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, it changed what I noticed.

The book is the manifesto for the Mingei (folkcraft) movement. It celebrates simple forms, plain 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 or 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 out living it. So I tried to steer him toward something he could actually hold.

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

The watch would have been easy. Pick a model, charge it, watch the novelty decay. The board was worse in all the right ways: slower, messier, less certain, and impossible to outsource completely.

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.

This was the first thing I wanted Noah to see: the room where the object becomes real. Not the checkout page. Not the tracking number. The messy middle where someone with good hands explains why a tiny curve matters.

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 in the air, a planer chewing through a blank, one of the guys stepping back under angled lights and explaining why a rail needs to be an eighth of an inch thinner for our local break.

I haven’t been near that kind of knowledge in a long time.

I want to build something with my son that can leave the workshop and get scratched in the ocean.

Next up: foam dust, bad sketches, and finding out whether an eight-year-old can care about rail profiles for more than six minutes.

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