Join Professors Vincent Edwards and Edmund Harriss for an overview of their August Intersession 2024 Honors Signature Seminar on Technology Craft. Technology is often associated with modernity and the cutting edges of human achievement. We instead consider it as something old, as the continuation of the ancient and universal human traditions of tool use and craft. A central question in that tradition is to start with a tool and ask simply “What can you do?”. In this preview lecture, we will apply this question to some of the most modern tools, CNC routers, laser cutters and 3d printers. We will think about tools as physical objects, as computer models (which in some cases can control machines) and in the abstract, with the goal of balancing between theory and practice, seeing how each supports the other.
