CAREER: Do You Focus on the Process?

Are you a creative person or creative professional? Do you feel a sense of disconnect between your process and your product? Anthropologist Stephanie Bunn argues that too much focus is placed on the end product of a creative process. When for the maker, it is the journey that is most meaningful. Once they’re made, products of all kinds go on to have complex social lives and develop their own material histories. But what about while they’re being made? What about the maker? Bunn writes that “making is an embodied relationship with something outside of ourselves.” It’s not about the product. It’s about the process; about working with materials, feeling what that feels like, and the sense of self and identity that making creates. Focus on the process and the product might just take care of itself.