My grandma’s hands

I have my grandmother’s hands. They are knobby, small and at almost two-thirds the age of grandma’s hands when she died, they look like they have already weathered over a lifetime of tactile challenges. Grandma came from a Bulacan family of ladies who made delicately embroidered Filipiniana clothes for generations, while I, her first grandchild, have never been near a sewing machine for 25 years since Ms. Aguila, my Practical Arts teacher in high school, intimated to me that she was not optimistic I would have a future in any handicraft since I had the manual dexterity of a circus clown. I now look at my "clownish" hands posed on my keyboard and realize that they have touched things that my grandma had never touched nor even laid eyes on before she passed away. I make daily contact with the world through devices and systems that were only considered science fiction two generations ago. This technological aspect of our lives has created a space between my life and my grandma’s by which I can understand how she made sense of her world and her times, through the systems and devices available to her. In that sense, I can have a window in my learning to understand her and the world of her times better, even when she is no longer around.

What I found so charming about my grandma’s craft was that it was so "intimate," not only in the sense of being "personalized" in the way people custom-designed sayas and barong tagalogs, but what to me, seemed like a charmed and poignant relationship with the "needle, thread and fabric" of their craft. No matter how inseparable I have become with my laptop, I still cannot venture a parallel comparison with the relationship my grandma had with the tools of her craft. You see, without my laptop, I am still not separated from my writing. I could still grab any blackening substance and a slate or even a slab to express my craft. But pull the thread from grandma’s life of a needle and the fabric of her trade frays and disappears. I was not so sure if it were envy that I felt that my grandma, her craft and her tools were so intricately intertwined, but I knew that I realized something about the way modern technology has mass-produced things which took away art from their creators and the presumption of passion, devotion and pride that was synonymous with guilds then. Now, anyone with a skill at tapping on a keyboard can post anything on the Web without careful consideration of whether they really have something to say. Anyone now who can stand in an assembly line can make your clothes and you can be assured that it has been inspected "with pride" by worker #905383.

I chanced upon George Johnson’s review of a book called Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop –From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication (Basic Books, 2005 ) by  Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Neil Gershenfeld in the June issue of the Scientific American and resonated with what he wrote the book predicts: "the revival of a spirit that had been fading since the Industrial Revolution: that of the artisan" and of "technological craftsmen… working on a personal scale. Crafting their code in home workshops, they enjoyed the same satisfaction that comes from building a bookshelf or caning a chair." Johnson thinks that Gershenfeld is onto some kind of  "revolutionary comeback" where creators and consumers were one or at least, had a direct and dynamic link. Alvin Toffler, in his Third Wave book in the 80s, also referred to this in his "Prosumer Theory," one that the "heals the historic breach" between producers and consumers, giving rise to "prosumers." Gershenfeld’s main idea in his book is that the computer codes that now empower personal users to custom-tailor virtual commodities such as their desktop designs, screen savers, computer sounds, etc. will also soon enable users to design their own physical "stuff," whatever it is, through "personal fabricators."

These "personal fabricators" are supposed to be software codes which will be free, so easy, so user-friendly and open (engendered by the free Linux and Unix systems) that users can specify what they need in a gadget and this will correspond to a code which you can post in the Web for someone to make for you, wherever he/she is, and send it to you. If you want a sewing machine that tells you stories or reads from a classic while you churn away at the tracery of your stitches, the personal fabricator will let you design it and you can send it to some artisan raring to make you one. I like this scenario. It does not only reunite the consumer with creativity but also gives rise to a some kind of "modern barter," some form of "alternative economics" where the need, the skill and good to match it is not solely motivated by money, but a fellowship among us to design and to create the "stuff" of our lives. Consumer, creativity and citizenship come home as one. As long as designer and creator agree, then we get our custom-designed tool because there are no world standard market prices for "story-telling sewing machines." Not yet, anyway.

The best thing about these ideas from Gershenfeld and Johnson’s review of his book is the way they flesh out hope for developing countries to cultivate their own "fabrication labs" that will empower communities since they will be "encouraging locals to try making tools that are unavailable or unaffordable: portable solar collectors that can turn shafts and wheels, inexpensive electronic gauges farmers can use to measure the quality of their crops, giving them an edge when they haggle with the brokers." I think they can even do better. I think when locals are empowered to design their own tools for use in their trade, they can even lend their own cultural texture to the design of things to make them not only relevant and useful, but also beautiful and meaningful to the way they live their lives. As Nobelist writer Italo Calvino said, it is the humanity we invest in things that make them meaningful. This way, cultural diversity is also preserved and we will no longer think of our technological future and think of ourselves, all in color-coded space suits with uniform helmets and logos owned by tech corporations.

It would be nice to still be around when that kind of technological scenario dawns. If so, I would still want to write about the nature of things through science and technology as this column does, in whatever form, and celebrate the fact that technology, the "stuff" of our lives, reached that fork in the road and foiled our destiny to be beggars for quality and creativity for these "stuff," that it reunited the consumer with the creator – with humanity’s sense of camaraderie, with citizenship. I dread the alternative – the thought that the stuff of our lives, such as the automobile, will be mistaken by an alien visitor to be the dominant lifeform here on our planet just like in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

My grandmother referred to me as Little Red Riding Hood when I was a child, owing she said to my independence and sense of adventure. In a twist of the tale, I imagine her now looking at me as I type away at my keyboard, asking me "My dear, what weathered, knobby fingers you have!" and I would answer: "Yes, Lola..." and taking her hands from which my hands were copied, thank her, saying "...the better to honor your memory with…"

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