In my search, no one embodied this new class of craftsman more than Joel Bukiewicz, a knife maker in Brooklyn. I learned about Joel, as I did many others, after watching a short 10-minute documentary about him, his craft, and his perspective on making. The video was shot as part of the Made By Hand series. It consisted of Joel talking over clips of himself in his gritty workshop in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. I was captivated by the visual tone of the film and of Joel’s world.

Like for me, making wasn’t always a part of Joel’s life. It was something he stumbled into during a particularly tough and uncertain time. Joel was living in Brooklyn, having just graduated with a degree in fiction writing from the New School, and was trying to get his writing career off the ground. After a prolonged struggle to sell his first manuscript, fear and doubt began to set in. It became so worrisome that Joel decided to take time off from writing. He let go of the fear by letting go of the hope.

With the hole that writing left, Joel began to fill his time with new “creative offerings” like making bookshelves, canoe paddles, or fixing things around the house. While spending time in Georgia, he began teaching himself how to make knives in a garden shed behind the house. The process resonated with him. The making of knives had the feel and fundamental utility that pushed all the right buttons. He started with sporting and hunting knives, putting thousands of hours into his newfound craft. After coming to the realization that the knives weren’t actually being used, and valuing the idea of utility more than art, Joel switched his focus to creating knives for the kitchen. His passion has since turned into a thriving small business in Brooklyn, where Joel still makes every knife by hand.

I’ve never made a knife. But I’d like to try. I wonder if I’d get that same rush, the internal “click” of something that feels right. That was the dream when I started. I wanted to find something that I could pour myself into. My starting point was the same as Joel’s: a creative hole that I needed to fill with something tactile. Joel’s search, moving from bookshelves to paddles, mirrored my own quest, which was a sampling of maker aesthetics. Like finding the right pair of jeans, it involved trying on a number of different roles, sitting in them for a moment, and trying to get a feel for whether this was “me.” Only after you have something that fits can you start breaking it in.

It wasn’t until much later, after I was knee-deep in underwater robotics, that I realized how critical that search had been. I learned that craftsmanship is not a destination, it’s a process. And the search—the trying-on process—was the first phase. It’s impossible to achieve mastery without starting the search. It feels similar to unlocking a padlock: twisting to the right, then back to the left, then back to the right. That doesn’t work. Back to twisting. Then, just when you’re ready to break the damn thing, something clicks. All the frustration and failed attempts are behind you, and were, in fact, part of the unlocking.

You picked up this book for a reason. Something about the idea of creating an actual, physical object spoke to you. Based on my conversations with other reluctant makers, this could be that you had a product you have always wanted to create. Or maybe it’s that you read about 3D printing and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Fundamentally, though, I’m willing to bet that there is a part of you that sees this maker movement as scratching an itch. It seems to me that that itch lives somewhere near this idea of craftsmanship—tactile and meaningful work—that I just described.

If you don’t have a specific project in mind already, but you find yourself driven by the same search for authentic creativity, I encourage you to recreate a similar “Maker Sampling Quest” that Joel and I found ourselves on (Joel’s writing sabbatical and ensuing “creative offerings” and my Zero to Maker journey). There’s something re-humanizing about the process. For me, it became very clear that human beings are tool builders and tool users; it’s ingrained in each of us. It creates a connection to the past and a sense of responsibility to the future. Committing myself to the month-long search helped me to crystallize that perspective.

The natural inclination is to rush the craftsmanship process, to squeeze into the first maker aesthetic you find. I think it’s worth it, if you can afford it, to designate the first month as a re-skilling exploration.

Here are some ideas and tips:

As much as I talk about this being a journey into a new world, don’t dismiss the knowledge and materials in your immediate surroundings and past experiences. In fact, after you start looking, it’s easy to find the maker spirit everywhere around you. Sometimes you don’t have to go far to find the feeling of craftsmanship. Sometimes it’s been with you all along. It just might be a new way of approaching what you already know. Susan Hoff taught me that.

Susan makes bags—beautiful, durable bags handcrafted from old sails and horseback riding reins. By grabbing a seat in her small studio in the Mission District in San Francisco, I had an inside look into the entire sourcing, manufacturing, marketing, and accounting departments of Susan Hoff, Inc. A large, sturdy table with a Sailright sewing machine takes up most of the room. Finished bags, about eight in total, adorn the north wall while shelves stuffed with old, folded sails and reins fill the rest of the space.

“I think this is the smallest industrial sewing maching you can get. It’s made for sewing sails on board boats,” she explains. Clearly, she doesn’t need much. The Sailright and an old-school push palm are the only tools she uses.

The bags, the tools, the studio: it all seems to fit together. It’s just so unapologetically her own. And the more I learned about her background, the more it came together.

Hoff had a hands-on childhood. When she was in middle school, her family bought an old, condemned farmhouse in northwestern Illinois. They spent the next five years completely renovating and rebuilding. She credits the experience as giving her the confidence to use tools. It was also during those high school years that her mom first taught her how to sew.

In addition to life on the farm, she spent time sailing at summer camps, eventually becoming an instructor at one of them. Her love for boats and the water grew when she spent a semester of college sailing around the Caribbean on the 134-foot schooner Corwith Cramer. After college, she spent more than three years leading sailing trips, some of them 3 or 4 weeks long, for Outward Bound.

The bag business was almost an accident. While working for Outward Bound, someone gave her an old sail that was well beyond its useful sailing days. She loved the texture of the canvas and decided to try and make a bag out of it. The results were great so she made another. Then another. Pretty soon she was getting requests from friends for bags of their own. She told me she had a breakthrough when she realized she could make money selling her bags in a few small retail stores in Maine. The bag business has grown from there. Whenever Susan has traveled or moved to a new city, she’s brought along her Sailright and set up shop.

She’s currently thinking about opening up a retail location in San Francisco, but even as we talk about it, she seems to go back on the idea. It’s not that she doesn’t think it would succeed—she’s confident it would. She’s just hesitant about the commitment. She’d rather take two months off and sail across the Atlantic Ocean (which she’s done) if the opportunity arises.

It’s hard not to be charmed by the life Susan has created for herself. The simplicity is alluring: taking old, undervalued materials and working them into a new, useful life. The value is so tangible. She gets out exactly what she puts in.

I’ve grown to love that quality of the makers I’ve met. They create value. It’s not an indifference to the grander scheme of things, but a sufficient preoccupation with immediate possibility. They don’t seem overly concerned with changing the world. They’re content to find a small corner of it—a place that not enough people are paying attention to—and make it beautiful.

It doesn’t necessarily take a 3D printer or an Arduino microcontroller to start making things. Sometimes the project you’ve been searching for—your maker sweet spot—has been a part of you all along. Susan is a perfect example. She didn’t have a blueprint for her maker life and business. She just started making what she knew.

When you venture into the unknown (and you should) with skills that are unfamiliar, you learn that all of these tools have their own unique histories. Even the latest and greatest have a maker lineage that can be traced back through generations of tool users. Sometimes there is new terminology or slightly different styles and techniques, but there are always people who came before. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants.

Part of learning a craft is learning that history. This became evident to me as I tried my hand at welding.

I actually had no good reason to weld anything. There were no parts of the ROV that needed to be welded together. I didn’t have dreams of building my own grill or fixing up an old motorcycle. There was just something about joining two pieces of metal together. For me, it was a romantic idea about welding masks, torches, and flying sparks. I had to try it.

Like any tool in the shop, as soon as you scratch the surface, you quickly realize just how much there is to learn, and how specialized the knowledge becomes, depending on what you want to do.

I enjoyed gas welding with the Tin Man, but it wasn’t my “thing” like Joel’s knife epiphany or Susan’s bag making. It was just a memorable pit stop on my maker journey. But if I ever want to dive deeper into welding or metalworking, I’ll know where to go. I would try to create some type of informal apprenticeship under the Tin Man. I would get my mile of welding in while trying to understand what it meant to be that next link in the chain of metalworkers.

Apprenticeships are an old idea, dating back to the Middle Ages, and they’re still around today. All over the world, some form of the apprenticeship model has been used for centuries to pass specific crafts to the next generation. Apprenticeships are still a fundamental feature of the education system in many countries, especially Germany. They are still alive in the United States, too, but they’ve taken on a rather narrow role. Currently, they are used mainly by the trades and labor unions—electricians, painters, plumbers, and others—as a bridge from school to work. It’s still an excellent option if you aspire to a career in the trades.^[16]

However, I think there’s an opportunity to apply the apprenticeship model in new, more tactile ways than the “momentary apprenticeship” of YouTube and the traditional apprenticeship of the trade associations. This model would be less formal, more broad, and more realistic for the work and life demands of new makers and experienced craftspeople alike. For example, if I decided that I wanted to learn metalworking, it’s terribly intimidating for me to think about going back to school with the intention of locking myself into one type of work for the next 30 years. But I also wouldn’t trust myself after watching a few YouTube videos.

Instead, I would set about creating my own apprenticeship—not based on a set curriculum or National Institute of Metalworking Standards (NIMS), but based on absorbing the knowledge of the most skilled craftsman I could find. To continue with the metalworking example, I would convince the Tin Man to let me work for him, making sure I was clearly articulating two things:

It’s one thing to learn how to make knives in a class at a makerspace, but it would be quite another to shadow Joel and learn how, in addition to making knives, he manages his small artisan business in the digital age; that’s an art form in and of itself.

In his book Mastery (Profile Books Ltd, 2012), Robert Green emphasizes the essential step of apprenticeship in achieving mastery: “…the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character—the first transformation on the way to mastery.”

That fits with my idea. The notch on the belt isn’t as important as actually absorbing knowledge. Greene goes on to outline three phases of this self-learning style of apprenticeship:

Greene also acknowledges the point when it’s time to move on, when the learning has reached a point of diminishing returns. The beautiful part about this self-styled apprenticeship is that you can then take your newfound skills to your next endeavor or adventure. You are not locked in to a foregone career path, and you are free to create value elsewhere.

Some part of me was always jealous of the craftsman (or what I imagined them to be). More than their manual skill, I felt that they were better prepared for the world than I was. They knew what was valuable. They built their lives on stable ground, whereas I had taken the “promising career in a growing industry” bait.

Somewhere along my path, I had confused the decline in the popularity of a traditional tool or technique with a decline in value. Still steeped in my tool insecurity, I began to hypothesize that older techniques were not only still valuable, but sometimes actually more valuable.

My thinking was based on an omission in one of the basic concepts taught in business schools and marketing classes around the country: the Innovation Curve, as shown in Figure 5-1. The Innovation Curve, or the Diffusion of Innovations Theory, was developed by Everett Rogers while he was an assistant professor of rural sociology at Ohio State University. He published his ideas in his book, Diffusions of Innovations (Free Press, 1962). He theorized that adopters of new innovations (technology, ideas, products, etc.) fell into distinct categories: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.

He based his theory on the bell curve, pictured in Figure 5-1.

Figure 5-1. The Innovation Curve (from Wikimedia Commons)

At one point, the theory became the second most cited paper in the social sciences. The idea received a new life of sorts when it was repackaged and sold in the form of a marketing book, Crossing the Chasm (HarperBusiness, 2006), by Geoffrey A. Moore. Moore used Rogers’ concept to explain why some technology companies fail or succeed based on their ability to attract and persuade “early adopters.”

For better or worse, the terminology has stuck with us. When I first saw the Innovation Curve, I thought it was overly simplistic. I still think that’s true, but have also decided that it’s misleading. Not that I totally disagree with Rogers and Moore’s analysis of technological innovation, I just think it only tells half the story; it focuses solely on the rate of adoption, ignoring both the nature of use and the rate of “un-adoption.”

In the real world, adoption can hardly ever be explained by a simple bell curve. Tools and technologies are continually replaced. The reasons are endless: something shiny and newer, cost barriers, unforeseen market shocks, supply issues, etc. To account for this, I’ve decided to create my own innovation curve, one that takes into account both the rate of adoption as well as un-adoption. The new graph, which I’m calling the Unnovation Curve (seen in Figure 5-2), attempts to tell a more complete story by including the general form of both technological diffusion and dissolution.

Figure 5-2. The Unnovation Curve

Is it perfect? No way! But the important part of the updated graph is to introduce and emphasize a new category of technology user: the collector. In the Unnovation Curve, a collector can come from any one of the previous groups; late adopters, laggards, early majority, late majority, and (although unlikely) even early adopters. What’s important about the collectors is not when they adopted a tool, but when they refused to reject it. They are the ones left standing in the musical chairs of technological evolution.

My definition of a collector is someone who refuses to reject a technology after it has passed its peak; or in other words, it is no longer recognized as a mainstream technology. For instance, the horse as a means for transportation is no longer considered a mainstream technology for getting around. However, horseback riding hasn’t gone away, it’s just evolved into equestrianism. It’s not something everyone does anymore, but it’s something some people still do.

This post by David Frey, in which he interviews farrier Danny Ward for the Tractor Supply blog, is the perfect anecdote:

The nature and makeup of the collectors is always different, but for every technology or tool that you can imagine, more often than not you’ll find a group of die-hard enthusiasts who keep it alive for one reason or another. For me, this is reassuring. I like the idea that there are people out there who are working with tools I’ve never even imagined. It keeps it interesting.

Take flint knapping, for instance. Flint knapping is the process of shaping stone tools for use in weapons, building, or decorations. It involves using both a hard and soft hammer to slowly remove flakes of stone—flint, chert, obsidian, or something similar—until the desired shape is reached. It’s a primitive form of stone carving, and different forms of flint knapping have been used by cultures all over the world. However, after the rise of more modern metalworking technology, the practical uses of flint knapping eroded. Now the technique lives on in the hands of experimental archaeologists and a certain class of outdoorsman scattered around the world. But these modern knappers are insistent. At one point, a handful of researchers and writers even “helped to ignite a small craze in knapping” thanks to their publications.

I learned about flint knapping through the Make: blog and, after following a few links, quickly found myself deep inside a foreign microculture. Much of it is centered around flintknappers.com, a site that gives knappers a platform to share knowledge. The man who runs the site, Mike Miller, started it in 2001 as a way for him and a few friends to publicize and sell their work. It has since turned into the central online hub for lithic art. Mike is a lifelong knapper; the hobby stems from his interest in arrowheads as a kid. Now he runs the site in addition to his work as an archaeologist.

From my perspective, Mike Miller is an enviable entrepreneur. It’s not a full-time job, but it amplifies his other work (and he explained that others do make a living as full-time knappers). He has a loyal and enthusiastic customer base. The flint knapping market is relatively insulated against market shocks, and there is no chance that a technology will come along and “replace” flint knapping. For all intents and purposes, it’s holding its course. And, Mike and his fellow flint knappers are holding onto knowledge that will never expire.

In his book Antifragile (Random House, 2012), Nassim Taleb argues that, in fact, the technologies that have survived the longest are most likely to endure. He refers to one of his insights as the Lindy Effect: “the longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live.”

Taleb elucidates his theory by explaining one of his typical evenings:

This simplified narrative is true for most of us. We’re surrounded by countless technologies of the past, yet we’ve become blind to their provenance and oblivious to the potential of actually making them ourselves. But just because we don’t notice the changes as much as the latest upgrade on our smartphone doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity to explore.

Even though the past is still with us (and still valuable), that doesn’t mean that only traditional methods hold the mark of craftsmanship. I came to realize the concept was much broader. It didn’t necessarily equate to age or have to involve a specific method or technique. More than that, it was an ethic, a way of approaching the work.

In the moments of technological transition, when the boundaries between manual and mechanized labor begin to blur or change, an uneasy tension develops. Whenever machines start doing our “jobs,” a group of people revert to a nostalgia for days and ways gone by, while others start tinkering with new opportunities, searching for a new maker aesthetic. The futurist Paul Saffo calls this the divide between the Druids and the Engineers. It’s something I’ve struggled with myself as I met the torch bearers of traditional skills while at the same time reveling in the immediate feedback of the newer tools.

And the divide is nothing new. In American Genesis (University Of Chicago Press, 2004), Thomas Hughes’ account of technological innovation’s effect on American culture around the turn of the twentieth century, he describes the dynamic perspectives and outcomes from the previous industrial revolution:

My nostalgic sympathizing with the Tin Man (and many others) about the decline in skilled machinists and my own lack of manual literacy seemed eerily similar to the tone of William Morris. But looking back, even the skilled machinists once seemed a distasteful transition from what was considered good and fulfilling work. Similarly, the migration to the digital fabrication tools doesn’t spell the end to craftsmanship. Rather an adaptation of it, driven by swaths of opportunity that the capital-intensive factory production model can’t serve efficiently.

If anything, the current trends of workmanship are pointing toward a more human-scale marketplace, a throwback to the small, local, and personal artisans and makers that existed before the factory production model took over. As people gain access to the powerful new tools of desktop prototyping and production, they are making everything they can imagine. And the new tools of distribution, fueled by the Internet and online communities like Etsy and Kickstarter, have made it easier than ever to connect and find a community of people to sell and share their wares.

Chris Anderson, the wisest oracle of long-tail maker economics, articulated it best in Makers:

Meet the twenty-first century artisans. They understand the value they are creating. It’s tactile. It’s real. They made it because they wanted it themselves. They can tell you exactly how everything is made and where their materials come from. They blend the proven tools of the past with the current tools of today, picking and choosing whatever suits their aesthetic. Joel uses Twitter and Vimeo to promote himself and his knives to his community. Mike Miller has created a website as a platform for distributing flint knapping knowledge and products. Celia uses CNC mills to aide her craft and amplify her production capabilities. They’re filling unique niches for the makers and users of things. It’s an adaptive radiation of cultural entrepreneurship.

The new maker movement is an opportunity to discover, define, and share your own unique craft. The spoils will go to those who can find that elusive sweet spot between personal satisfaction, a dedicated approach to the work, and an openness to the evolving technologies.

Now, let’s meet some of these new tools.