Hands, the Brain, and Product Quality

I  will be talking about this topic in future posts, but circumstances have caused me to bring it up now.  I have just returned from an escape place I have in the Sacramento Valley, which in a short time provides me with amazing physical and mental therapy.  It consists of a bit of land and a small house (my wife calls it a run down shack), and a swell barn I built on a farm belonging to one of my oldest friends.  It provides me with the opposite of my life at Stanford —few people, little noise, no traffic, open scenery, no internet connection, and no cell service.  I go there and work on projects requiring heavy lifting and sweating, but which result in immediate feedback — primarily rescuing old, abandoned, no longer loved machinery. 

The photograph  shows a Model A John Deere and a Northwest crane (in the background) that I restored.  This is a hobby (addiction)  that is rather common in agricultural areas, but less so in the San Francisco Bay area, especially among university professors.  But even a short burst of such activity makes me feel wonderful, and in the opinion of my wife ever-so much more lovable.

In my opinion, the great medicine of my escape place is the uninterrupted opportunity to work with my hands.  We homo sapiens have spent the vast majority of our evolution working with our hands, which along with the brain that controls them, are nothing short of miraculous.  A book dwelling on this written in 1998 by Frank Taylor is The Hand (subtitle: How It's use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture).  If you haven’t thought deeply about these miraculous devices at the end of your arms, take a look through it. 

I was triggered to touch on the subject in this blog because of an article in Sunday’s New York Times entitled Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing, by Michael Graves, a famous architect and emeritus professor at Princeton.  He grieves about the tendency of his students to use the computer to produce drawings whenever possible, rather than the pencil .  This is often a reaction of designers old enough to have fully established their career before computers and to have acquired great facility with drawing, but there is truth in it.  Computers are a great help to those involved in designing and manufacturing products, but drawing, especially trained free-hand sketching, when combined with the human brain result in tremendous ability to create, communicate, and think through problems, if for no other reason, because sketches appear less final and more open to iteration than the products of the computer.   I am a believer.  The connection between brain and hand is intimate.  Think of doodling, or resorting to a rough sketch when you can’t get an idea across.

 And drawing is a skill that can be developed through practice.  Not everyone will acquire the same level or proficiency, or have as easy a time improving their skill. But everyone can improve.  When I first began teaching at Stanford, I taught a large required freshman course in the engineering school entitled Introduction to Design.  It was about drawing.  Many of the students claimed they could not draw, and disliked the course because it was difficult for them.  But they were thinking of  photographic realism, and the course was about sketching and thinking visually in general.  It was a difficult course to teach, but very rewarding, because to many of these students it was an introduction to a new and extremely powerful way of solving problems. 

 I must admit I was not entirely successful.  At the time I taught it, there was great interest in engineering because of the “space race”. One of the students, David Kennedy, had declared engineering for a major, and fell prey to an assignment I innocently gave, requiring the students to make a freehand sketch of a steam locomotive (they were still around).  He hated the course and in particular that assignment so much that he dropped the course and engineering and changed to history. But  the good news is that he is now acknowledged as one of the top American historians in the world, and won the Pulitzer prize in 2000 for a magnificent book entitled Freedom from Fear.  He is now a very good friend of mine, and occasionally makes me famous by giving me credit for his career (with tongue in cheek) in his public lectures and interviews.  Maybe I was very successful.