Handmade: A Scientist’s Search for Meaning through Making

by Anna Ploszajski

From atomic structures to theories about magnetic forces, scientific progress has given us a good grasp on the properties of many different materials. However, most scientists cannot measure the temperature of steel just by looking at it, or sculpt stone into all kinds of shapes, or know how it feels to blow up a balloon of glass. Handmade is the story of materials through making and doing. Author and material scientist Anna Ploszajski journeys into the domain of makers and craftspeople to comprehend how the most popular materials really work.

Anna has the fresh perspective of someone at the forefront of the field. Each chapter features her accounts of learning from masters of their respective crafts. Along the way, Anna builds a fuller picture of materials and their place in society, as well as how they have intersected with her own life experiences – from land racing on American salt flats to swimming the English Channel. She visits a blacksmith, explores how working with the primal material, clay, has brought about some of the most advanced technologies, and delves down to the atomic scale of glass to find out what makes it ‘glassy’. Handmade affords us a new understanding of the materials we encounter every day and an appreciation for the skills needed to fashion them into objects that are perfectly formed for the jobs they do.

• ISBN10: 1472971078
• ISBN13: 9781472971074
• Publish Date: 13 May 2021
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Imprint: Bloomsbury Sigma
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 320
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.

Handmade: A Scientist’s Search for Meaning through Making is an interesting monograph in the Sigma series, on materials and how they're utilized by Dr. Anna Ploszajski. Released 27th June 2023 by Bloomsbury on their Sigma imprint, it's 320 pages and is available in paperback and ebook format. (Other editions available in additional formats). It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

This is emphatically *not* a tutorial or crafting guide. What it is, is a materials scientist's exploration of materials and how their characteristics relate to their use and suitability to craft different purposes. The author is meticulous and clearly knowledgeable and goes into depth about the physical properties of each material she covers. The writing is not academic,

The book is arranged into chapters by subject: Glass, Plastic, Steel, Brass, Clay, Sugar, Wool, Wood, Paper, and Stone. The work is not too technical for laypeople to understand and the chapters are not annotated. There is a cross referenced index with live hyperlinks in the back of the book. 

The style is chatty and accessible. I found the information and history interesting.This would make a good choice for public library acquisition, maker's groups, materials science and popular science readers.

Four and a half stars - with the codicil that readers pick it up forewarned. 

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.