discovered, cultivated, or shared through the mechanisms of our human animal in action?
Jacob Bronowski, a Polish-British mathematician and philosopher said in 1973, when writing in the Ascent of Man, “The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye. . . . The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.”
In the half century since Bronowski’s revelatory
articulation about our species, we seem to have become increasingly more intent on acceleration. Our innovations toward greater efficiency may open revolutionary worlds of advancement, but since we are only beginning to understand how Artificial Intelligence and large language models can augment our capacity to analyze complex bundles of information, we at Handshouse Studio ask you to consider what is at stake when we outsource the practical and physical knowledge of our bodies to machines.
We have been relatively reckless about casting away timeless practices of hands-on learning and hand-made craft as if they were a stone from a lesser-developed age. But to what effect — especially on the younger generations for whom so much developmental learning has been limited to the digitized world experienced only with a flat screen? Can we recenter our
ancestral capacity for learning-by-doing as
cutting-edge for our future survival as any other innovation we can design?
Handshouse projects are guided by the belief
that hands-on investigation is intrinsic to
understanding our world. We have found that
learning in community brings all kinds of skills,
perspectives, and experience levels together, allowing us to take on daunting challenges together and make complex problem-solving a joyful collaboration. Our success could be largely attributed to the fact that when we dream of wild ideas like helping reconstruct Notre-Dame de Paris or resurrecting a seventeenth-century synagogue from its ashes, we do not let the fact that something seems impossible dictate whether it's worth a try. But
just as critical to our success has been Handshouse projects’ tendency to burst beyond the confines of any container that anyone may try to put them in, offering transformative experiences to those who take part. Allowing robust imagination to follow curiosity toward exploration through action we remain unbound by any rational order of things and pave the way to discovery and innovation that can only be found by bodies collaborating in community employing the intelligence of the hand-in-action
To learn more about Handshouse Studio, or view many of its videos, please click here:
https://www.handshouse.org/
To listen to Marie Brown's presentation at the Dignify by Design Summit, click here: and scroll down page to audio link:
https://www.humandignityprojects.org/dignify-by-design
Marie Brown
Executive Director
Handshouse Studio
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