Stay up to date with my newsletter for more thoughts and projects~~
I’ve now lived in New York City for nearly 2 years after graduation from design school. As a former product design student, I’ve found that one of the things that I miss the most is access. Access to people, to institutions, to space. I’ve since realized that the most powerful key that I’ve possessed had been the sentence “I’m a student in this class and I need to…” followed by a request for access to anything you can imagine. One of the most practical accesses that I miss the most is access to the wood shop. This was an access to space to create, to make messes, to craft. Access to people, knowledge, and expertise in woodworking far behind mine. And finally access to tools, capabilities, and processes. All of this has been sorely missed.
Thinking that it could be easily replicated, I told myself that I could easily keep up a practice through personal projects on the side. Plus, with most of my day now behind a computer screen as a design consultant, I could use an additional physical and creative outlet; not to mention how helpful it would be as I filled out my first apartment. Furthermore, who doesn’t feel that ‘can do’ attitude right when graduating college? What could go wrong?
Now this didn’t come crashing down on my head per say, but this ‘fun’ endeavor turned into the most frustrating parts of my weeks. At first I felt bad to turn sour on a ‘passion,’ but talks with friends have quelled my worries; we often get frustrated with the things we love the most. If it’s something we love, we strive to have the perfect piece of furniture, perfect choreography, perfect workout, perfect recipe, and are emotional when it doesn’t quite get there.
Comically, I think about my romantic associations with ‘woodworking.’ It’s about deep tradition, refined craft, tender slowness, and skillful handiness. That all sorta goes out the window when you’re trying to cut consistent 45 degree miters in living room (It should also be noted that I cuss the most when I’m ‘woodworking’).
I have not yet mastered the art of making things with very little tools in an unequipped space. While I might not be an expert from all of this, I do have 4 takeaways that I am keeping with me:
1.
You must accept the loss a lot of certainty and time. There’s nothing wrong with creating something with a machine. There’s nothing wrong about 3D printing a chair instead of carving it out by hand. All the matters is what you prioritize. As someone who loved making fine furniture with perfect joinery and clean lines, I deeply missed the advanced precise tools that imbued certainty, precision, and repeatability. Ensuring all 24 pieces are exactly 4.5" long is a much taller with battery powered tools as oppose to a large table saw. Many pieces were thrown out in my journey as my humble setup made repeatability and certainty harder to achieve. Before I made the right jigs to accomplish this, a task that would take me 10 minutes to setup and execute on the table saw would end up taking 3 times as long with my crude setup and will less of a guarantee of certainty.
I admire many of the makers who embrace the opposite of perfect: those who proudly display the human (not machine) hand behind their work; the exposed screw heads, the glue residue, the wildly maximalist forms. I found myself stuck in the middle, trying to optimize and achieve certainty on one hand, and a desire to hack it together. I’ve completely rethought my process of fabrication
2.
Dust management is a priority. The god damn dust. You don’t realize it get everywhere. When you’re in a shop, you certainly see dust everywhere, you touch something and see your finger mark. But you accept it as a part of a workspace (along with many other things). However, you cannot accept it as a part of your living space. Eventually, I began ‘tarping’ off as small a section of space as possible (but still large enough to work in) to contain as much saw dust as possible and make clean up a manageable task. This presented an additional challenge of trying to occupy as little floor space as possible while still being able to carry out every needed task and have space to move around your piece. Confining yourself felt counter to the act of creation, but the alternative was to let dust settle everywhere in the apartment and dedicate at least a full hour to clean it off of every surface imaginable.
3.
A new practice of entering and exiting. One of my favorite things about the wood shop was the way you could pickup your work where you left off. Because it was a dedicated space, it felt ritualistic enough to know that you were entering a different special space, but it was frictionless enough that you could quickly get going. The same was for exiting; the process of cleaning and returning things marked a ritualistic goodbye to the work but also did not take too much time but it bookended the experience nicely. The same cannot be said for making something in your living room. The friction to start felt higher and the ritual of entering a new special place was gone. The act of arduously hanging up a screen for dust from the ceiling and the act of restoring the workplace to make it resemble a living room has introduces much friction into the process. This has made me appreciate the thoughtful design of that wood shop space beyond the power tools and where they go to uphold that reflection.
4.
Working Alone: One final aspect that I miss about working in a wood shop space was the collective brainpower with the people you work with. Not only do you share the tools and the space, but you also share the brainpower, creativity, and experience with the people around you. This manifests in trouble shooting difficult operations, brainstorming new ideas, and even receiving validation that you’re not crazy. The shop culture and environment spurs action, timely collaboration, and a humble openness to learn from those around you. I expected to miss the tangible obvious things like the tools, but didn’t anticipate the impact the absence of that type of culture would have. While figuring out how to carry big pieces on your own is difficult enough, the added difficulty of proceeding without validation from other experienced woodworkers introduces a new mental procedural roadblock. Diving into the unknown has taught me a few things;
- It has slowed me down considerably, but not necessarily in a bad way. I’m more thoughtful, cautious, and cognizant of the differing potential outcomes and consequences. I need to think more intentionally about tangential experiences that I can draw upon to inform the new situation I find myself in.
- It has forced me to have needed to leverage external research more heavily. This includes learning more formal techniques that I haven’t familiarized my self before to diving into more informal sources like youtube, reddit, and instagram. While this is similar to just asking those immediately around me, it comes with differing implications; the flow and delivery of knowledge digitally doesn’t bring me closer to people as it does with in person. But this is also an opportunity to approach online relationships in new ways.
- Finally, it has infused more confidence to make my own decisions and mistakes. With more leverage in my decisions, I also own more of the learnings. Whether the outcome is good or bad, I gain greater more personal insights that would not have resonated with me as strongly if I had simply followed instructions someone else gave me.
While I haven’t made the most perfect things, I’m grateful for what this practice has brought me; from learning new ways of working to instilling stronger senses of ownership. Looking ahead, I’m curious what other wood working arrangements could teach me. How would my practice change if I were to rent out dedicated studio space? If I shared the space with professionals? If I owned my own space? What would I learn from each of these?
Stay up to date with my newsletter for more thoughts and projects~~
