Objects Born, Not Made

Almost twenty years ago I caught a lucky break and spent a few months working in San Francisco. I was very junior, wide-eyed, and didn’t know much about anything. A local Managing Director handed me a book that had nothing to do with my job: The Unknown Craftsman by Soetsu Yanagi, adapted by Bernard Leach.

I didn’t read it immediately. When I finally opened it, the ideas rewired how I looked at the world.

The book is the manifesto for the Mingei (folkcraft) movement. It celebrates simple forms, honest materials, and everyday objects made without ego. Yanagi and Leach return constantly to one idea: “objects born, not made.” Things that emerge organically from repetition, care, and necessity, not from a desperate attempt to impress anyone.

(For more on Japanese craft philosophy, there’s a good reading list on Sentomono’s blog.)

I think about this often. I see it in software, in engineering, in visual design. The most elegant code I’ve ever read has this exact quality. It isn’t flashy. It isn’t clever for its own sake. It feels inevitable, like it couldn’t have been written any other way.

This came rushing back recently because of my eight-year-old, Noah.

His birthday is coming up. He’s been eyeing my fitness watch for weeks and recently declared that he desperately needs one too.

Fair enough. But the request rubbed me the wrong way. I pictured him with another screen on his wrist, buzzing with notifications, counting his steps for a week before the novelty wore off. Another object optimised for metrics rather than meaning.

I didn’t want him tracking his physical life on a screen. I wanted him to live it. So I tried to redirect his attention toward something tangible.

Long story short, after a lot of talking, we traded the smartwatch idea for a custom surfboard from the local legends at Santosha Surf.

A few days ago we walked into their shaping bay. Instead of just ordering a board, I asked the shapers if Noah and I could learn how to shape it ourselves. They paused. Nobody had ever asked them that before, though they’d often thought about offering an apprenticeship-style experience.

So we have a project.

The rough outline:

• Learn the fundamentals: materials, tools, foam blanks, templates.
• Document every session: photos, notes, the inevitable mistakes.
• Understand the shaper’s eye: how they manage to “see” the finished board trapped inside a raw block of foam.
• Write about it here, maybe film parts of the process.

I spend most of my life in software, staring at screens, wrangling abstractions, building things you can’t touch. The shaping bay is the opposite. Foam dust hanging thick in the air. The mechanical scream of a planer chewing through a blank. One of the guys stepping back, squinting at the foam under angled lights, explaining why a specific rail needs to be an eighth of an inch thinner to handle how the wave breaks at our local beach.

Highly specific, deeply physical, hard-earned knowledge. I haven’t been around anything like it in a long time.

More than anything, I want to build something real with my son. Something we shape with our own hands, cover in foam dust, and eventually carry into the ocean together.

Updates to come.

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