at itp, we’re taught about the application of many materials 1 . for a while, i believed that it was important to understand everything about the working material.
now, i realise that that’s perhaps impossible.
say you work with code. you’d first understand the language, and how it produces things. then, you’ll understand how the computer processes code. then, from there, you’ll get into the circuitry. then, electricity. then, matter. then, electrons. then, trying to find a source of truth when you realise that electrons are just conventionally believed to be true — we don’t know if they are true. then you’ll perhaps go into what is true?
mimi yin presented this thought (indirectly) in my head:
do i really need to know the material? or do i really need to know how the material interacts with the human?
Footnotes
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i refer to materials, here, as a generic umbrella for everything that we work with — saws, wood, code, computers, electricity, et-cetera. ↩