The Logic of a Lost Craft

The Premise

Traditional crafts are dying out. These aren't just hobbies; they are complex systems of mechanical knowledge passed down through generations. The making of a simple sieve or a wooden boat involves hundreds of micro-decisions based on an intuitive understanding of materials and forces. This is a form of non-verbal engineering.

The 2-Month Project

Choose a specific, well-documented craft from your region. Deconstruct the process into a series of fundamental steps and rules. Create a "shape grammar" in code—a symbolic system that can procedurally generate valid designs for that craft. The tangible result is a paper defining this grammar and a script that can output novel, "grammatically correct" designs that the original artisan would recognize as valid.