Review by New York Times Review
in 1912, Otto Rohwedder of Iowa began working on the first machine to slice a loaf of bread, paving the way in the 1930s for Wonder Bread to start packaging and shipping presliced loaves around the country. "The greatest thing since sliced bread" became the aphoristic stand-in for superb American innovation for good reason. Newly discovered chemical antioxidants slowed the bread's fermentation and the development of plastic polymers allowed loaves to stay fresh even ionger as they were transported. Before this, bread was local. If a wheat crop failed, people in that area would go hungry or even starve. In "Creating Things That Matter," David Edwards, an engineer, inventor and professor of a course in idea translation at Harvard, notes that it was commercial innovations, just like this one, built on the back of advancements in science and technology, that created a world better than at any other time in history. Great swaths of the human population could have access to abundant, relatively healthy food, increasing life expectancy and reducing infant mortality. These commercial innovations have broadened access to health care, education, clean water, information and entertainment. And yet, these world-historical transformations aren't looking so good anymore: Growing plastic gyres float on the earth's oceans choking marine life, and a landscape marred by pollution, deforestation and climate change leaves us with scarcely enough arable land to feed the population at the rate it's growing. Our current system for innovating, Edwards says, "is falling short of addressing today's challenges." He offers a new model for creating things that can be hopeful, helpful - and commercially viable. In "Fewer, Better Things" Glenn Adamson, a former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and author of several books on craft, views the suffering of the natural world through the prism of our increasingly tortured relationship to it. When we look up from our screens, we find we have lost our connection with the physical realm, which according to Adamson is the embodiment of our shared humanity. Objects, particularly well-made ones, contain intelligence in the form of "thousands of years of accumulated experiment and know-how." By forfeiting an understanding and appreciation of objects - their materials, how they are made and why they are as they are - we forfeit the power they have to enhance our lives and to connect us with one another. If we were to love stuff more and better, Adamson holds, we'd want and waste less of it. Historically, innovation, according to Edwards, has followed two distinct models - commercial or cultural. The former, driven by profit margin and return on investment, changed the world and eased our lives but it is by its nature shortsighted and unable to act on long-term humanitarian goals. Capitalism can't monetize what doesn't yet exist - i.e. the future. Cultural creation, on the other hand, like art or theater, may more ambitiously attempt to change how we think or act, but its effects, when they can be discerned at all, are seen only after a duration of many years. We value the sort of innovation that has a more immediate and tangible effect - the sliced bread - while devaluing, and therefore failing to invest in, innovation whose contribution might not be obvious at first. Edwards sees this as a problem, and his solution is to return science and art - disciplines segregated from each other postNewton - to their rightful place as a single endeavor he calls "aesthetic creating." He came to this realization after having invented inhalable insulin, which despite being an improvement over injected insulin, wasn't adopted, in part because it wasn't offered in an aesthetically appealing way. As our basic needs have already been met, he says, we will only adopt new things, even ones that might solve world health issues, if we find them beautiful or attractive. Edwards proposes culture labs, spaces where creativity is encouraged, supported by a group and guided by mentors. Science should become more open-ended and personally expressive, and its explorations exhibited to the public, whose feedback could help guide development and evolution. Edwards's own such space is the Artscience: Culture Lab and Café in Cambridge, where people can interact with and consume works-in-progress of his own and his students and collaborators. His work with inhalable technology led Edwards to invent aerated flavors, able to enhance one's experience of drink or food, and then to create a mechanism that renders these invisible vapors into clouds of smoke, presumably increasing one's delight in the cocktails on offer at the lab's bar. As Edwards looks for solutions in clouds, Adamson would have us look to the ground. Literally. At one point, he offers a riveting tour of a Manhattan street corner starting with asphalt ("hot poured and rolled") and the manhole covers ("round because a square or rectangular cover turned at the wrong angle would drop right into the hole") and on up to building awnings ("formed of sheet metal using giant rolling and crimping machines" still fed by hand at an old factory in Brooklyn). Adamson, a scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, wants us to appreciate how the material world - all that implacable, inert stuff we are surrounded by - carries memories and an opportunity for empathy. The word "smart," applied to phones and cars, implies that objects that don't interact with us are "dumb" - both mute and unintelligent. But Adamson finds a banality in the hyper-flexibility of "smart" objects. He tells of one night when his niece slept over at his house and set out a little photo of her dog, Pepper. Why, he asks, when your phone has dozens of such pictures? The point of the phone, she says, isn't to be a picture of Pepper, "while the point of the picture of Pepper is to be a picture of Pepper." Physical objects possess richly specific, intrinsic characters, and can be repositories of meaning in ways that a powerful portal to the entire world cannot manage. Adamson is not so much anti-digital as he is pro-thing - to the point of being materially agnostic. He would like us to be curious and nonjudgmental about all physical objects. Adamson ties himself in knots trying to advocate for the fewer, better things of his own title, because "better things" are often handcrafted, expensive and, therefore, elitist. (William Morris and others have also wrestled with craft's failure - after industrialization - to be democratic.) Yet as Adamson allows that "beauty" is culturally relative, it follows that "better" and "luxury" are likewise shifting targets. As someone once told me, "luxury is what one doesn't have enough of." In fact, Adamson talks of his grandfather growing up on a farm during the Depression without luxuries - having to make do, he says, with hand-split rail fences and homemade ice cream. My very idea of luxury! Creating value around - and a higher price tag on - labor-intensive handcrafted goods creates jobs in the developing world, and helps keep age-old traditions, cultures and communities relevant. Its processes are also usually more ecological than its industrial or technological counterparts. (Plus, the stuff is really beautiful if you ask me.) "The real test of an object's worth lies not in its efficiency, novelty or even beauty," Adamson says, "but in whether it gives us a sense of our shared humanity." Edwards's latest innovation allows us to digitally transmit aromas through a small device that plugs into our phone. Thus far, our phones have engaged only our senses of sight and sound, leaving our olfactory organs untapped. Edwards's hope is to offer the scientifically proven metabolic and calming health benefits of scent to us, on demand, even as we sit stressed out at work. Maybe one day, if widely adopted, this technology might, after the inevitable scented spam and fart pranks dissipate, revolutionize global food and medicine delivery systems. In the meantime, as Adamson might suggest, we should step outside and smell the roses. DEBORAH NEEDLEMAN is the former editor in chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine and currently writes the Material Culture column for the magazine.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Stuff is everywhere. As is advice about how to tidy it up. Design curator and scholar Adamson's new book takes this popular interest in paring down one step further to consider how to find value in the things that fill our lives. Each of its 34 short and spry chapters examines a different aspect of making, touching, and having things. The book offers a sprawling set of contemporary and historical objects from the tools used by a custom fabric designer in New York City to the carefully prescribed ritual of a Japanese tea service to meditate on the way material relationships are about necessity but also pleasure, discovery, inventiveness, and, particularly important, responsibility. Ultimately, engaging with the material world is, for Adamson, an ethical act. I believe we can derive the same sense of togetherness from a shared concern for our material world, he writes. Fewer, Better Things is a primer on how to deliver to material things the attention they deserve and to thus find meaningful ways to connect to each other. --Maggie Taft Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Adamson, the former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and author of The Craft Reader, challenges readers to reconsider the nature of physical objects in this dry treatise on material culture. He asserts that mass production eroded the understanding of craftsmanship and that reconnecting with processes and materials increases one's overall quality of life. The book is most successful when drawing on everyday items, like a chair. Instead of just something to sit on, he asks readers to consider the wood, the techniques binding it together, and the cultural significance of its design. Adamson writes enthusiastically of how the aesthetics of Japanese tea ceremonies reveal other elements of society (the texture of the clay tea bowl, for example, denotes its provenance). Although almost all readers will find value in some of these anecdotes, Adamson too often veers into academic territory, such as his extended discussion of museum theory. While some examples are more illuminating than others, the book will awaken those who have tuned out from their surroundings. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The impact and significance of the objects we shape and live with.Adamson (Senior Scholar/Yale Center for British Art; The Invention of Craft, 2013, etc.) writes that "we are in danger of falling out of touch, not only with objects, but with the intelligence they embody: the empathy that is bound up in tangible things." He takes us on a winding, personal tour of material intelligence, the world of things; sadly, "our collective material intelligence has steadily plummeted." The author seeks to paint a "full, kaleidoscopic picture of material experience. Making things, using them, and learning about them." The book is rich with examples and stories of objects and their makers. Early on, Adamson invites us to take the "Paper Challenge": What is the best way to evenly divide a piece of paper? He also asks why the materiality of stuffed animals is significant, and he writes in awe about how experts split diamonds and the importance of tools. A fretsaw, a laser cutter, a Jacquard loomall are "repositories of accumulated material intelligence." Adamson discusses the importance of touch in making and appreciating things. A visit to Brussels Musical Instruments Museum teaches us how to navigate the displays with our ears as well as our eyes. The author also provides brief history lessons on plywood, aluminum, vulcanized rubber, linoleum, and how a material "rises into fashion, falls out of fashion, then rises again." He introduces us to many fascinating people and their achievements: "one of America's greatest basket makers" Dorothy Gill Barnes; master woodcarver David Esterly; Ian Hutchings, who's "interested in what happens when things rub up against one another;" Murage Ngani Ngatho, master coconut carver; and Constance Adams, a "space architect" for NASA. Interested in footwear? Belgian design researcher Catherine Willems combines "ancient wisdom with new technologies" studying sandals made with reindeer, buffalo, and antelope skin.Although a bit dry in spots, Adamson's crafty enthusiasm is infectious. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
