Making a Book: Rough Draft to Final Iteration

I’m getting really excited about the launch of my upcoming book, The Tinkering Workshop, a collection of materials, projects and inspirations for exploring art, science and technology. It will be released on October 15th by Storey Publishing. We’re less than three months away from the pub date and until then I’m planning to share more behind the scenes stories about the process of putting together the book and sneak previews of the playful explorations.

Early on in the process, our team of photographers, designers and editors put together a really rough “first pages” draft that became a framework to map out the types of images and layouts we would need to create for the book. Having a physical object to think with when thinking about something is a core principle of the tinkering process and we used the draft to work through some of the most important elements in the book.

In first version of marble run page, we wanted to show how you can build a path for a marble to travel from the top to the bottom of a chair as slowly as possible. In the initial sample page there’s just a basic outline showing the position of the builder and the example project. The sketch helped us think about an angle of the photo that showed our kid tinkerer with his own version of the machine, keeping the general look and feel of the rough draft. It’s important to me that in the book we didn’t just showcase the final version of the projects but also highlighted the experimentation and testing process as front and center.

Another page that shows an interesting element in the development of the book’s themes is the cardboard crank sliders. Tinkering is all about exploring your own unique ideas and not just following step by step directions to make the same thing in the end. As much as possible, we wanted to show multiple examples and encourage readers to make their own designs.

We thought this might work the same way as when hosting a tinkering workshop, having a variety of examples encourages people to create their own version. There isn’t just one idea to re-create, but instead to used elements from all the different examples in the process of exploring the materials and phenomena. From the rough draft to the final version, we kept the idea of highlighting three different automata and added even more inspiring ideas on the going deeper page from professional artists like Keith Newstead and expert educators like Ryoko Matsumoto. 

The first pages draft of the book also served as a physical model to help us solve challenging moments in the book development. In a tinkering activity, building something concrete helps you work through ideas. Likewise, in the publishing process of the book different issues and questions can be explored by making a prototype.

One example of how this looked for The Tinkering Workshop was in Sky Trams, a project where learners build vehicles to travel along a length of string. We wanted to show both the environmental set up with the string attached between two chairs as well as close up details of the cardboard tram. The angles were really important here and we had to think about how to communicate several aspects of the activity using just an image or two. The collages version of rough images in the first pages draft translated to experiments from our photographer and kid tinkerer to make an understandable layout.

Hope you enjoyed this quick look at how The Tinkering Workshop book came together. For me, working on all of the aspects of the book development and launch has been so much fun and I’m happy to share some of that process. If you want to pre-order your copy you can do that today and stay tuned here for more updates and behind-the-scenes content.