In Defense of Crafts

Why we should tell kids who love crafts that they could be engineers

When I was a kid, I’d go through crafting phases. One month I’d be in a frenzy of friendship bracelet making, the next knitting scarves. I made soap. I got super into beading and jewelry-making at one point. Baking lasted several years, and I started a baking blog in high school to document my creations. I now sew many of my own clothes, and continue to bake and knit when I can. I am also a full time product design engineer.

I’d like to make the case for crafts as an educational tool, the common but unrecognized STEM toy flying under the radar. Girls and women are up against significant ingrained bias when they enter fields of science, tech, engineering and math. I believe we can get some serious bang for our buck by capitalizing on the hobbies and crafts little girls already gravitate towards. Young girls need to see not just “STEM toys for girls” (which are wonderful!) but also to be shown how arts and crafts set them up for success in STEM fields. I’m an engineer, so I’ll focus on how crafts encourage engineering skills, but if you’re interested in science, Psychology Today has you covered on that.

Crafts and gender

Crafts are popular with many children, and make excellent educational toys for all kids, no matter their gender. However, crafts are usually marketed towards girls, both in the color schemes chosen for materials and the children featured on the box. Furthermore, sewing and cooking were historically “women’s work,” associated with working in the home. Women who tended a household — their own or someone else’s — needed soaps to clean, baskets to organize home items, warm clothing, and bed linens, so they learned to make them.

Gendered toys come under fire frequently for their impact on gender equality. They are blamed for unrealistic beauty standards, reinforcing stereotypes, toxic masculinity, and more. Reexamining the role of crafts in girls’ learning and play can open doors to more options, and hopefully encourage more little crafters to consider engineering later in life.

The crossover between crafts and engineering

Perseverance

When I was making a tee shirt quilt one summer, I had to iron interfacing (a sort of stiffener for floppy fabrics) to the back of each quilt square. The squares were cut from tee shirts I’d grown out of, and there were 25 of them. That may not sound like a lot, but each time I put the iron down, I needed to hold it for 15 seconds before moving on to the next spot. As a 9-year-old, this felt like an eternity. I wanted to start sewing already! The project took me a couple of months with parental supervision (thanks Dad!) and perseverance. I was so proud of the final result when I finally saw the quilt and was able to use it on my bed.

In product design and engineering, we rarely see the final product until months or even years after starting the design. Sure, 3D prints provide an estimation, but it’s nothing like seeing the real thing. Crafts encourage persistence even when the progress doesn’t seem glamorous, and reward little makers with the sweet taste of satisfaction once the project is finished.

Tradeoffs

Design involves a lot of tradeoffs (famously, between cost, time, and complexity). So do crafts. The tiny decisions of each moment require compromise: choosing materials at Michaels, picking colors, making spur of the moment changes to a pattern or recipe on the fly. These choices are woven through the process, sometimes defined (in instructions) but always malleable. Craft projects teach kids to make these decisions, combining the guidance of instruction, limitations of the materials, and the inspiration of creativity.

Learning new skills (while applying them)

When I sew, I pick up new skills on every single project. I am at the ripe phase of amateurism where what I want to make is just beyond what I’ve done before. Engineering education rarely prepares students for every situation they’ll encounter on the job. The hope is that you’ll pick up the relevant skills by doing them. Crafting builds the confidence to learn skills while taking on new challenges.

Imagination and Creativity

Imagination and creativity are essential to both crafting and engineering. Kids have to imagine how each choice along the way will make the final product look or feel different. They also exercise judgement, predicting which color palette will look best in the scarf they’re knitting, or what mix-ins will make the most delicious cookie. Once it’s made, they have a chance to assess — did butterscotch chips make a delicious cookie? Did that one yellow thread brighten up the whole scarf? All of this feeds back into the next creation.

Creativity is expressed through design choices that reflect the creator’s preferences, instinct, and emotional connection to the work. Engineers also weave in limitations and opportunities of manufacturing methods (eg. tooling concerns, moldability, in mechanical part design). This forward-thinking creativity is important when considering the future ramifications of early design choices.

Spatial Understanding

Many types of engineering (mechanical, civil, electrical, chemical) require the ability to visualize three dimensional forms. Crafts teach spatial reasoning and visualization skills. Friendship bracelets are made beautiful by combining different knots. Sewing garments can involve flipping fabric inside out and upside down, matching up curved seam lines to wrap flat fabric around a curved body. Similarly, woodshop-type construction projects require construction skills — planning how several flat pieces will fit together. Manipulating objects and their relationships in space is a skill I use every day in product design.

Sourcing and Materials

They don’t teach much of this in college engineering classes, but sourcing is a whole department at many large engineering companies. At smaller companies, engineers play this role, and even at large ones, they must understand supply chains and communicate with manufacturers. Craft projects require organizing the shopping list for materials, planning for necessary quantities, making a trip to the store, managing the supply of material once it’s at home, and sometimes doing it all on the cheap! All of these are transferable to real-world engineering work (with bigger budgets, usually).

Process Control

Crafts require fine motor control, and achieving consistency (say, in knitting tension or paint brush stroke) yields professional results. These skills are analogous to process control in manufacturing, where consistency often directly affects quality. Crafts teach kids to be diligent, careful, and consistent in their work, traits employers look for in engineers. It also requires practice and repetition, which gives kids a sense of mastery while showing the benefits of doing the same thing over and over — you get better at it, on an automatic level.

What about Legos?

I could make all the same points about legos, but no one has trouble telling a kid who lives for legos that they (not always, but often, he) could be an engineer. This is already ingrained, part of the nerdy legacy of engineering that we celebrate. They’re a wonderful toy, but they’re not the only way to spot a young tinkerer and future engineer.

Making the connection

There is so much talk of girls toys, especially their role in the shortage of women in STEM fields. It’s not just legos that impart STEM skills, it’s also pottery. It’s not just arduino, it’s also myspace pages. It’s not just brio train sets, it’s also crochet. It’s not just erector sets, it’s origami too. Maybe it’s not building a birdhouse with Dad, maybe it’s sewing a pair of pajamas.

It doesn’t really matter what the craft or hobby is, what matters is connecting the dots between a little girl’s sparkling eyes as she shows off her latest creation to the huge variety of career paths available to her, including engineering. STEM toys marketed for girls are awesome additions to the toy landscape, but I’d like to see arts and crafts lifted up in a different light. Parents, teachers, and other adults that work with kids can make this shift, changing how they praise the persistence and creativity kids learn through crafts. We might reach a large number of young girls and help them see themselves as engineers-to-be.