Direct From Mind to Hand: A Purity of Execution

I am currently working on a small residential renovation project. I am performing the design, fabrication, and installation for the project. The chaos of the pandemic has actually made it easier to work on the project everyday. Although the project is small in scale, it is huge on ideas.

I am designing and building a patio cover and privacy screen with two gates. It is a unique project requiring a great deal of work which I have taken the initiative to build on my own. This action was born of necessity. It would have been too expensive to have someone else construct it. In the beginning, I went to various trades and got pricing for different scopes of work. I was surprised at how expensive it was. I decided to take on the hard work myself. It has been very difficult but extremely rewarding. Thinking in financial terms, working in this fashion has allowed me the opportunity to design a highly technical project that would be cost prohibitive in normal circumstances due to the huge amount of materials and labor. In some ways the project is priceless.

What I learned from the work was the amount of clear thinking that is born from grueling tasks. During the difficult times, I constantly think about the notion of the transfer of information from the mind to the hands. I reflect on the pure transit of design which emanates directly from the mind, then into the hands, which results in a built product. This differs slightly from the traditional methods where one designs in the mind then passes the intent to the hand where it is translated to a medium; paper or digital. That translation is then provided to a highly competent builder who then crafts the work.

Does that passing of design to a third party affect the explicit or intrinsic value of the design? Maybe the value is not merely set in financial terms but rather many aspects, some being very personal to me. Maybe it is solely about the pursuit of ones dreams without any thought about reward or financial returns.

The value that I see is the experience of being directly connected to a design and learning what that means. I see the value of being introduced to various factors and design challenges while seeing new processes and systems born of those new issues. The project has been an intense experience filled with many decisions and paths to travel. The project has exposed a new focus which will require innovation and the development of new relationships. Most of all, the project was very personal - produced of my own mind and hands and then executed into the real world.