Tim Hunkin and the Issue of the Inventor’s Identity

This post is proud to have been syndicated to the Ponoko Blog.

A while back, the Core 77 blog led me to an archive of the 80’s series The Secret Life of… which beautifully relates the history and design of various household items.

But the real star of the show is the presenter himself, Tim Hunkin. He is one of a few multi-disciplined tinkerers whom I count as a personal hero. Cartoonist, inventor, broadcaster, sculptor – his book Almost Everything There Is to Know was a formative influence in my childhood. He is a great example to any of us who want engage in this new world of designing, adapting and making, embodying as he does both passion for the end product, as well as a broad variety of skills and experience to get there. The great thing is with the enablement of the web, we can all be part time designers, or adapters, or makers, and indulge our multifaceted natures while still holding down a day job. If not making it a day job.

Incidentally, I constantly have trouble defining what it is I do in my studio/workshop – increasingly I err towards the term ‘tinker’ which is unsatisfactory, evoking activities of a more mischievous nature than they often are. On his personal site, Hunkin goes for ‘engineer/cartoonist’, which gives no indication of his myriad other talents.

We need a term for this new breed of inventors to which I belong and which sites such as Make, Ponoko and Instructables seem to attract. We are changeably referred to as makers, industrial designers, inventors, indie designers, hackers: none of which seem to embody the activity truthfully (the term ‘maker’ really doesn’t cut it as a valid activity amongst some of my peers, who have the benefit of such well established terms as ‘doctor’ or ‘telesales operator’). My favourite has to be ‘post-industrial designers’, as referred to in this discussion on Core77. It would certainly be good to stick to one job-title in the future, and this seems to infer the right amounts of professionalism, independence and irreverance for me!

Anyway, back to Hunkin. Have a look at his site and you will find an Aladdin’s cave of truly joyous objects, thorough explanations of his workshop and methods, all infused with the man’s quiet, considered adoration for mechanical creativity. An inspiration, whatever he is and whatever we are!

The image above is a self portrait by Hunkin, and the images below, a human sewing machine from The Secret Life of the Sewing Machine and a cartoon from Almost Everything There is to Know, used with permission from Tim Hunkin.