And now I have empathy for computers

I brutally threw out most of the iterations of both the Paper Nativity and the Paper Easter Set, but I ended up not being able to bear throwing out certain models, like these earliest drafts of Jesus-in-swaddling and the manger. This was partly because it was so dang much work to get from the first draft to a minimally acceptable state, where I was no longer fiddling with the shape of it and only needed to fiddle with how it would be built. A certain computer program, or rather set of programs, will probably change this reality for me sooner than I had realized was possible.

I’m not saying I have empathy for the machine kind of computer— the kind that I’m typing on right now. I have empathy for the human kind, the people whose job it was (before machine-computers were common) to add up columns of numbers. Their jobs were made obsolete by the advent of machine-computers, which could do those jobs more quickly and accurately than the humans ever could.

This is the story. My early design process for both the paper Nativity and the paper Easter set involved quite a bit of flailing about and being uncertain if I would be able to come up with an acceptable design in the amount of time I had left between when I started and the upcoming holiday. This was one of the highest-stress parts of the process for me, though I can’t say, given the time constraints I gave myself to work under, that the rest of the process was particularly stress-free.

Now that Easter is over, I keep telling people how grateful I am that there isn’t a holiday associated with Noah’s Ark. (My sister pointed out that there actually is one, in February, but my response is that this is NOT the same.)

Then, a few weeks ago, a friend sent me a link to a computer program called Pepakura. Pepakura takes information from a 3D file and turns that file into a paper pattern which can be cut out and folded and taped or glued into the final product.

At first I wasn’t worried; I thought, hey, this thing could totally speed up the early stages of my design process. And you know what? It totally could. And that part is exciting, because, as I mentioned, quite frankly the early stages of my design process have not been super fun, and I think speeding through that part could be amazing.

And yet, as I began to mess around with this new program and see how powerful it was, there also started to be a part of me that was a little bit horrified that something I’m good at is suddenly no longer needed. Like being a hand-sewing tailor when the first sewing machine comes to town, I either adopt this technology as a new part of my process or be left in the dust. No time to mourn or wail about my sudden, uncomfortable obsolescence.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that I want to go back. I’ve seen what resistance to new technology can do.

About thirty years ago, my hometown in Utah adopted ginormous sturdy black garbage cans for household use, because they had upgraded their garbage trucks to have an automatic arm-gripper thingy that allowed the driver of the truck to dump the garbage into the back of the truck— no handling of bags required. Here in Maryland, we still don’t have the arm-gripper trucks, I assume because the unions are strong out here and surely have protected the garbage workers’ jobs. I think that if they hadn’t fired anyone but simply not-replaced garbagemen as they retired or moved on from their jobs, they could have made a transition by now which everyone had found acceptable. And if they had done that, yes, there would be fewer jobs for low-skilled workers, but also being a garbageman is SUPER dangerous and— let’s just say I don’t mourn the loss of those jobs in Utah. Retrain folks to be computer programmers or something. Having one’s skills replaced by new technology doesn’t have to be traumatizing, that’s all I’m saying, and even if it is, it might still be worth it anyway.

Anyway, the new design process is indeed much faster than the old one, and despite my horror, I am adapting to it remarkably well. Technology hasn’t come for my job; it has only come for the more boring, frustrating parts of it. I’ll survive.

This is a picture of the Joseph from the Nativity standing atop the second draft of the Noah’s Ark. Given that the ark looks like more of an extra-beefy surfboard than an actual ark, I clearly have decisions to make about scale (size the ark up? Size Noah down? A little of each?), but the relevant point here is that both the first and the second drafts took less than an hour. Combined. AND I spent exactly zero minutes calculating anything using the Pythagorean theorem. For the record, I actually kind of love calculating things using the Pythagorean theorem (there’s a reason why I was good at the thing at which I’ve just been made obsolete) BUT sometimes I get numbers wrong, and that can be frustrating. So, yeah, overall this one’s a win.