The Road, Drawn in Crayon
We put up a page a few days ago that shows the road to a product instead of the product. Drawings, shops, prices, the things that went wrong. It was written the way I write everything, which is to say for adults who already know what a drawing is. Then my nine year old started reading it over my shoulder, and it turned into the thing the two of us talk about. So we rewrote it for him.
Everything that gets made goes down the same five stops. Draw, source, make, check, ship. Draw it and put a number on every edge. Find someone who can build it and agree what it costs. Cut the wood. Measure what came back against what you drew. Put it in a box. Grown-ups call those design engineering, sourcing, prototyping, inspection and fulfilment, and the words are worth learning in that order, because skipping one is how you find out in December which one you skipped. Each stop now has a picture and one thing you can do at a kitchen table with a ruler and a pencil.
The pictures are crayon, and that is on purpose. There is no photograph of either of these objects, because neither object exists. A crayon drawing cannot pretend otherwise. Every one of them is captioned with the same line: not a photograph, nobody has built one yet.
The stuck parts stayed stuck, which was the only rule I cared about. Max is standing at source, waiting on a five volt bulb that has to look like a filament bulb and weigh under sixty grams, and until it is found no wood gets cut on him. The airplane is standing at draw, seven sheets done, waiting on a signature. A kid reading a progress bar that only ever moves forward learns nothing. A kid reading the word stuck, next to the reason, learns what the job actually is.
There is a card on the page now with five stamps on it, one for each station, and you earn one by actually doing the thing. Two of the five cannot be earned yet, because nobody has cut any wood, and the card says so instead of pretending. Nothing on that card leaves the computer you are reading this on. There is no account, no form, and nothing for a nine year old to sign up to, which is a rule we wrote down before we wrote the code. Next to it is a guessing game called the millimetre eye. It looks like a game. It is the first thing anybody on a bench learns.
There is a word bank at the bottom with eight real words on it. Millimetre, tolerance, revision, prototype, first article, minimum order quantity, gold seal. Not kid versions of them, the ones an inspector uses. If you have a nine year old within reach, the one to start with is the drawing of Max. Print it, and find the eight places where he bends. Then look at your own arm and work out why a shoulder needs a different one than an elbow.
