Physical making is not only a way to develop our technical skills, but can also be a powerful tool to develop soft skills, strengthen interpersonal relationships, improve problem solving and promote play in a positive manner.

By creating real, tactile and tangible outputs that can be picked up and passed around we can also explore cultural and social issues as well as the more obvious making skills.

The physical making process can reward some of our primitive emotions that make us human. We believe that by supporting, building and promoting these skills, we can impact on wider aspects of society, improve wellbeing and generate social capital.

As humans we learn through making: it allows us to reach our higher ground, to reach a heightened state of awareness about our humanity and the world around us. By combining the digital with 3D and laser printing, MAKlab reduce the distance between the ‘real’ physical world and the ephemeral, cold and distant (as it is often wrongly characterised) of the digital. And what could be a more potent symbol of humanity’s relationship with the digital at our current historical moment than a 3D printed skull? Just as the image of Hamlet holding up ‘poor Yorick’ has come to symbolise humanity’s mortality and the individual’s own death, this skull, far more than Damian Hirst’s superficial ‘For the Love of God’, for example, is a powerful reminder of our current digital condition. We exist, as humans, in the physical and the digital.

My experience with MAKlab wasn’t all just big philosophies about mortality, however. They also made me a badge: ‘Mikey: Free For All’, with a lightbulb on it to represent thought and ideas. Of course, light, has often been used as symbol of knowledge and spirituality, indeed, enlightenment itself, certainly in Western Culture for centuries.‘I was blind, but now I see’, from the Gospel of John, has come to mean any kind of spiritual awakening (not just Christian). Light as a metaphor for knowledge and understanding, then, is a powerful one. ‘Higher Ground’ is taken from the album Innervisions and the album’s artwork is a painting of the blind Stevie Wonder staring out at what is, presumably, an American landscape with that landscape depicted as being directly fed into his eyes.

Wonder may be blind, but he can still see the tumultuous American culture of the early 1970s, the painting is saying. Seeing is not confined to the physical, but also the mental. On Innervisions, Wonder combined the electronic (synthesizers), with the analogue (guitars) and created a musical soundscape that is as unique and as a fresh sounding today as it was forty years ago.The album is the sound of a young man experimenting and excited by the possibility of a new form of musical communication brought about through the synthesis of electronic and analogue instruments, bringing about the spiritual renewal that Wonder sings about in ‘Higher Ground’.

The questions for us today in the humanities, and they are questions that the Common Ground event explored, but did not answer, are: how can we successfully synthesize the digital and the analogue in our teaching and our learning? Can the humanities become spiritually renewed? Is this even a desirable thing to be wished for? The Common Ground event was a reminder that we should never lose sight of the wider cultural and often tumultuous political landscape in which we work. Through openness, sharing, collaboration and generosity we can make work that extends beyond the university and change lives.

Is such a situation possible?

Perhaps it won’t be too long till we find out.

Michael Goodman
Goodmanmj@cardiff.ac.uk