Mark Miodownik asks: what is a perfect relationship with machines?

When I was young I used to disappear down into the cellar of my parent's home to scrabble about with the machines that lived there: the boiler, the washing machine, old computers, cassettes, calculators and strange looking cameras. This realm of the machines was warm, darkly lit, and full of comforting clicks and whirring sounds.

There were also boxes of books which I was not much interested in until one day out fell a copy of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance'. Apart from its strange title, it also had a weird image of a spanner coming out of a plant. I started reading it, and found myself transported, Alice-in-Wonderland-style into a new world inside the book, where I was Phaedrus, the eager, learned, pupil. I had never experienced this before, but this book really rang a very deep bell for me.

The idea that knowing about the details of the machines we all rely on, the washing machine, the phone, the motorcycle, not only changes our relationship with them but also gives us a new sense with which to 'taste' the world, struck me as true, even though I had no real knowledge of those machines at all, being 8 years old.

Ever since then my work has been a way of trying to develop my 'taste' of the machine world, a sense that seems to me to be fundamental to being human.

Do you have a 'taste' for the machine world? Do you think it is important to understand the machines we rely on, or is that an unnecessary distraction? Are machines becoming more human? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts below.

Mark Miodownik is a curator of the Perfection of the Mind, Body and Machine series on Saturday 3 July 2010, and is chairing the Perfection Machines discussion.

Book tickets for these three events today for just £8 each, or £20 for the series.