It’s close to what we’ve been calling reality.
By actuality I mean “a sense of reality as a felt, living experience”—what wells up in you right now. It’s a deeply private feeling.
By contrast, reality refers to objective reality—what society has accumulated and made conscious from the past, a publicly shareable sense.

Strictly speaking, when I’ve said “reality” up to now, I’ve often meant actuality.
This actuality seems to undergird the feeling of “I am myself”—a basic assurance for living. (*1)

As I’ve said a few times, acts mediated by modern tools tend to collapse into mere “tasks.”

Because machines do so much, action and outcome are simply coupled—if you learn the controls, anyone can get pretty much the same result.

That’s good in ordinary terms, but it removes the instability of not knowing whether things will work (*2), so there’s less trial-and-error and learning. (Of course, it’s a matter of degree.)

That trial-and-error is what we often call meaningfulness—or, put differently, actuality as a felt, living sense of reality.

Older tools are simple, so you have to face what’s in front of you, tinker, and grow your skill.

That’s where meaningfulness—and thus actuality—emerges.

You could say modern tools are more public, while old tools are more open to private feeling. Or: in modern tools, skill has been mechanized as a service.

Also, because older tools often require cooperation, they create spaces where that privately felt meaningfulness can be shared.

I suspect modern tools traded that built-in joy and delight for convenience—by enclosing it as a service inside the machine.

I think the essence of urbanization is letting go of the tie between tools and skills and replacing it with services.
But that’s also said to have made life harder in a certain sense.

You’d hope so—but humans are complicated.

For most of human history we were nomads, hunting and moving; climate shifts pushed us into settled life with farming and storage.

As a result, the cognitive and behavioral capacities that were fully exercised in nomadism lost their outlet, and humans became “animals with surplus cognition.”

In short, the cognitive power we used to engage fully no longer had enough to bite into, so we became idle.
There was plenty of work, but it became patterned, and the opportunities to think and experiment each time shrank.

Philosopher Koichiro Kokubun argues that because idleness/boredom hurts, escaping it became a major human task. (*3)

We are busy—
but as tools/skills get service-ified, you need more money to pay for them, so you work more.

To earn more, you increase efficiency, which pushes more service-ification.
So a cycle advances: more of the surrounding world becomes service, and more cognition is left unengaged—a vicious circle.

Much of modern busyness is information processing; meanwhile, hands-on acts that generate actuality are fading.

Kokubun proposes two paths: “being human” and “becoming animal.”

I take that to mean savoring things deeply and immersing yourself.
In that sense, older tools leave more room to savor and immerse.
And in a way, that’s luxurious—because if you calculate money and efficiency, modern tools “win.”

I think doing beats thinking here.
Actuality isn’t grasped by thinking—it’s what wells up in you when you act.

And even if my design practice doesn’t change overnight just because I’ve had these experiences, architecture builds the environments humans live in—
so how humans can live better is an everlasting theme.

In that sense, reflecting on actuality and tools is to reflect on architecture.
If the only way to understand it is to try, then we should try.

I’ve long felt that architecture should be able to receive and hold a person’s “will to engage with the environment.”

Buildings are more joyful—and more alive—when you can participate, rather than having everything pre-arranged.

From that angle, I believe the lens of tools and actuality will connect back to architecture somewhere down the line.