What Materials Let Us Do.

Different Materials, Different Ways of Making

Something I've been thinking about lately:

The way we work a material seems to be closely tied to what the material is capable of doing.

Take metal. We have casting, forging, machining, sheet forming, fabrication. They are all ways of making things from metal, but each one takes advantage of a different behaviour of the material.

Then I started thinking about wood.

Carpentry, timber framing, boatbuilding, carving, turning. Again, completely different traditions have developed around the same material. A boatbuilder and a carpenter are both working with wood, but they are looking at it very differently.

The same thing happens with stone.

And that made me wonder: is this true of almost every material?

Maybe a lot of what we call craft is simply the accumulated knowledge of figuring out what a material will let you do with it.

We don't just choose a material and then make something from it. The properties of the material push us towards certain ways of making. Over time, those ways become techniques, trades and traditions.

Then 3D printing comes along and does something rather strange.

Instead of starting with the form the material naturally comes in—a block, a sheet, a bar, a plank—we ask whether we can make the material behave differently for a while.

Can it flow? Can we deposit it? Can it hold its shape? Can one layer bond to the next?

If it can, we can potentially build the object rather than carve it, forge it, bend it, or assemble it.

And that means the same basic idea can be applied to very different materials.

I'm not sure where this leads yet.

But it does make me look at materials differently: not just as things we make with, but as things that already have a set of possibilities built into them.