About
Start here.
You've stood in front of a building, or a song, or a machine that stopped working, and wanted to know how it was made. This is a place for people who don't let that go.
See Think Create is about the people who make things well, and what it takes to become one of them. Musicians, builders, craftspeople, founders, engineers, cooks. The subject changes every time. The way of looking doesn't.
The name is the shape of every piece. Notice what's there. Work out why. Do something with it. It's an old shape; the classical schools taught it as grammar, logic and rhetoric, and you were using it long before anyone gave it a name.
Why now
For most of history, if you wanted a song, a drawing, a plan or a paragraph, a person had to make it. That's no longer true. Machines do it well now, and they're getting better fast.
Every tool that did a job for us changed us. Calculators took arithmetic. Phones took the numbers we used to know by heart. A muscle that isn't used wastes away. This time the tool is aimed at the parts of us that think and make, which are the parts most worth keeping.
So the choice in front of you is real. Hand it over, or use the same tools to get more curious and more capable than you were before. This project is a bet on the second way, made in public.
What you'll find
Each piece takes one person and one thing they made, or one thing that broke, and stays with it long enough to understand it. No hot takes. Where the method shows, it shows. Where I don't know something, I say so.
Some of it will be film. Some of it writing. Some of it conversations with people who are unusually good at what they do. All of it is meant to leave you wanting to go make something.
Who's behind it
Trevor Menard
I spent ten years inside other people's companies, working out how they really ran and then building what they could become. It taught me two things: look before you touch, and almost anything is understandable if you're patient with it.
The same two things turn out to work on everything else: a building, a song, a piece of software, a way of living. Somewhere along the way I stopped being able to look at anything without wondering how it was made.
I'm not an expert in most of what you'll find here. I'm someone who looks closely, and who wants to meet the people who make things well. I live in Winnipeg. This is where I keep what I find.
Come along.
New pieces land on Instagram first. If you'd rather write, hello@seethinkcreate.com gets a reply. And if you make something well, or know someone who does, tell me. That's how the next piece starts.