The happy person in the photo is Dave Beach, Professor at
Stanford and founder and proprietor of the Product Realization Laboratory in
the School of Engineering. I have
written about Dave and the Lab in previous posts, but an excellent short (3
minute) video about the lab has just been released that is well worth
watching. It will make you feel
good. It is here.
The students who make use of this lab design and build things themselves—not by sending them out to professional design and manufacturing people. This process involves working with their hands as well as their minds. And I believe it contributes greatly to the ability to produce high quality hardware products. There is such a thing as tacit knowledge, which is usually learned by doing.
As I have mentioned in previous posts, working with the hands is one of my main pleasures – quick feedback, satisfaction, and confidence that if it is broken, I can fix it, and if it doesn’t exist, I can make it. It has beautifully balanced the more traditional professorial and domestic components of my life. If you want to read a book about the importance of hands and of using them, try The Hand, by Frank R. Wilson (Vintage, 1999). At the time he wrote it, he was leading a hand clinic at the UCSF medical school. A large number of his clients were musicians, who obviously cared deeply about their hands, because they are their livelihood as well as the secret to doing what they love.
The students involved with the Product Realization Lab are overseen not only by people on the permanent lab staff, but by a number of teaching assistants, who have demonstrated their ability to not only work in the lab, but supervise people who usually begin their work in the lab with little, if any, training or background in shop work. These TA’s tend to be an impressive lot indeed, for their abilities to design and manufacture things, their ability to teach others, and their overall creativity and confidence. Were I still working as an engineering manager, I would make an attempt to hire as many of them as I could.
I find that since I have retired, I have been drawn more and more to people who have always loved to work with their hands, whether they have been company founders, executives, physicians, engineers, artists, machinists, or whatever. In fact many of them had reached a point where they had enough money, energy, and intellectual background to do practically anything they wanted to after retirement. They could have spent their time reading great works, traveling to exotic locations, seeking the finest in food and drink, listening to fine music and absorbing outstanding theater, or otherwise focusing on vicarious pleasures. Instead, they have chosen to spend much of their time domesticating such things as knots in the wood, chattering tool bits, hot steel, and uncooperative welding rod, and seeking replacement parts and no-longer- made fasteners.
It’s the only way to live!
I will talk more about this in future posts. In the meantime, if you did not watch the video, do it now.
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