Last week our team Research Unit Mechanics and Structural Dynamics, opens an external URL in a new window, Civil and Environmental Engineering, opens an external URL in a new window at Technical University Vienna traded keyboards for clay and spent a morning at a pottery workshop in Bratislava. 
Turns out throwing a pot isn't so different from shaping a research idea. You need real strength to work the material, but also the instinct to know exactly when to ease off before everything you built starts wobbling on the wheel. Push too hard, too late, and it collapses. Same with a hypothesis, a draft, a half-formed idea in the lab. 
It was also just good for our hands and heads to make something without a screen for a few hours. A bit of manual, tactile work is its own kind of thinking. 
Mostly, though, we laughed. At lopsided bowls, collapsed cylinders, and clay everywhere. Which, honestly, is a pretty healthy way to treat most of our research results too — laugh, learn, try again. 
Grateful for a team that builds things well together, on the wheel and off it.