A long workbench where hand tools, a stack of paper, and an open laptop share the same surface.Creative makers and builders have always learned their medium by working with it, from grinding pigments to HTML. Models are the next material, and you need to learn them by building.The field keeps arguing about whether designers should code, as if that question were new.It’s not new.Art and design have always been taught through materials, going back centuries.In the 1390s, the painter Cennino Cennini wrote a handbook that’s still translated today on grinding pigments, and that history still runs through my own family as builders and creators. My mother, Jean Neeman, ground her own pigments as a conservator for the Los Angeles Museum of Art, the Getty and Hearst Castle, and I watched her repair Chinese statues that were over 600 years old with original materials to restore history.You can...