Making as a form of thinking
Antony Gormley is a British sculptor and artist whose most famous works include the Angel of the North, a large public sculpture in Gateshead in the North East of England
Last month I heard a Leading podcast interview with him that got me thinking about the importance of process in art and design. This is something I’m thinking about a lot at the moment, especially with so much focus on technology and AI increasingly reducing things to outputs.
This quote from the interview stayed with me the most:
“I realised early on, that making was a form of thinking, that making was a form of communicating, that maybe I implicitly trusted more than words.”
I think this illustrates the importance of process. With AI, I don’t want to give up the value of thinking in our teams, organisations, and our craft as designers. I think that we lose so much more than we gain through so-called productivity gains if we only focus on outputs.
In design, we learn by doing, which is the same principle as making as a form of thinking. We learn through the way we draw, prototype, and test new models of the world.
In the interview, Antony Gormley goes on to talk about the importance of the materials he works with, saying:
“I don’t trust words as much as acts, and acts that are embodied into material mean the most to me.”
This really stayed with me as well – the importance of the materials we work with as part of the process of making. Thinking about making as something very tangible that we can hold in our hands, or how our fingerprints should be all over our ideas.
As a final point, he goes on to also talk about the participatory nature of his work, explaining how the Angel of the North was made with help from people in the local area of Gateshead and the North East. This includes how materials were sourced and support for how the structure was crafted.
This is what we could call collective making as a form of thinking:
“[It] was made through collective will and collective action […] art comes out of life and it should go back into life […] art made in community, for community.”
In part, this is about a place and a group of people collectively shaping and forming what is important to them.
Again, the process is what’s important here. Without this collective will and direct participation, the final output would lack the same meaning that makes the Angel of the North a source of local pride and identity. In this example, it’s the process that makes the final output, all that it is, and what it represents for local people, so valuable.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.