If there’s one thing you do that makes you feel most like yourself, whatever that is, then you know why creatives create.  It is a craving to manipulate raw material.  Pervasive throughout time and across cultures, we see the creative impetus applied to functional ends:  the elegant practicality of the Shakers, the organic wabi-sabi of Japan, and the sculptural minimalism of Scandinavia.

Fundamentally, human beings…need free play of imagination and intuition in their homes and workshops or they become starved.  All the cog-wheels and electronic brains cannot assuage these human needs in the long run.  It is for lack of such essentials that we turn to dope of one kind or another, or to destructiveness.  Basically this is not so much a revolution against science and the machine as a seeking of a means of counterbalance by employing man’s first tools, his own hands, for the expression of his inner nature.

B. Leach, The Unknown Craftsman