 Alright, it's 1202 so why don't we go ahead and get started. Welcome everyone to make to know from spaces of uncertainty to creative discovery with Lauren Buckman and Tom Stern. My name is Karen Edwards, and I am one of the librarians here at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. This event was produced in collaboration with the San Francisco Writers Conference. We work closely with them and together we strive to provide high quality learning experiences for writers at low cost or free. So I want to thank those of you who elected to support this event and pay a little something to attend. It really does go a long way to help us do more in these challenging times. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Mechanics Institute, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library, the oldest in fact designed to serve the general public in California. We are also a cultural event center and a world renowned chess club that is the oldest in the nation. Right now we are in the process of reopening fully. Right now we're open six days a week. And however, most of our events continue to be virtual. I encourage you however to consider becoming a member with us. It is only $120 a year. And with that you help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area, which we have been doing since 1854. Our speakers today are two gentlemen from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. We have Lauren Buckman, who is president there, and he is an international leader in art and design education. He is also the author of the book, Make to Know. So I'm going to put the link to that book in the chat space. The book is also part of our collection here at the Mechanics Institute's library. It's a very thought provoking volume. So I hope that you check it out. Mr. Buckman will be in conversation with Tom Stern, who is a senior vice president of Art Center and himself an author of novels and other short pieces that have been in many literary journals that I'm sure you have run across. Before we get started, I want to encourage our guests to use the chat space if they have any questions. And after Lauren and Tom are done discussing, we will take the questions. I hope in a conversational manner to continue to provoke thought and discuss all the vistas that this book will encourage. So we are recording this event, so should you wish to see the recording I will send the link to the events video in a few days. So thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon and thank you Lauren and Tom. Thanks for having us. Thanks to the Mechanics Institute and welcome everybody. It's always great to talk about books in general, but to talk about creativity and making in particular is a point of fascination for me and so excited to open up this conversation about a book that really delves into the space in a really thoughtful and really investigative way and and and minds some some territory that personally for me is really engaging and I spent a lot of time thinking about. So I guess to kind of start the conversation going I want to start with two words that are central to the title and central to the book in general, which is making a knowing make to know. And what fascinates me about those two words together is that to those who are creative I think there is either there's a sense of how those things relate how we make things in order to understand ourselves the thing the world. But sometimes that can be very intuitive to an artist or a designer. And I also think that those who aren't or don't think of themselves chiefly as creatives might be surprised that there is in an eight connection to those words those two things actually seem very disparate the idea of making something, which we relate to usually you know in the form of its its artifact the book, the painting, the sculpture and knowledge and how those two things relate. And it's one of the things that I think is most beautiful about this book is that it really minds the relationship between those two things so I'm wondering more and maybe just start us off if you could talk a little bit about the relationship between making and knowing and how those things relate. So thanks for doing this and thanks to Taren and the mechanics Institute and to my friend Annie McGaty for setting this up. I'm really delighted to be here. Yeah, so this relationship between making and knowing has been is something that's been with me really my entire life though it took a while before I could name it and really understand it. But if we just pause for a moment and think of certain kinds of think of art certain kinds of processes of creativity that we we appreciate here are the things that inspire me. I love it when a novelist says I created the shell of my characters. And then they told me what they wanted to say, as I was in the process of writing. Or I love when the artist Alexander Calder says I think in wire, or when the novelist and bear to echo said in the post script to the name of the rose. I didn't know Jorge was the murderer until I put him in the library. There's something fundamental about engaging in the making process writ large. It can be writing and moving words around on a page it can be painting it can be sculpting it can be filming it can be performing whatever the case may be but that there is a process that unfolds a making and it's through that that a discovery can happen a discovery can occur. That couldn't come about in any other way. Now you talk about people who don't necessarily relate to that or they don't consider themselves artists. I know for me and the kind of paradigm that I've always used when I'm thinking about this to contrast. Is the, you know, widely understood idea of Michelangelo seeing the angel of the stone, and then chipping away until he set it free. That the assumption is that there is some vision, there is some idea that is a precursor. This job becomes the manifestation of that idea. And when you explore and you talk to artists and designers and certainly the ones I interviewed and there were scores of them, very few talk like that. On the contrary, what they say is this. Some say they have a question some say they have an urge, a notion, an idea. Some say they have a stomach ache, whatever the case may be. It's something that gets them into a process, but they necessarily use that to go into a place that is unknown, a place of uncertainty. Then they begin to make within that space of uncertainty. They begin to engage. And in that space, a kind of discovery happens that leads them to a knowledge of or a sense of what it is that the thing they need to make comes to life. And interestingly in another note, the artist and designer who goes into that space of uncertainty can also come to know a part of themselves which is a whole other thing that we can talk about a little later. And that's what fascinated me and that's the road I wanted to try. What happens, what is the space of uncertainty, and what is this magic of making that uncovers and allows us to discover as we engage. And so I talk about it in four basic ways. One is just what it means to enter that place of uncertainty and what those entry points might be for people. The experience is of being in that place of uncertainty. So that's a whole, that's one of the ways. A second way is engaging materials. And what it means for the painter and the conversation between the painter and the paint and the canvas and the ceramicist and the clay and the writer and the words, or more broadly speaking, the an artist like and what is that space or performance, etc. What how does all of that work, what is that engaging material thing about, and that's a second by a third which I learned a lot from designers is, if you look at making through the lens of solving problems. That's an engagement and that's a making that uncovers very specific kinds of things and opens up possibility through that process. And then the final one is performance and improvisation. And the implementation itself as a concept is one that crystallizes so much of what I'm talking about because when you improvise as the process of making it is the same as the thing made. And when those two come together you have a making knowing relationship that is vital and alive, and very much in the spirit of what I'm trying to explore. And in the book you you delve into the last one in particular in terms of kind of your own path and development as a theater director right and correct. And so, in setting up those, those conditions are setting up that circumstance in physical space but entering into it with scores of uncertainty right. I mean, it was sort of your experience in that space. You know the story that's, that goes along with that it's kind of interesting is when I was a college student studying theater and studying directing. And I happened to have a teacher who was very, very much in the spirit of make to know kind of make to know pedagogy, which is all about sort of throwing people in the deep end and saying, you know, do it and let the questions and ideas and thoughts let them let them be born of the of the making itself. And I remember the, the, the, the first day of class when he said you know if you want to learn how to direct you're going to direct so find a short piece and cast it and go into it and I did I found a comedic romp by Anton Chekhov called the Boer. And just to play I, I loved, again, I'm as green as ever here you have no idea what I'm doing right, and but I knew enough to cast play. And just out of you know sheer luck I happened to get a couple of good actors, and I knew I had a schedule the first rehearsal, but other than that I didn't really have a clue what I was, what I was doing. I read some books and I talked to some people and I tried to find out but you know not it really made sense it all seemed theoretical to me. So then this first rehearsal came, and there we were people in space with this text and it was an amazing moment in my life because you know necessity descended to use the escalain phrase and all of a sudden. I began to engage in conversation and we thought about ideas and we moved around in space and we played with improvisational situations and it was incredible to me how that making theatrically speaking opened up a way of seeing in a way of knowing that I just couldn't have done. I couldn't have realized in any way before I went into that space and to this day as a theater director I marvel at directors who can kind of look at a text and on their desk and kind of stage a play in the margins. I could never do that. I began in that space in real three dimensional space moving real people around it, it can come to me and so it was that experience of directing the board that was, it wasn't the first time that I had experienced to make to know kind of engagement but it was the first time I began to name it. It was personally incredibly important and then I extended it and again we're sort of talking about my own professional career to my life as a writer and my life as a college professor and my life as a college president, in which, in each case there was this kind of parallel process going on, in which I was going through a difficult working process to really know what it was that I wanted to do. But here's something we need to kind of a caution I always need to, to make here, because at this point in time and conversations, sometimes folks think, Well, so is this kind of making it up as we go along is this kind of building the plane as we fly. And nothing could be further from what I mean that that's not what I mean in any way shape or form nor does what these artists and designers talk about at all. On the contrary, one skill, one's education experience ethics priorities. All of that is an incredibly important part of the creative process but the way I understand it from these conversations I had with ours and designers. That's the scaffolding they stand on as they reach into places of uncertainty and engage in a making that is an extraordinary story. And so the less experienced individuals simply not on as tall or as structured or as organized as scaffolding. But that scaffolding and the work we do in the education week, we had the 10,000 hours to quote, I'm glad, well that's critical. You know, build it and that structure can can can increase and it can make for a reach into uncertainty that is that much richer and that much, you know, I mean, more, more comfortable if reaching into uncertainty is ever comfortable. So that distinction is a really important one that that we all we need to understand here. And this is the idea of uncertainty to one of the most resonant aspects of your book for me. In as much as it differentiates or delineates for me this notion of uncertainty or not knowing, and that there's a way of saying, I don't know, which in some ways is attempting to deflect something or avoid and there's a way of saying I don't have a way of questioning in a way of leaning into something in a way of trying to better understand. It makes me think of Plato and the notion that all we can know is what we don't know. Can you talk a little bit about uncertainty, I mean you take that deeper dive into it and into that the section on entering uncertainty which is a piece of it. But maybe it is that what happens once you're in it right. Yeah, but also is the entering into it. It's really the way that you keyed into uncertainty as you were thinking about how these pieces relate. Great, that's such a good question. Yes, I, I looked at it in two different ways I looked at it. What are the ways in which we enter places of uncertainty. And so, again, as I was eluding before, some artists talk about that they have a question some have this kind of big idea that they want to explore some have, again, this, I always say a stomach ache because and Hamilton always used to talk about she gets a stomach ache and she can follows on that or the urge one poet said I just feel a discomfort in my body that needs to be manifest in words and rhythm so there are ways in which we enter uncertainty one of the most interesting or up there with the most interesting is sometimes it's just a matter of physically showing up. And so the novelist Amy Bender talks about the fact that in her first novel. She just needed to be present that was she didn't know anything else had no intention and I'd like to get back back to the notion of intention. And the joke was that when she wrote her first novel she would tie herself to the chair of her desk for 90 minutes, just to be present with it. And to see what would come of it. She wasn't one who was up in her head with ideas or questions she was one who needed to physically show up for it. And that funny anecdote about Victor Hugo who used to do the same except he used to, in order to discipline himself to show up used to strip naked and give to his, the various people at his house, all of his clothes and he would go in naked, and, and that he would make them swear that they couldn't get his clothes back until he finished. Yeah, he finished whatever writing he need to do for that day. And there are ways in which we show up we, or we have ideas or we want to enter placement so then the, but the second question is, what happens when we're in that space of the unknown in that space of uncertainty, keeping us from making any kind of final conclusions staying open as long as possible, which is a discipline and of itself to discovery in that place of uncertainty. And different artists and designers talk about that experience in different ways. One of the more helpful ones is the novelist Amy Tan, who talks about uses quantum mechanics as her way of kind of describing what it's like to be in that world of uncertainty. And she's very quick to say, I know nothing about quantum mechanics but that's not going to stop me from talking about it that way. And she's interested in a cosmology that unfolds in the writing in the making of gravitational pulls in certain ways of particles and under of materials that make up certain kinds of experience of ways of engaging as you make your way and understand the very cosmology you're creating as you're producing this written thing at this novel, this work of art. And it's a beautiful way to kind of explore what that could be and what that means and, and it's, it's kind of taking the uncertainty principle into a, into a creative realm, which is, is really, really interesting. What happens there what happens in that space, and to get to this place of intention and then I'll pause for a minute. I think the, the idea is that if we go into these places of uncertainty with too much consciousness about what we want to do there. And, and too much of a focus we actually, and too much of a vision frankly we close ourselves to the possibility that might exist in that world. And as Amy 10 says so it becomes about aboutness or about the thing that you're doing, instead of a really, you know, powerful and and alive discovery. And it becomes a really important piece of this and then Hamilton talks about that to holding back intention in order to go deepest into what it is that we need to create. And, and that this starts to bleed for me into the section of your book about engaging materials, and about the kind of iterative process and about a kind of dialogue that's taking place between the maker and the thing or the maker and the other is in this role of sort of conversation in the creative process. Yeah, I mean it's just the most interesting thing in the world to me I mean how many artists and designers talked about they're involved in these multiple conversations that part of the making process is being kind of this multi level multi faceted that goes on and what are things in dialogue the things that are in dialogue are. You're in dialogue with your own previous work, you're in dialogue with an idea you're in dialogue with a community of artists who work similarly to you. You're in dialogue with influential books that you've read, you're in dialogue with material. Right that there is this conversation, as one artist put it between the charcoal, the paper, and the drawer, and there you give me that and I'll give you this and if you attune yourself to that kind of making. Attune yourself to that kind of possibility that comes from material engagement. And you're opening yourself to discovery in a really really interesting way. There's also a cultural piece of this to so the architect Frank Gary talks about. He's always looking at the building that he's creating as talking to other buildings in the area and he gives them a lot of examples of that that are so fascinating. So when you think about your own work and expanding beyond that cosmology and utensils to dialogues that are happening on levels of material or levels of culture or levels of architecture whatever it might be, that also opens up all kinds of and challenges you not to get stuck in that narrowness or stuck in that manifesting vision but to enjoy the process and journey of discovery as you go along, which also then connects to this. The idea of improvisation or making it a way that again is there's there's intention there but but that discovery isn't predefined that there is this element where you're you're sort of discovering as you go or in conversation or dialogue and discovering things that you wouldn't necessarily think of and you talk a little bit about kind of the neuroscience behind some of that kind of making space and improvisational space and and how those things kind of function on a scientific level to right. Yeah, yeah. Before and I want to get to that, but before I do, I think maybe it's, it's, it would be helpful for me just to say what we learn from improvisation and all of this. Yeah, because improvisation on no matter what level doesn't come out of nothing improvisation requires a context in a frame. When Miles Davis riffs on a on a on a tune or go. It's there. There is to make it give us a simple example it's, it's a gershwin tune it's summertime and he riffs on that that's the basis for or a theatrical improvisation has a sense of context, or you begin to think about improvisation as, you know, even in a wider frame of a series of notes or a musician engaging with the piano, in terms of the structure of certain kinds of scales or certain kinds of relationships of sounds, and then you get to the end of all one of the great, but nonetheless a frame, one of the great moments in the history of improvisation and that's Keith Jarrett's concert at home. With a whole background story of a messed up piano and he was leaving and he wasn't going to participate etc but there he was and he created that improvisation, absolutely not a clue what he was going to play that day. On this broken piano which he had to find the right parts of the piano that we're going to work and and because there's a whole story about getting the wrong piano and the parts of the piano that he had to ignore because they didn't work, which in turn provided a frame for him to engage. But you need that frame and with that frame you begin to explore and the breeze can blow and you can find your way into these places of the uncertainty within that context and I think it teaches us in important ways improvisation does how frames are, are, are necessary for this kind of thing, but that to close them to to narrowly is to compromise what we can do and what we can discover. So then comes along these neuroscientific studies using functional RM MRI machines in which you begin to the studies were what happens to the brain on improvisation. And what parts the brain light up so they created this mechanism and they put them in these machines and they would be improvising on these keyboards while they were being studied. And found that so many parts of our brain that light up are similar to other aspects of our life the really interesting one is speech. That the same center that we use when we're speaking actually lights up when you're playing improvising. Another one is that you're the part of your brain that is sort of the locus of autobiography lights up. And we take those two right speech is a form of improvisation. We have a frame we have a context in which we're speaking but even as I'm speaking now, there is an improvisatory quality to it. It's not all predetermined, and how often we when we speak we're in a way discovering what it is we need and want to say sometimes we struggle with that but that's the process creative process occurring right. And this same part of the brain that lights up. That's the same as autobiography you begin to say, Well, there is an idiosyncratic way there is a part of ourselves that in the improvisation is being told a story of our own that's being told, which gets to what I alluded to earlier about make to know is not only coming to know the product or the thing that you want to create, but it comes to getting to know yourself in a certain way, and a fundamental way. Joan Didion is most articulate about this when she says I would have no reason to write if I could access my thoughts in any other way. She writes to know herself. She writes to know how she's how she thinks. She wrote those beautiful texts on grieving for her husband and then her daughter to get hold of her emotions to get in a way to get to know herself. The relationship between these neuroscientific studies and what the making process is are fascinating. The one I just forgive me I just want to add to is that these these studies also show that there is a relationship between the brain, the improvising and the brain brain and REM stage of sleep dreaming and improvising show the same kind of brain activity. I mean, amazing right. We are improvisers in our dreams, we are makers in our dreams. We are making ourselves in our dreams in a fascinating kind of way, which is another wonderful way to salute that kind of form of self access and self knowledge through the creative process through the making process. Really interesting to think about that. So there, so then there's a tension there between, I think, between the scaffolding that you were talking about earlier, and that improvisational component of making and moving in the space of uncertainty. There are instances wherein scaffolding over scaffolding obstructs the ability to improvise and circumstances wherein the over dependency on the improvisation without the adequate scaffolding also creates. Right. Right. And there's an interesting somewhat paradoxical some interesting relationship. We employ this as we think about art design education to but really sort of the greater the skill, the greater the creative freedom, there seems to be a deep relationship and a lot of our designers talk about that. And you think about that Keith Jarrett concert right. The skill that he brought. Yes, it's the scaffolding he didn't know the place of uncertainty, but the relationship between the deep skill he knew are any great musical improviser. How well they know the music how well they know their instrument. That's what opens the possibility. Now, can it overcome. I think it can overcome. And it's interesting to ask that because now I'm remembering there are certain artists and designers who reflected back and said I get too preoccupied with the, with the, with that, you know, the precision of the mechanics of it. And that's when it starts overcoming, you know, as opposed to letting it be free and finding the time, maybe later on when I, I structure that I use the structure I use the mechanical piece of it to to to enhance or to improve or to support it. I also talk about in the entering uncertainty portion of the book, the, the realizations the recognitions that come about from stepping away in the moment in the shower in the shower, or, or the single right the single most frequent statement from all these people I talked to was I thought of the idea in the shower and variations on that theme or I thought of the idea driving my car I thought idea walking the dog. What I insisted on was that was not aside from the creative process that was integral to the creative process that we can't think of that shower moment is being somehow separate from what's being done in the studio. That it's, there's, it's, it's, you know, it's fundamentally connected, and it's all part of that process to, and God knows we need to help our students understand that as well. It might just be this constant, you know, one foot, you need to open up and context can help change and to use Amy Tanz metaphor change the cosmology that you're in, and therefore allow you to see something and then, which, which makes me think of the, the traffic circle example. In the book as well you're talking a bit about that. Yeah, yeah, so this becomes a metaphor for everything for me it's it's I discovered this, and you know almost 15 years ago. And it in the book it really becomes a very important, a very important story about leadership really and the kind of leadership, if you think of a make to know leadership if we think about make to know and the implications for how we live. There's a sense of a make to know leadership that that's really important. And the story goes like this there was a very dangerous, seriously problematic intersection in a town in northern Holland. And so we're going back in close to 20 years now. And there were all kinds of car collisions and pedestrians were being hit and bicyclists were being knocked off their bikes. And the more problems there were the more the traffic authorities added signs and directions slow down here don't go this way don't turn here don't switch there. More and more instructions. And, despite the fact that they were offering more and more instructions, the, the carnage continued it was it was very, very dangerous. And along comes a traffic designer by the name of Hans Mortimer, who was inspired by a very different kind of sensibility and what I like to think about is a make to know sensibility. But what you need to do is you need to remove all these instructions you need to remove the narrowing and open it up. And he was inspired by people on a crowded skating rink and he observed that there was a kind of natural tendency of the human being to avoid collision when things were just open and you were moving around in a, in a, in a skating rink or a flock, you can walk a block of birds or a school of fish and the way multiples move together in this precise choreography and not collide. So he lifted up the, all the signs and he completely opened up the, the space and he put in a roundabout and immediately the collision stopped, the pedestrians were safe, the bicyclists weren't being hit. And what he offered was that people were coming into this place and he actually says they didn't know what they were coming to see they were moving into uncertainty, and they naturally slow down. They naturally took charge themselves, they own their safety and made sure that they yielded properly or slowed down properly watched out in a different kind of way so wasn't simply the signs telling you it was drawing on the creative making, making it safe, the people involved were making it say safe, and it called upon a kind of making within them and to me it's an amazing metaphor for leadership that that that you can think about an authoritarian follow the leader model, or you can think about what it means to create a structure that allows people to thrive to create a structure that allows people to engage at their best to make and to discover. And so it becomes a form of make to load leadership that as you know we practice that art center and open it up and try to create those roundabouts of possibility that are so integral to thriving of our institution. And in the book kind of lands in a place to where it's thinking about the implications for that in terms of leadership but just also in terms of life right just in terms of of how make to know is integral to just being to just living. Right and and how many, how many folks doing how many people do we know and how do we reflect on our own lives, where we get preoccupied with needing to know at all having a vision and we can't start with something until we really have it all in place. Whereas, maybe we need to find our way into uncertainty and engage creatively. And then you begin to think about our lives. And our lives, we are, we are makers human beings are fundamentally makers and we, in the end at the end of the day we make our lives and if you begin to take the make to know idea of all that's involved. of the creativity that's involved and begin to think of our lives as a making I think it opens possibilities for discovery and thriving and well being that could be really vital and really important. On a very specific level you know it's so much of the this book was inspired by students early in their years at art center who come and don't feel like they can start their work until they've got it all figured out. And faculty tell me that all the time and breaking that down and saying, you're not going to know it until you start to make it and get in there. And again as I was saying earlier, the questions and the thoughts and the reflections and the failures will come of that making and the learning will ensue. Well, I think that's a good place to pause for a moment if we want to open it up to questions. Fairies I think that there might have been one or two that showed up in the chat as we. Yeah. So, those of you have questions please put them in the chat space. I'm going to start with the one by Hamilton Carter. What's the choice, should people sacrifice doing to get their 10,000 hours of knowledge, or should they get their 10,000 hours by doing. Does that make sense. It makes total sense yeah and my belief and what I understand from the artist and designer I suppose is the ladder that it's not. First comes this and then comes that there is a certain level of freedom obviously and I was trying to suggest that has achieved by honing that skill. And building that 10,000 hours of experience but you can't get it in some kind of a bookie way or theoretical way you've got to jump in and do it. And so, is very much the latter. I have a question for you. How did you. Why assume you came up with the concept just because you're constantly exposed to people that are making. But what was one of the biggest challenges for you in writing the book. One was finding the time to do it as I'm president running a college that was that that that was tricky. It was certainly a, I came at it with a sense of my own sort of personal experience. I'm just a make to know, as I was trying to say person. I, you know, it's happened in so many different facets of my life. So, I have to kind of try to live by the very principles that I was trying to articulate to leave myself as open as possible to what I was hearing and not come with a predetermined set of, you know, confirm what I already know. And really disciplining myself like that was what was huge and allowing then the writing to itself to help be a making that helped me discover some of these ideas and pull them all together. And so, you know, I'm often asked was writing make to know make to know experience and it was 100%. How did your concept evolved is, did, did you have a different sense of what the book would be in the beginning and then did it evolve into something else, which is the finished product or did you have like a vision and know exactly what you wanted from the start. Right. Yeah, no, it was all manifestation of vision. No, on the contrary, no, exactly right. It was, it was an evolution. So how specifically did it evolve. Well, the whole question of entering uncertainty was a something that took on all kinds of different dimensions. And the learning about what it means to enter it and how that's part of making what the shower moments how that's part of making the, you know, going into this, this, you know, thinking about what this world is as we make it this cosmology, all of it, the, the, the traditional piece of it that was all part of it but then understanding patterns and exploring patterns so that an artist like and Hamilton engages material but that material is spatial and understanding what that might mean and how relevant that is to my own background in the theater, and another artist like Edgar Arsenault, the material that he engages with is really time and a kind of temporal base sense of how things inform one another and how that material gets engaged with so it's not always the canvas or the clay it's these larger concepts of experience and in our lives too. So that's that that that was an example and then the, the designing piece, you know, the designers that part of the learning that came with talking about designers and solve what the making is and solving problems is, you know, there's a cliche that we think that we, there's a brief, they conduct research and then they make the brilliant product but, in fact, there is an exchange between research and doing all the time that designers talk about, which I would reflect and answer to your question was the same for me. So you think about something but it's not like prelude. Okay, my research is done now I'm going to write that essay now I'm going to solve that problem and design that product I'm going to do it. It doesn't work they don't talk about it that way they wrestle they make they learn from the making they go back they open up other possibilities they and and it's this constant back and forth that that can lead them on their journey on their creative journey. All right, now I have the million dollar question that all writers want to know. How did you organize your research because you have a lot of quotes, you have a lot of anecdotes. What's your favorite software or your favorite organizational method. Yeah, I'm embarrassed to say I know that there are all these programs around but I didn't use any of them I just you know kept. Well, I'm not I'm not I'm not that that I'm not that bad. But I do, I do. If you look, if you look on my Mac if you look at notes you'll see just all kinds of things that I would constantly use that to to to keep records of it and then whiteboards whiteboards for me are just beautiful ways to take. You know it's a great metaphor to that tabular awesome just begin to play with it and you know colors and ideas and stuff and then. So to me that was a big part of the of the making as well. And sometimes and Tom can talk about this too. Sometimes you just need to write. Whether it's whether it's creating good stuff or bad stuff. It doesn't matter and you know Tom maybe I can invite you to talk about your experience with L. E. V. So, yeah. Yeah, so I was really fortunate as a as an undergrad to taken a couple classes with Dr. L. E. V cell. Part of one of those classes we I didn't know when I signed up you would also meet with them one on one and I was like what the heck do I have to say to this guy is a Nobel laureate. But we talked about writing, which, you know, I was thinking of him as like, you know, the conscience of the world and didn't realize like oh yeah that's right he writes a bunch of books to. And one of one day one of the things he said to me was, if you take yourself seriously as a writer, you will make the time and you will sit down and you will write every single day and it doesn't matter if what comes out is complete garbage, or is absolutely brilliant. You'll sit down and you'll do the work and for whatever reason that was like a lightning bulb lightning bolt lightning bulb moment for me. That just clicked it was like well that's right like if you if you want to write then right and throw don't worry about what the outcome is don't worry about what your plans are. And, you know, to me if anything part of what's great about writing is that it's smarter than I am so it will, it will take me to places that I wouldn't know to go on my own. And that just clicked for me and so every single day of my life from that day forward, I sat down and write and, and it does it addresses I think a lot of the things that Lawrence talking about in that space of, you know, the creating a readiness and readiness to receive things and a readiness to work and working out those muscles and whatnot, but also setting aside and doing away with the expectations which I think can be awful. Right, I mean, if you're worried too much about, you know, like I've never been one who's like well it has to be this number of words per day or I set a plan and I'm going to finish this chapter by this month by the end of this month. I mean, it doesn't happen when it happens and all I can do is show up and push the words around. I love I just have to say Karen sorry I just love the metaphor of the writing is smarter than I am. I mean that's that's a wonderful way to think about this book and this concept of make to know that the making is smarter than we are and we need to yield to it to discover and to, and to, and to know from it. Beautiful. Well this angle of conversation is relevant to something that Annie has put in the chat space. She comments that so many students particularly, particularly around the end of semester or at final season that they wrestle with deep feelings of anxiety and overwhelm and she's wondering what your advice of just doing it and just get started to address any feelings of inadequacy that someone might have. Do you have any other tips on how to just channel the energy. Yes, I do. And I don't mean to be cute by this but I think we need to revolutionize our educational system in order to do that and if we think about it make to know educational system. Maybe we wouldn't get to that kind of point where we're narrowed by the expectations of a particular course in the same kind of way. And let me say I'm not I don't mean to be naive about this I don't mean to suggest that you know we're not going to be struggling with feelings of inadequacy and security that is part of it though the making can help us if we yield to it smarter virtues. The making can help us move through it. But I also think that the question kind of begs what's the system there that leads us to it why wasn't there a kind of exploratory opening from the beginning of the semester. And I think that the way to kind of engage in a in a doing in and in making that would allow us to, you know, be playful within the, the, the unknown that we're in and learn from it in a kind of way and so I'm, I'm fascinated by educational models and I think make implications for educational kinds of ways I'm fascinated by educational models that open up those kinds of possibility your constructionist views that allow people to, to engage in a very particular way, make in a very particular way. The ideas of, I talk about some, some leading educators who use arts based or design based ways of thinking and approaching to help students get through it so their creative energies are ignited, they're making abilities are ignited the learning and an opening therefore comes from it so that maybe you don't get to a point in the, in the course where you're preoccupied by, you know, a sense of inadequacy, you've, you've been able to engage. And then, you know, on the higher education front and I, I talk a lot about this with my colleagues in the art world to is from a very good place we want our students to know so many things we want them to be have incredible skill and we want them to have a wide range of interdisciplinary skills and we want them to know their communities in which they're from we want them to study humanities and we want to study business and we want them. We, there's so many things that we want them to do and, and what we do when that happens and again it comes from good intentions is we create requirements. After a certain time requirements are necessary but after a certain moment. It's the most uncreative way to set up a curriculum. Right, because you're not setting up frame you're not setting up that improvisational frame, you're narrowing and you're checking off boxes. You're not allowing that kind of make to know the learner. Right, so what we need, I think, is not requirements but frames, and we need to build those frames and we need to be creative about that. Those are the roundabouts that we should create for our students to thrive. Right. Exactly. And lots of free time in a library to just explore. Exactly great libraries like mechanics. All right, well I don't see any more questions in the chat space and I just wanted to throw that out there we have time for a little bit more. And I also just on the last question is also throughout, which I think touches on the book touches on this too but I think there's also a component to, and this will sound negative but I don't mean it this way to set the expectation that will fail in making something. It's, it's, I often think it's, it's almost all failure because you're trying to figure out what it is and it isn't quite that but then you enter back into it with that iterative purpose into that dialogue or conversation and then you continue to move it forward and I think sometimes students are people who are are earlier on in developing their practices. They forget that and they think that they're supposed to be just producing this, this final thing that this action supposed to result in this, but that that erodes the the entire joy of the process and the entire discovery of the process which is a necessary process. I think there's also something about just setting the expectation that it's that that you will fail, then that's, that's right that's part of it now get up and go again. Yeah, I love that. Annie, Annie just popped that into the chat to because you took my words Annie that she loves that concept of giving people permission to fail and that that's part of the learning process. There's a question by Hamilton and he wants to know if making to know the book discusses revolutionizing the educational system, certainly suggest it. And maybe that'll be volume two at some point but it, it, it, it really it tries to suggest in a last chapter that's called implications for how we live, how we might want to rethink our educational system to engage this human capacity to make and their and to know and that and to explore that relationship of making knowing in the most interesting ways as we educate our kids. Yeah. All right well that's a wonderful thing to end on. Hey I want to thank you both for sharing your sharing this conversation with us I think it was really thought provoking and I just want to tell everyone to check this book out. We have it in the collection of the mechanics Institute and it's also available from the publisher. I put the link there in the chat space. But I'm sure your local bookstore can also order the book for you and I just want to shout out. Thank you to our local bookstores, they are places to treasure, treasure and and help you on your way to a greater understanding and learning. So thank you, Lauren and Tom, and thank you all for attending today and I will send you the link later next week of the video. Thank you Karen. Have a great weekend everyone. Bye bye. Bye bye.