I’ve actually written about David Macaulay a few times over the last few years. However different their artwork might be, they are both deeply humorous and they both work hard to explain things well.

Macaulay, with his lighter, water-coloured drawings of architecture and technology. Gonick, with his cartoon strips and deep dives into a science and history topic. I find Gonick’s work a fascinating counterpoint to David Macaulay. I recently wrote an article on Larry Gonick and his Cartoon Guides to history and science. This isn’t the first time I’ve told stories of powerful visual communicators. Those few communicators, illustrators and explainers who fight against the tide of ignorance. All of this puts an extraordinary pressure on those responsible for explaining our things to us. The more we know about the way things work, the more we know about the implications of the things we make and the better we can make decisions about what we want things to be. Is it important to know how our car works, and its resulting impacts on our lives, societies and environment? What about simple things, like levers? How about light-bulbs, in all their incarnations?Īn answer to these questions is that knowledge gives decision making power. The thing is, once we start avoiding the responsibility of learning how things work, it becomes harder to decide what’s worth learning about and what we can ignore. We close our eyes to how machines work because they’re hard to understand and it makes us afraid. This sounds partially like wilful ignorance, but also a little like fear-induced blindness. Some suggest it doesn’t matter if we understand how things work as long as they continue to do their jobs. To start with, we have to decide if we really want to know how our things work. Why should we want to know the way things work? His story has a great deal to do with ancient buildings, quirky alternate histories and mammoths. His work has contributed to some of the most memorable books in history. I want to tell the story of an award winning, veteran technology illustrator, one of the best of our time, the British-American, David Macaulay.

I celebrate the science and technology communicators that challenge our ignorance and work hard to explain our things to us.

Their parts are shrunk down and they become opaque boxes full of parts we just don’t understand. Our mechanical and electronic machines are gradually encapsulated in ever tighter wrappings that hide their function. Does it really matter if we don’t understand the way things work? Over the years, there is a sense that we’ve gradually become distanced from the things we make.

The Way We Work by David Macaulay