the maverick and controversial group whose work has had amazing civilian influence in addition to its impact on the military.
There were many others, too, and I would like to read every one of those books listed above, but in the end I only bought one, and it was an odd choice. It was written by Tina Seelig, a professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford, and called What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. 
The book was written in response to the coming-of-age of her son Josh. Wondering about how he would make his way in this world, she looked back at her life, and her teaching methods, and produced a provocative manifesto for the young.
The reason I chose it is because my daughter is grappling with the same issues – where does her true passion lie and what kind of career and life will she develop? I thought it might be a good read for both of us. She hasn’t read it yet – she left two days ago for a winter of wildlife research in Costa Rica with Global Vision International, which will surely be more life-changing than any book her father could toss her way – but I have, and it was worth it.
What sold me – as I sat at the bookstore with a pile of books stacked on the broad arm of a comfortable chair – was a story at the very beginning about an assignment she used with her students. She gave them an envelope with five dollars of “seed funding”, granted plenty of planning time, and then allowed them two hours, once they open the envelope, to generate as much money as possible. She says, “Most of my students eventually found a way to move far beyond the standard responses. They took seriously the challenge to question traditional assumptions – exposing a wealth of possibilities – in order to create as much value as possible.”
The teams that did best didn’t use the five dollars at all. They realized that the money framed the problem way too tightly, and that five dollars is essentially nothing, and that the assignment is really to figure out how to make money when you start with nothing. . They identified problems they experienced or noticed others experiencing – problems they might have seen before but had never thought to solve and became very inventive.
One group set up a stand in front of the student union and offered to measure bicycle tire pressure for free. If the tires needed filling, they added air for a dollar. They had the uneasy feeling that they were taking advantage of their fellow students, who could go to a nearby gas station to have their tires filled for free. It turns out their first few customers were grateful and that they were providing a convenient and valuable service. Nonetheless, after the first hour, they stopped asking for a dollar and requested donations instead. Their income soared. Experimenting along the way paid off. The iterative process, where small changes are made in response to customer feedback, allowed them to optimize their strategy on the fly. Afterward the students agreed that they would never need to be broke, since there is always a problem at hand waiting to be solved.
What a lesson.
“Being in business,” says Seelig, “should be like traveling in a foreign country. Even if you prepare carefully, have an itinerary and a place to stay at night, the most interesting experiences usually aren’t planned.” You meet someone who leads you to an extraordinary place, you have unexpected encounters, and the most memorable parts of the trip are the surprising parts that happened into your path.
Come to think of it, I think I knew all that when I was 20, and the reason I read the book is that I’m now re-learning it. It’s about resilience, which may be the successor to the idea of sustainability. Since change is inevitable the impacts may be dependent on our ability to harness the unexpected.
DESIGN THINKING
In the autumn issue of Strategy + Business Magazine, editor Art Kleiner interviews Tim Brown, CEO of the legendary design firm IDEO. Kleiner tells about IDEO’s first great protoype, which was created when the company consisted of eight scruffy designers crowded together in an upstairs studio on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Douglas Dayton and Jim Yurchenko affixed the roller ball from a tube of Ban roll-on deodorant to the base of a plastic butter dish. Before long Apple Computer was shipping its first mouse.
Brown is a proponent of Design Thinking – every problem, in his view, is a design issue and can only be solved with Design Thinking. He says, “I want to challenge designers to transform design practice. There will always be a place for the artist, the craftsman, and the lone inventor, but the astonishing pace of change in the world demand new approaches to design: collaborative, in a way that amplifies, rather than subdues, the creative powers of individuals; focused but flexible and responsive to unexpected opportunities. . . The next generation of designers will need to begin looking at every problem – from adult literacy to global climate change – as a design problem.”
He recently published a book called Change by Design. Reading the book reminded me of my own brief encounter with IDEO two years ago.
As a Stanford undergrad Deb Meisel worked a summer at South Mountain as an intern. She did some great work helping us develop a manual of information and company practice for new employees. When she left she was looking forward to an exciting opportunity: working at IDEO.
Not long after I was in Palo Alto and Deb took me for a whirlwind tour of IDEO. It was unlike any other company tour could possibly be.
The Palo Alto offices (there are now additional offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, New York, London, Munich, and Shanghai) are a campus that has developed over time in a sprawling set of old commercial buildings and back alleys near downtown, the ultimate “low-road” facility. Outside they are unimposing and unremarkable. But open any door and watch out!! Walk in and it’s truly psychedelic. Everywhere you look there’s stuff you want to examine, touch, read, explore. It’s like a carnival, a bazaar, and a museum rolled into one. Overwhelms the senses.
Here there’s a glass cylinder piled full with crude foam prototypes of computer mouses. Then there’s a graphically beautiful poster meant to hang in a hospital room that says “Here’s what’s going to happen to you while you’re here and here’s what it’s going to be like” and elegantly explains each step and tells you all the things you never know in hospitals until they rudely happen to you. Bikes hang everywhere on cables up in the high warehouse-like ceilings (One of the IDEO designers, years ago, got tired of tripping over all the bikes clogging the passageways every day. He invented a cable system to raise and lower them, built it that night, and the next day bikes began to hang from the ceilings). There’s a beautifully appointed employee eating and gathering space. A curving glass showcase displays the various iterations – about thirty of them – of Palm Pilots.
We walk into buildings, out of buildings, down alleys, and into other buildings. We come to the Toy Lab. This is the only place at IDEO where people are not working on projects for clients. Here, a team of creatives spends all their time making new toys. The Toy Lab is out of this world. I want to take a picture. Not okay.
And then to the Kitchen, where test cooking is done and food products and packaging are developed and on to the shop. Oh, the shop. Huge, cluttered, and organized. Rows of Bridgeport Millers, bandsaws, and every imaginable kind of metal and woodworking tool. This is where prototyping happens, where people make things over and over, trying different versions, experimenting.
It’s 6 in the evening, and all the buildings are semi-occupied and busy. Deb says people work at all hours. They work when they want. People look purposeful. At the same time, they look relaxed. Some have their feet up on their desks. Some are munching. Some are hunched at computers; others are engaged in animated conversation.
All this happened in 15 or 20 minutes. I kept wanting to stop and spend an hour or two here, there, and everywhere.
It’s an intoxicating place, a collaborative Mecca, the reflection of an ethos that knows, as Brown says, “that all of us are smarter than any of us.” The long-term global transformation ahead will require more than political will and appropriate investment; it will also require collaboration, the kind Tim Brown refers to, but possibly of a type and scale heretofore unknown. We will need new tools, new abilities, and new ways of working together. New forms of governance and business.
I read a few passages from Change By Design at the most recent meeting of our Design Group. I am convinced that the future of our industry – and our business – is the fusion of Tim Brown’s Design Thinking and Stewart Brand’s Planet Craft (see Whole Earth Discipline). Seems like a vast virgin forest of opportunity . . . and necessity.
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JOHN ABRAMS is co-founder and CEO
of South Mountain Company and the author
of COMPANIES WE KEEP read more
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COMPANIES WE KEEP is published by Chelsea Green Publishing
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