Following Materials

In the AI Story

The phrase was given its most influential statement in a 2010 essay where Ingold contrasted two models of making: the hylomorphic model, which treats making as the imposition of form on matter, and the model of following, which treats making as a process of growth in which form emerges from the correspondence between maker and material. The ethnographic evidence for the second model comes from Ingold's long engagement with craftspeople across traditions: basket-weavers, potters, boat builders, blacksmiths, carpenters, all of whom describe their work in terms closer to following than to imposing.

The key phrase in skilled practitioners' accounts is something like 'the wood wants to go this way' or 'the clay is ready.' To an outsider, these sound like anthropomorphic projections. To Ingold, they are rigorously empirical descriptions of a mode of perception that has been cultivated through years of practice. The wood does not literally want anything — but the trained craftsperson perceives, through her hands, features of the wood's grain that make certain actions appropriate and others disastrous. The 'want' of the wood is the craftsperson's perception of the wood's affordances, arrived at through sustained correspondence.

For the AI moment, the concept sharpens the question of what the human contributes. In a hylomorphic frame, the human's contribution is the form — the vision, the intent, the specification. The machine's contribution is the execution. The prompt-execute cycle fits this frame perfectly: human specifies form, machine produces artifact. But in a following-materials frame, the human's contribution is the attending — the cultivated capacity to perceive what the medium offers and to respond appropriately. This capacity cannot be prompted; it can only be developed through the practitioner's own sustained engagement with the medium.

The framework thus identifies a specific vulnerability in AI collaboration. The tool makes hylomorphic production extraordinarily efficient. It offers nothing to the practitioner who is trying to cultivate the capacity to follow materials. In fact, it structurally impedes that cultivation, because the conditions under which following develops — sustained, friction-rich, hands-on engagement with a resistant medium — are exactly what the tool eliminates.

Origin

The essay 'The textility of making' (2010) is the locus classicus for the concept, though it draws on themes Ingold had been developing since The Perception of the Environment (2000). The immediate intellectual debts are to Gilbert Simondon's critique of hylomorphism and to Heideggerian phenomenology of tool-use, but the ethnographic grounding comes from Ingold's own fieldwork and his reading of the anthropology of craft.

Key Ideas

Form emerges, not imposed. The maker's intentions shape the direction of the work, but the specific form arises from the correspondence with the medium.

Attending is active. Following materials is not passivity but a specific mode of active engagement cultivated through practice.

Affordances, not commands. The maker perceives what the medium allows and responds; the medium is a partner in the making, not a vehicle for the maker's will.

The capacity is cultivated. Following materials requires perceptual capacities that develop only through sustained, hands-on engagement.

AI cannot follow. The machine processes specifications; it does not attend to materials, because it has no cultivated sensorium and no stakes in the correspondence.

Debates & Critiques

The most common challenge is whether the concept applies to symbolic and conceptual media — can one follow language the way a potter follows clay? Ingold's framework is most developed for material media; its application to abstract domains is contested, though writers and thinkers who report 'the argument wanted to go here' or 'the sentence is ready' describe something structurally similar.