Just had a discussion with my manager about the anxiety of modern fathers over the fact that the creative skills children are developing these days are to do with the intangible virtual interactions, whereas my youth was about making stuff, physical interactions.

There is a lot of anxiety about this gap, especially for the generation who broke things in dad’s shed, or garage. That’s actually everybody except the current batch. It seems very different to sitting on the floor with a Playstation. But I often wonder what being creative now requires, and does working in a purely electronic way, sitting at a desk peering at a monitor, hinder my creativity? Should I be sketching more?

I think I should as a recent article in Wired expounded the advantages of making things, because in making things you understand them. So I’m going to build a Foxhole radio. Conceptually I will come to grips with the electromagnetic spectrum , well the radio bit of it – I’m not going to be messing with microwaves or x rays. I’ve found the link on make magazine, and I’ll be away.

How will this help me do my job? Dusting the cobwebs from the rusty motor skills part of my brain, and the satisfaction of having a physical object at the end of it. This will remind me of the importance of actually building something simple that works. With websites, the complexity of the interaction and the multiple outcomes to every user journey and the fact you are just thinking about it, means it’s very hard to judge if the website is actually working. This, I think, takes away from a lot of people the satisfaction of a job well done.