Watching ceramic workshops, learning nothing about ceramics
I went to a ceramics workshop a few weekends ago. I have no intention of becoming a ceramicist. A friend was demoing slip-casting and invited me along, and I went mostly because I like watching people who are good at things.
Three things I noticed
The setup time is most of the work. The mold takes longer than the cast. The cleanup takes longer than the mold. The actual moment of pouring slip into the mold is maybe four percent of the day.
Nobody talks while they pour. They will talk through the prep and through the cleanup, but the pour itself is silent, focused, slightly held-breath. Whatever else ceramics is, it is a craft with a moment in it.
Mistakes do not feel like mistakes. A bubble in a cast is a thing that happened, not a personal failure. People look at it, name what caused it, fix what they can, and move on.
I have been thinking about the third one ever since. In software the equivalent move is the bug report. Most engineers I know treat bugs as personal failures. The ceramicists I watched did not. They treated the failure as a property of the material at that moment, not a property of themselves.
I am not going to make ceramics. But the relationship to my own mistakes has changed slightly since that afternoon, and I do not think that is a small thing.