When is the Hand a Better Teacher?: Blocks and the Handmade

Updated: Mar 26, 2019

In my artist statement, I attribute much of my interest in installation art to playing with dollhouses when I was younger. My grandmother’s friend created a modern ranch dollhouse, which I painted, populated with small toy mice, decorated, arranged and rearranged furniture, and rearranged some more. I made worlds and narratives with these objects.

I always am happier when my hands are doing something. I can focus and relax more. I am also a fan of seeing something come into being, of seeing something transformed. I think that is why I like to pick up garbage as I mentioned in the Plastic Whale blog.

Last year on a trip to visit friends in Baltimore, I picked up a book on how children’s building blocks relate to architecture (Architecture on the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern Buildings, by Brenda and Robert Vale, link below). In this book, the author draws connections between building blocks and kits and specific styles of architecture in different eras. The influence and connections went between the toys, culture, location, materials, philosophies, and needs of the times.

I have also collected online images of different building blocks that artists or art movements have created (see some images and link below). This summer I made a trip to the Lego store in Copenhagen: amongst the frenzy of the tourists and the purchases being made, were tables full of toddlers busy and focused in creating.

Legos at Danish Design Museum, and at Lego Store in Copenhagen

Jenna Wolf, our school librarian, brought in UMass professor of psychology Sarah Kuhn to talk to our faculty on a recent professional development day. She spoke about the history of kindergarten and kindergarten toys, and how they affected many of the 20th century's artists, architects, and scientists. She spoke about building with your hands not just as relaxing or a therapeutic experience, but also as a way to communicate and learn. She ran us through a series of activities with blocks, pointing to the ability for the blocks to convey abstract information.

She referenced the book Inventing Kindergarten by Norman Brosterman.

“In effect, the early kindergartners created an enormous international program designed specifically to alter the mental habits of the general populace, and in their capable hands nineteenth-century children from Austria to Australia learned a new visual language. While focusing on kindergarten’s many educational and social benefits, these pioneers overlooked a potentially radical outcome of their efforts that is obvious in retrospect: kindergarten taught abstraction. By explicitly equating ideas, symbols, and things, it encouraged abstract thinking, and, in its repetitive use of geometric forms as the building blocks of all design, it taught children a new and highly disciplined way of making art. Like spokes on a wheel–separate at the rim, but connected at the hub–every lesson of the original kindergarten led from diverse vantage points to a central truth”

(Inventing Kindergarten, Norman Brosterman p. 106)

I have mentioned in past blogs how I have noticed the need for reflection and focus in contemporary life: the swing set installation by Superflex in Copenhagen, the people laying beneath Studio Drift’s Meadow piece, being read to in Marina Abramovic's Copenhagen Library piece. In the entry about the Spring House I wrote about the artist Julia Mandle working with Spring House to get the participants to think about their interface with technology and what it means to them. Many progressive schools in the Silicon Valley severely limit screen time, especially in the younger grades. At CSW, there are many unofficial conversations about screen-time, and how to best utilise digital and analog skills. It is in need of a longer conversation to be sure, but many progressive schools are leading the way in testing solutions.

So how can blocks help with this? What is the role of touch in contemporary learning?

My former colleague Tara Merenda-Nelson, a filmmaker, would often talk about how the mind processes analog film differently from digital film. There is something to seeing working parts that helps us understand the physical world. While some might (and do) argue with that idea, we exist in analog bodies, riding analog bikes, on analog streets. While the digital has much to offer (good and bad), when is the hand made a better teacher?

Two works by Dutch designer Maarten Bas at the Stedlijk. Each is hand made and therefor unique, and imperfect.

Before I landed in the Netherlands, I listened to the podcast Social Design Insights while working on my art in Slovakia. One of the themes that came up in almost all of the podcasts, as well in many of my observations in Amsterdam, is the need to master and experiment with materials, with the physical. The Materia exhibits, the Danish woodworking crafts, and the playfulness with the handmade look in Dutch design/art all speak to hand skills. Many of these objects emphasize being touched by hand and are less likely to look mass manufactured (see Maarten Bas above). In a talk at a What Design Can Do conference, Marcus Engman (the Head Designer at Ikea) even talks about using “mistakes” to work against the sameness of products: there is one textile design using an algorithm, so no two textile samples are the same.