Notes Design

In Digital Designers Rediscover Their Hands, some of the action takes place literally in our backyard as the article name checks our coastal hamlet of Montara, CA as well as our colleague Mike Kuniavsky, all in the consideration of designers developing (or rediscovering) their manual skills, as a way to stimulate the thinking part of making. See also Kinesthetic Learning.

Mr. Tulley's transformation highlights a little-noticed movement in the world of professional design and engineering: a renewed appreciation for manual labor, or innovating with the aid of human hands.

Using computers to model the physical world has become increasingly common; products as diverse as cars and planes, pharmaceuticals and cellphones are almost entirely conceived, specified and designed on a computer screen. Typically, only when these creations are nearly ready for mass manufacturing are prototypes made - and often not by the people who designed them.