I don’t need to tell you that we are living in complicated times. Our systems are becoming increasingly chaotic, and the consequences are alarming.

Meanwhile, generative AI is involved in our everyday lives, and it is proving itself extremely efficient at speeding up our interaction with data and words. There are more papers, more emails, and more text everywhere, but these words are, in Manabu’s terms “delegated, in whole or in part, to systems that have no disciplinary identity, no form of life, and no stake in the truth of what they produce”. [1] This is seen again in the generated imagery and models, conceived entirely in what recent graduate Pauline Vaandrager would call, worlds “without physics.” [2] These hallucinated visions have little connection to the constraints of the physical (yet).

Traditionally, we consider Industrial Design the field where we put the industrial production system to creative use, with the designer, metaphorically or sometimes actually, standing next to a machine and asking: what else can you do? With these new immaterial dream scapes, it becomes harder to connect fast-moving data streams with slow-moving machine parks. But real change happens on both a material and conceptual level, and it must eventually find its physical form. More than ever, Industrial Design is the place where we attend to this negotiation.

Human makers think with and through the making process. Each “make” takes the form of an iterative movement from version to version, until we arrive at the point where the outcome appears done, in ways we might not always have words to express. Goveia da Rocha might call that traveling [3]  and the practical result is an ever-growing body of things, prototypes, experiments, and materials. Malafouris proposes human thought as co-constructed with this making, suggesting a meandering cognitive process from thing to thought and back again [4]. In this way, humans and materials are collaborative partners, extending cognition to the interaction between our bodies and the things we make.

The learning of a craft then becomes a way of participating in the thinking-making that is core to our knowing. However, craftsmanship implies that the knowledge and the learning resides only with the (hu)man. Can we suggest a broader kind of collaboration with machines and things, in opposition, abstraction and difference… and with each other in solidarity, companionship and care?

I would like propose an extended re-reading of digital crafts-machine-ship as a way to engage with machine-making for worlds-with-physics. Digital crafts-machine-ship opens the possibility of knowledge residing with, alongside and in between as an inter-connected and inter-dependent set of materials, models, machinery, and an ever-expanding range of other entities. [5]

As designers and makers, we are the keepers of our immediate physical worlds, and the work to make something is often a harsh reality check not only of our plans, but also of our skills and the limitations of the systems we make with. Digital crafts-machine-ship suggests that making might become the grounding validation and proof of our digital design visions (and in turn the machines and systems we use). It allows us to become the conduits between worlds with and without physics through material knowledge production.

Design dreams of different outcomes, and through making we have a stake how those outcomes change and are changed by us. The body is restless and hungry, full of desire and fear. Our ideas are flighty, our attention is fraught, but it is through the making process that we attach thoughts to things, meaning to experience. I propose crafts-machine-ship as our opportunity to test the hallucinogenic digital against our felt experience of machines and materials.

References:

1. Thomas Manabu, The Machine Consumes Itself: Artificial Intelligence and the End of

Publish°or°Perish, Postdigital Science and Education, Springer, https://doi.org/10.1007/

s42438-026-00666-0

 2. Pauline Vaandrager, M2.1 rapport, Industrial Design, TU/e

3. Bruna Goveia da Rocha and Kristina Andersen. 2020. Becoming Travelers: Enabling the Material

Drift. In Companion Publication of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS'

20 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 215–219. https://

doi.org/10.1145/3393914.3395881

 4. Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement, Cambridge,

MA: The MIT Press, 2016

5. Kristina Andersen, Ron Wakkary, Laura Devendorf, and Alex McLean. 2019. Digital craftsmachine-

ship: creative collaborations with machines. interactions 27, 1 (January - February 2020),

30–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3373644