possibilities forming under your hands. As a child I
really tried to master the skills of model building and
after some training the joints between the parts be-
come almost invisible and shape of the plane looked
as promising as the one on the cover. When finishing
I added camouflage paint and national insignia on
the wings. It was perfect. In my hands a world was
born. But as I looked closer and compared the mod-
el with the cover image it was as if the djinn of mod-
el building had slapped me in the face. I had forgot-
ten to paint the pilot inside the now closed cockpit!
He sat there in solitude, still in authentic plastic grey,
reminding the world that this plane was no real
plane. It was nothing like the grim and vivid fighter
on the cover of the box. This plane was no real plane,
and now it was forever doomed to suffer under grav-
ity’s bitter curse! Slowly I realized that this model
was not test of skill – it was a test of discipline. No
matter how exact the joints, I had failed the test. The
pilot looked sadly out at me from the cockpit, gloomy
and grey faced.
Similarly, we can look at IKEA manuals for assem-
bling furniture. If you follow the process exactly as
IKEA tells you, you will get the bookshelf witnessed
in the shop. Without a good toolbox and some skills
it will be hard for you to change this process, to tune
it, to turn the bookshelf into a table. Actually, you are
just a continuation of their factory, an unpaid as-
sembly worker, an unskilled home mechanic. And
no matter how many pieces of furniture you build
from IKEA, you will have to go a long way to before
becoming a carpenter. Likewise, no matter how many
plane models I built as a child, I never became an
aviation engineer.
The cookbook is different. For every dish I make, I
reclaim a small portion of the kitchen. Instead of us-
ing the ready-made exotic soup, which in a way are
very accessible and “democratic”, I learn how to make
one by myself. When I woke up this morning I didn’t
know there was a small Thai-chef inside me, but that
came out during lunch as a learned to make a tasty
Tom-Kha soup. A combination between a cookbook
and a highly transformable material opened a new
action space for me. It even inspired me to go fur-
ther. Next time I will improvise a little as I make it,
change a little in the recipe. It is an impulse to make
me act, to make me regain some initiative. The cook-
book induced me to act, setting me off into a new
action space. Or to use the words of architect and
change agent Nabeel Hamdi:Zac McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, (Lucas-
Films: 1988) exposes an example of action spaces. The gameplay
menu show how an action space can be experienced as a list of possi-
ble actions or distributed potentiality. During the game different leads
are found as well as new tools and these combined expand the charac-
ter’s possibility to solve situations and finish the game successfully.
A Hammer is an example of a tool expanding the action space
of its user, but it also creates a certain attention to the world as “eve-
rything looks like nails”. However, the hammer has a rare analog
ctrl-z option which few designs have: the nails can be drawn out with
its back claw.