The Book Every Maker Should Read

I have a denim jacket on my worktable that I’m about to cut apart.

I picked it up from the Goodwill down the street.

Now and then I feel a way, right before I cut into something like this, because I know that once it’s cut, whatever history this thing has goes somewhere else; into whatever I make from it. Or it gets lost.

I’ve been trying to understand that feeling, and recently I found a book that comes closer than anything else I’ve seen.

The Meaning of Things

In 1974, two researchers at the University of Chicago started a simple project. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (later famous for his work on “flow”) and Eugene Rochberg-Halton visited 82 families at their homes in the Chicago area. They asked 315 people, from kids to grandparents, which things were special to them and why. They walked in, asked, and listened.

At first, Csikszentmihalyi spent years studying how painters and sculptors make their work, but he wanted to flip it. It became: once art leaves the studio, how do people actually live with it? They started studying places where culture was bought and sold, like galleries, record stores, and theaters.

That method didn’t last long. Instead of studying where they were sold, they turned to the places they were kept.

Then they hit a problem: which objects do you ask about?

If they’d gone in with a list (art, heirlooms, expensive things, etc.), they would’ve found the expected. So they decided not to decide. They asked about everything in the house and let people tell them what mattered.

The book “The Meaning of Things” came out of that study and was published in 1981. It’s a strange, quiet classic. Very few people outside academia heard of it, and almost everyone who makes things should read it.

The part that changed how I think

The preface alone is full of ideas, but one stuck out.

For decades, psychology spoke of “object relations.” But the objects were people: our mothers, our fathers, or our partners. Real objects in our lives, the chairs, the rings, and the jackets, hardly entered the picture.

The authors flipped the question. They set out to study, in their words, “the personification of things rather than the reification of persons.” In other words: not how people get treated like things, but how things come to carry someone.

They also leaned on an idea from the philosopher Charles Peirce, one that goes further than “objects remind us of things.” Peirce believed that the object itself helps to make the meaning. The weight, texture, and wear matter: they don’t just hold the memory. They are the memory.

The fade on this jacket is a record of years spent moving through one particular life. Nobody designed it. It built up slowly, just from someone living in it. If I print that same fade on a new jacket, it would probably look identical, but mean nothing.

Meaning is grown.

The authors called it cultivation. Objects don’t hand us meaning. We grow it slowly and on purpose, the way we’d tend a garden.

That’s humbling to hear as a maker. It means I can’t stamp meaning onto anything. A clever story on a hang tag won’t make a stranger feel it. The person who lives with the object does most of the work.

What I can do is make things worth that work. Things made from materials that already carry history. Things that wear in instead of wearing out, and only get better with use.

That’s why I take apart old denim instead of buying new fabric. I keep the fades, the stress marks, the seams someone else’s body already broke in, and I cut away only what’s too worn to hold up, so the history stays and the piece can still take years of use.

Things that teach us who to be

One more idea from the book stayed with me. Borrowing from the sociologist George Herbert Mead, the authors argue that objects can be role models, just like people.

They help to shape who we become. A fountain pen on the desk pulls you toward writing by hand. A good knife in the kitchen pulls you toward cooking. The things around us are quietly teaching us how to live.

Why this matters now

The preface opens by pointing out that we name entire eras after what people could make: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age. Making things is at the heart of being human.

The authors also made a point that was ahead of its time in 1981: the idea that a good life comes from owning more things was already fading.

Forty-five years later, we own more than any generation before us and feel connected to almost none of it.

I don’t think the answer is owning nothing. I think it’s owning fewer things that can actually hold and help you build a life.

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I write Things With Weight, a publication about objects, meaning, and the ideas behind handmade work.

The Book Every Maker Should Read was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.