Hands-on ideation

The digital age has transformed many aspects of our everyday experience - not least what we do with our hands when busying ourselves with digital devices. But what function does continual hand activity have? The most obvious answer is that we need our hands to do things. The hand is associated with agency and power. Hands serve us. They are the instruments of executive action, our tools. The idea of the hand as a tool, however, isn't new - it was common also in classical times. Where Anaxagoras had argued that humans are intelligent because they have hands, Aristotle, and many after him, countered that they have hands because they are intelligent, as the hands perpetuate our will instrumentally. In contemporary society, we are encouraged to counter the apparent excesses of the digital world by returning to traditional activities such as knitting, gardening, or general tinkering. Using our hands to make things is a remainder of the grounding, satisfying bodily techniques of the past. And when designers talk about why they practise hands-on skills such as freehand drawing and model making, the answers tend to reflect the importance of discovery, authenticity, and fulfillment. This blog entry inspired by, Leader, D (2016) Hands: What We Do with Them - and Why.