I was born in the dead of winter in the Middle of Nowhere, Idaho. I was also the first child, so understandably, my mother and her parents were a bit overprotective. My grandparents were particularly wary of my dad's child-rearing skills, perhaps partly due to the significant language barrier between them, as they could just stumble through a the Pledge Allegiance in English and my dad's Romanian skills extended to saying "Good Night" and "Thank you for the food." But, when my dad was finally allowed to take me outside of the house by himself for the first time, he of course took me to Home Depot, for the first (certainly not the last) time. As a tribute to the effort he put toward pushing me towards engineering and making in general, this book nook represents that first "father-daughter" trip.
I first began designing the book nook in Fusion360 by making a rough CAD model. My primary goal here was to capture the inner dimensions of the pre-laser-cut book nook box and from there build the proportions of the other components. Also included was the mesh model of the Christmas tree I modified to fit within the box, which I later 3D printed so that I can wrap lights around it. (Because I took the time to 3D model the project with precise measurements from the materials, the building process went relatively smoothly and quickly.) I then exported the faces to Adobe Illustrator, where I finalized the pieces for laser cutting. I used laser cut plywood that I left mostly unpainted and untreated for the bulk of this project because it reminds me of the stacks in the wood section of Home Depot. I also decided to raster etch the image of the interior of Home Depot to simplify the design - I was going for minimalism.
I laser cut the pieces, compensating for kerf so that most did not need glue for attachment! The face of Home Depot was cut with masking tape over it, so I was able to weed out the parts I wanted to paint and spray paint over it to achieve precise lines. I also sewed tiny hats for the child and father to add to the "winter" feel. I 3D printed the tree model with CPE, and due to its complexity, I spray-painted it in bronze. Home Depot only sells fake Christmas trees after all!
After the preparation was complete, I began assembling the parts of the book nook. I wrapped the provided fairy lights around the Christmas tree and fed the battery pack out a small hole on the side of the box for easy access. (In hindsight, I should have made the tree smaller to not be against the walls so that I could easily wrap the lights all the way around. I had to pin the lights to the panels on either side of the tree to achieve a wrap-around look.) I also added a tree skirt. I attached the Circuit Playground Express to the ceiling of the Home Depot and fed its wire out of the back panel. The circuit is programmed to turn its LEDs to the brightest white it can upon activation to mimic the fluorescent lights of Home Depot. Poly-fill, usually used for stuffing animals, was used for the snow. I wanted the light to be concentrated inside Home Depot and the snow to be thick on the ground to capture some of the wonder for the viewer in approaching it with my dad during a dark day in December.
Finally, the book nook was complete!
More on My Dad
When us middle schoolers were finally granted access to our very own lockers, the other students all brought in flimsy wire locker shelves from Walmart. My dad instructed me to take careful measurements of the inside of my locker, and he built me a custom wooden shelf in with the old miter saw in our garage instead. At my Catholic elementary school, every second-grader built tiny nativity scenes for a proud display, and rather than settling for a popsicle-stick stable held together desperately with hot glue, my dad insisted on designing and building a beautifully stained wooden stable, which lasted eight Christmases and the intervening garage storage periods. The year before, the big class project was recreating Christopher Columbus’ ships (at a mostly white, relatively affluent, definitively conservative school). I brought in a wooden Santa María, larger than I was, that my dad and I had spent two weekends building together. Every school and home DIY project my dad touched produced the same glorious results: impressive, sturdy, and over-engineered. His particular brand of making was rooted in an adolescence spent inside woodshops, metal shops, and hardware shops, a consequence of the “blue collar” community he came from.
My dad’s father and his father’s father were electricians, so his earliest education in any sort of making involved followed his father around (loosely-managed) construction sites and being (literally) shocked by the wiring. Before his family were electricians, they were small farmers, stringing all the way back to the earliest German farmers in Omaha, Nebraska. This background is to say that “blue collar” – working class jobs – was the only type of profession known to my dad growing up, and manual labor was simply expected. From the age of fourteen on, he worked various jobs to supplement his family’s basic needs. These jobs included mowing lawns, delivering newspapers, and, most formatively, working in a local hardware shop with a popular power tool rental service. In this store context, he mostly learned how to use the available tools by “bullshitting” explanations to customers.
The place he learned to properly use the various power tools, woodshop, and metal shop tools he now stores in our basement is “shop class.” There, he learned how to fix car engines, build birdhouses, and fashion metal toolboxes. My dad says that the only reason he finished high school was the shop class, as he found the traditionally-academic classes tedious. Shop class activities, in contrast, were unstructured and free to play within, and, most importantly, the skills involved were directly functional outside of school. His high school catered to the low-income students from the blue-collar families of the surrounding area which, not uncoincidentally, happened to be comprised of relative racial and ethnic diversity, for Nebraska. Not only did most of them expect to enter blue-collar jobs, but they also depended on shop class skills to survive by extending the lives of their run-down houses, cars, bikes, etc.
Consequently, the school had a relatively strong emphasis on “vocational training” – that is, making things. The students, after all, came from a background where, as Linda Le phrased it in respect to communities of color but can also be extended to all low-income communities, “making has always been a way of life and has always been a part of how [they] taught, learned, survived, and more important thrived” (Le & Medrano Ramos, 2020). When you do not have the money to buy a replacement, you need to be able to fix it yourself, and if that fails, to build it yourself. However, the type of vocational making valued in blue collar industries and communities has been traditionally undervalued in the American education system.
The separation of “liberal arts” and “servile arts” is rooted in the historical divisions between higher academia and inferior apprenticeship learning. As education systems became codified in the United States, so did this division. Evan Barba cites an early example in the earliest laws governing youth education in the United States: the 1640s’ Massachusetts School Laws. The laws emphasize the intended goal of training students for “higher employments,” that is, those professions requiring reading and writing skills. The Industrial Revolution only further degraded manual labor and strengthened “the division between academic and manual education,” and the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 formalized a two-track system of secondary school education, with one “for the head” and the other “for the hands.” The vocational system grew as distinct practice-over-theory education, tailored for students who were deemed “ill-suited” to academic pursuits. However, this separation of students enforced a perception that vocational education led to undesirable second-class jobs, blue-collar jobs that do not require “higher” education (Barba, 2015). It is no surprise then, that today’s emphasis on college education as a gateway to social mobility and standardized testing-based funding allocation for public schools has led to a decline in vocational training – particularly traditional shop classes and home economics classes – in secondary schools (Brown, 2012).
This historical inferiority of manual labor is somewhat ironic then, in the face of the “Maker Movement” initiated by Dale Dougherty’s 2005 publication of MAKE magazine. This movement enshrines making, or “technology-based DIY culture” (Melo & Nichols, 2020) in the trappings of the “technology entrepreneur,” who uses what is essentially a shop classroom as a place to “incubate ideas, to prototype gadgets, and to network” (Barba, 2015) rather than to work and survive. The shop class of the twentieth century held grease-slick metalworking tools and sawdust-covered woodshops, but the shop class of the twenty-first century houses sleek, expensive self-automated machines like 3D printers, virtual reality headsets, and laser cutters – all of which require a high threshold of finance and education to access. The typical demographics of the “Maker community,” then, are societally privileged: overwhelmingly older, white, cis, heterosexual men in high-income tax brackets (Brown, 2020). But at its core, the Maker movement represents a reassociation of quote-on-quote higher cognitive skills with the manual labor long-associated with the working class, and to ignore the making endemic of low-income, “blue-collar” communities is a disservice to the Maker Movement. Digital fabrication is only one side of making; “traditional” fabrication methods cannot be ignored.
My dad was extraordinarily lucky: he stumbled into a university scholarship for a nuclear engineering degree the next state over, where he thrived in higher education. He was also lucky that he was a white, able-bodied, heterosexual, Christian man. Now, he has a Ph.D., the first Dr. Palmtag, and he teaches nuclear reactor physics at NC State, a decidedly “white-collar” job. His hands-on making is an intermittent hobby rather, while still being deeply practical, and his primary objective when he does build things is to teach his daughters the “shop class skills” we did not learn in our fancy, college-preparatory schools. These days, my dad is also delving into the classic Makerspace technologies with a child-like glee, by living vicariously through my access to a university’s makerspaces. Of course, because he still straddles the gap between his blue-collar roots and his white-collar present, he is not satisfied with using any already-available 3D modelling software to design for the 3D printer: he built a tessellation program from the ground-up himself, and then has me print out his to-scale teaching models of nuclear reactor cores, because every project must have a purpose.
