Hand Made Theory

Crafts Council research

2008-04-03T21:44:00.002+01:00

Following my previous post regarding the Crafts Council commissioned research on Learning Through Making, it is worth pointing out that a recent redesign of the Crafts Council's website has given access to some very useful research on craft.

Its new research page enables you to download the following:

Making it in the 21 Century (2002-03) - the most recent socio-economic survey of crafts activity in England and Wales.
Makers in Focus (2006) - a summary report about the working environment of West Midlands designer makers, craftspeople and applied artists at different stages of their careers.
Making it to Market: developing the market for contemporary craft (2004) - a two-year research programme into the market for craft, with a specific focus on contemporary fine craft, commissioned and published by Arts Council England.

There are also links to other reports.

Learning through making

2008-04-01T21:52:00.005+01:00

What is the educational value of craft? What do we learning through making? What is the relevance of craft education in today's world?

These were the central questions of a research project conducted by the UK Crafts Council in the late 1990s. The Learning Through Making Project brought together research teams from Loughborough, Middlesex and Sheffield Hallam Universities to explore and define the value and nature of craft learning. The research also tackled the nature, relevance and value of contemporary craft practices.

I led one of the research teams, and even today - nearly a decade after the completion of the research - I receive queries about our findings. Until recently it was possible to download a project report summary from the Crafts Council website, but no longer. Following a recent inquiry I have made copies of our own project report, and the Crafts Council summary report available online.

Here is the Craft’s Council’s own summary report. And here is the executive summary of our research on the value of craft learning in higher education. In our research we undertook a longitudinal survey of employment patterns for 216 craft graduates throughout the UK, providing a unique picture of craft employment. Not only was this the first survey of its type, but (unless anyone can correct me) remains the only survey of its type.

If design is dead, what happens to design (and craft) thinking?

2008-04-01T18:11:00.005+01:00

Philippe Starck is the French designer who championed elite design, and has been responsible for everything from toothbrushes to houses. He now claims to be ashamed of his practice and intends to quit from design within two years.

"I have been a producer of materiality. I do feel ashamed for this. What I want to be instead now is a producer of concepts. This will be much more useful."

An English translation of the interview with Starck printed in Die Zeit is provided by mlle a. on her blog here. A full reading of the translated interview is recommended.

This raises the question of the future and value of design thinking (and craft thinking) in a post-material design culture. It is interesting how many of our students on our Master of Design (MDes) course come from a craft-based undergraduate degree and have applied themselves seamlessly to strategic design projects. Significantly, this more conceptual approach makes full use of their craft knowledge and thinking, demonstrating the unique value of craft thinking to a range of problems covering healthcare, strategic management and social issues.

Technophilic craft

2008-03-19T21:59:00.002Z

One of the highlights for me at last year's Neocraft conference in Canada was Ezra Shales from Alfred University, New York State. He has just had a paper published in American Craft that deserves full reading, and is available online here. Below is one of his compelling arguments:

"The “craftsman-artist” was a strategy to combat the division of labor but it contains an important contradiction: When the Arts and Crafts movement distinguished the craftsman as autonomous, it simultaneously signaled a withdrawal of engagement from the collective social economy. The cliché of “freedom” has become ingrained in craft lore. The craftsman-artist continues to be described as an inspired individual, as if the process were redemptive for society as a whole. The idealization of the individual atelier as a bulwark against “alienated labor” has remained widespread even now, as new disciplines, such as digital craft, challenge the primacy of traditional processes. Are the craftspeople engaging in DIY in the privacy of their home really being radical, or are they simply participating in niche consumption, merely like microbreweries promoting “ethical consumption?” I would argue that craft will revive its radical aspect only if it returns to engaging in collaborative production and addressing its audience by speaking in the vernacular."

The article is a passionate and well argued case for craft makers to "Reclaim The Factory". Ezra uses the example of Barry Dixon, who worked with Wedgwood on the piece shown above that was cast using Josiah Wedgwood's black basalt, to demonstrate the relevance of factory production.

The craft of problem finding

2008-03-13T15:51:00.002Z

More on Richard Sennett and his new book The Craftsman....

In February this year he gave a lecture at the RSA in London on the themes of the book. This is available as a podcast and PDF transcript. Just go here and scroll down to his lecture. He presents just a few of the themes from his book, and the discussion that follows explores these further. Just to take one part of his lecture that stood out, and in a sense rationalises why craft is so essential to design education at degree level:

"The second big issue of skill that was first raised by Wedgwood and then I'm afraid stolen by Diderot is the relationship... Diderot was, I couldn’t call him a magpie but let’s say he was on the edge of magpie-like activity on the encyclopedia, was the relationship between problem solving and problem finding. Oftentimes when we think about a skill we think just about problem solving, how to get something done, how to make the pieces of wood join together or how to, if we’re a computer programmer, how to work out the logic of the lines of a piece of computer code. This is not the whole story. What Wedgwood understood and what Diderot then expanded was the notion that as we get better at problem solving we ought to also get better at problem finding, that every solution for us, at the higher levels of skill, should open up new problems, otherwise what we’re doing is simply equating skill with procedure."

The Craftsman - getting craft on the cultural radar

2008-03-11T22:37:00.007Z

It is an eternal complaint of the craft communities that craft is marginalised, ignored, and simply not accepted as a subject worthy of attention by the media, policy makers or critics. But over the last two weeks, craft has been discussed in the pages of The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, New Statesman, Daily Telegraph, and Times Higher Education. BBC Radios 3 and 4 have also been discussing craft. Indeed, a monastic retreat or diet of tabloids are the only two reasons why a person in the UK can have avoided at least a fleeting brush with the art of the potter or the notion of tacit knowledge in the last couple of weeks.

The reason for this new found interest in the handmade is the publication of The Craftsman by Richard Sennett.

This excellent book has attracted considerable attention because it is a significant work of scholarship, it is hugely readable and it presents a compelling case for the contemporary relevance of craft.

As Edwin Heathcote writes in the FT: "At the heart of the book is an idea that work need not be about making money but can be about something more existential and profound. In a charmingly (and often slightly ramblingly) eccentric journey, Sennett takes a look at great craftsmen over the ages, from the workshops of Antonio Stradivari and of Renaissance goldsmiths to the strange set-up and motivations of the National Health Service."

According to Lynsey Handley in the New Statesman, Sennett approaches his subject with passion and commitment: "Sennett's goal is to remind us that skill - technique, to use his preferred word - is the result of hand and brain informing each other, through repetition and decision-making, to create a unique, solid and easy flow of knowledge between the two. Mastery, in other words. It is an open letter to us all, reminding us that we can shape and craft our own lives, and must not allow wider forces over which we have little control to rob us of that awareness. Our hands can both anoint and kill, but with practice, understanding and the help of others, can be turned away from destructive purpose. Literally, the future is in our hands."

Writing in The Guardian, Fiona MacCarthy explains how "Sennett alters one's view of craftsmanship by finding so much meaning in the detail. The grip on the pencil, the pressure on the chisel: he persuades us that these things have real significance. The Craftsman is one of a trilogy, with volumes to come on ritual and craft, and craft and the environment. This first instalment is so good it will be difficult to wait."

Indeed, he promises two further volumes. Warriors and Priests will explore ritual as craft, while The Foreigner will tackle the issue of environmental craft, arguing that "craft is now foreign to us." But for now, it is The Craftsman that provides more than enough to stimulate, challenge and provoke.

The Times set the tireless champion of conservatism Roger Scruton the task of reviewing The Craftsman, which he began with clarity and a degree of objectivity: "The Craftsman continues an argument begun in the 19th century, when writers such as John Ruskin and William Morris extolled the crafts remembered in our surnames (Smith, Cartwright, Thatcher, Mason, Fletcher) while lamenting the mind-numbing and soul-destroying labour of the industrial process which was replacing them. A long line of thinkers, from Hegel and Marx to Sennett’s teacher Hannah Arendt, have sympathised with the argument. But Sennett does not think that craftsmanship has vanished from our world. On the contrary: it has merely migrated to other regions of human enterprise, so that the delicate form of skilled cooperation that once produced a cathedral now produces the Linux software system. Linux, for Sennett, is the work of a community of craftsmen “who embody some of the elements first celebrated in the (Homeric) Hymn to Hephaestus”.

However, Scruton could not avoid using the review to pursue his own argument on modernist culture, concluding thus: "Architecture succeeds in its public task through humility and devotion, of the kind that can be observed in the moulding, firing and laying of a properly proportioned brick, but which is violated at every point by Frank Gehry’s bombastic Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Sennett writes beautifully of bricks and their manufacture. But a residual sympathy for modernism leads him to praise Gehry’s costly extravaganza. He is entitled to his taste; but he should be clear that Gehry’s building is not an exercise in craft but an attempt at art, and exemplifies the same kind of “look at me expressing myself” that has led everywhere to the death of those virtues – humility, piety, obedience – without which no tradition of craftsmanship can really survive."

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Noel Malcolm gets his review off to a shaky start, in my view, by cracking gags about Polish builders. But this The Torygraph, after all, and it manages to get references to immigration and the BBC licence fee into just about everything, including the sports and gardening sections. However, Malcolm soon gets into a more balanced stride: "'Domain-shift' is one of Sennett's favourite terms, and there is some very energetic shifting on these pages. Sometimes the result is real insight, but all too often the whole procedure seems merely fanciful. Writing about how tools can be used for new purposes, he describes Christopher Wren's early scientific work using telescopes and anatomical dissections; then he claims that these were put to use in his town planning after the Fire of London, where his long straight streets would 'channel' vision (as in a telescope) and his overall plan involved thinking about the 'circulation' of people (as blood circulates in a body). But is this anything more than a clever association of ideas in Sennett's head?"

More serious criticism follows: "Sometimes the connections are not just fanciful, but obviously wrong. Having described how the Renaissance anatomist Vesalius acquired new skills in dissecting the human body, he then makes the startling claim: 'Modern mining technology derived originally from the bodily revelations of the scalpel.' The first modern treatise on mining, Biringuccio's Pirotechnia (1540), 'urged its readers to think like Vesalius, using mining techniques that stripped back strata of earth instead of simply chopping through them'. The reference he gives, to back up this claim, is bogus; Biringuccio's book makes no mention of Vesalius's work (not surprisingly, as the latter was published three years later, after Biringuccio's death); it is a treatise on metallurgy (smelting, etc), not mining, and has just a few comments in the preface on how to dig for ore; and what it says there is the opposite of what Sennett claims: 'You must work in a straight line, breaking through every composition of stone strata that you encounter…'"

Keith Tester, writing in Times Higher Education, introduces a further critique. "Sennett knows that there are threats to the craftsman, but his book never really confronts them. It is not really enough to say that: "Social and economic conditions ... often stand in the way of the craftsman's discipline and commitment." The point is that the institutions and enterprises of contemporary social and economic life are not primarily about creating opportunities for the nurturance of craft skills. They are about closing down the ambiguities of the world in the name of ever tighter efficiency (which nevertheless fails precisely because of the inescapability of ambiguity, and so the management consultants are called in again - and again), or they are in the business of profit generation. The latter is something that Sennett understates. He discusses Japanese car plants as if they were beacons of craftsmanship, and he says they used management styles that allowed all workers to localise, question and open up. But this is to miss the main goal of the car plants, which was to make profit."

Certainly, the book has flaws. When he links his thesis on craft to changes currently underway in the NHS, then the result is unconvincing. So is his treatment of CAD which is curiously uninformed by the work of craft practitioners who work with digital tools. But this is perhaps unsurprising when one considers the sources used by Sennett. There's no mention of Dormer, only a passing reference to Pye, and Malcolm McCullough's ground breaking work Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand is a further absence.

But to have a hugely well researched volume on craft that avoids Dormer, Pye and the other usual suspects is also refreshing. Last November at the Neocraft conference I said how the best contributions to our understanding of craft come from outside the cosy, cloistered world of craft itself. I was referring then to Harry Braverman and Mike Cooley, author of Architect or Bee. Richard Sennett, Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Professor of the Humanities at New York University, joins them in providing a perspective of craft that is timely, relevant and well argued. However, as I have explained elsewhere it is not that easy to get hold of.

The Craftsman has succeeded in putting craft on the radar of cultural commentary. For that reason alone it is a highly significant contribution.

Podcast on craft and skill

2008-02-06T17:37:00.000Z

The BBC gets crafty

2008-01-21T22:42:00.000Z

An interesting piece on the BBC news website about crafts and the internet.

Craft 2.0

2007-12-19T00:03:00.000Z

(Also published on the Craft Research blog)

The collision between the seemingly separate worlds of Web 2.0 and craft is described in a recent article in The New York Times Magazine written by Rob Walker.

The article begins by describing the Handmade Consortium an online project that seeks to get consumers to pledge to 'buy handmade'. It's a consortium that interestingly includes key movers in the DIY movement, and the American Crafts Council. It has a page of online resources for the Handmade Movement that includes this blog.

Walker explains how the rise of the DIY/Crafter movement has been intimately linked to Web 2.0. For example, the new Craft magazine which addresses the needs of "the new craft movement" was initiated by O'Reilly Media which itself has been behind all the analysis (and indeed the hype) that has led to the idea of Web 2.0.

The article argues that the new handmade movement is an explicitly ideological movement that has profound implications for consumerism, and seeks to develop sustainable economies based on craft production. More than once the piece draws parallels with the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the examples cited demonstrate how a Web 2.0 enabled craft movement enables makers to overcome the Morris Dilemma. No "pandering to the swinish luxury of the rich" here - the hand felted ipod cocoons are very reasonably priced.

Much of Walker's attention is given to Etsy - essentially an online craft fair - - which provides makers with their own branded online stores. Brooklyn-based Etsy indicates something of the size and significance of the new handmade movement. It comprises a community of 70,000 people, with a $4.3 million turnover in November 2007 alone. OK, let's put this into perspective. According to the latest research the entire craft sector in Scotland accounts for an annual turnover of at least 95 million pounds. The probable annual turnover of Etsy is around 25% of this figure, and projections indicate that turnover is on a steep upward trajectory. The new craft movement is thus significant in economic terms alone.

To quote from Walker's article:

"The luck or genius of (Etsy) is that Kalin and the other founders encountered in the D.I.Y./craft scene something that was already social, community-minded, supportive and aggressively using the Web.... Kalin is nothing if not grandiose about what he thinks Etsy can accomplish. For example, he knows that individual crafters face a problem of scale: there is only so much one person can produce. (Hence the Industrial Revolution.) So he mentions creating “co-production” sites across the country, where groups of crafters would band together in a co-op-style model, ideally occupying space in distressed areas and offering training to people who want to learn handcrafting skills. Handmade isn’t a fad, he told me, it’s a resurgence, one that is of a piece with the booming interest in organic food. In 25 years, he said, Etsy would be both worldwide and personal, a global-local marketplace, a Web version of the Athenian agora.... Etsy could “disturb” the way people see the world, rethinking what makes their possessions important or trivial, leading us to re-evaluate the way we consume."

Craft 2.0 is the true inheritor of the Morris legacy. Unlike the professionalised 'art school' educated craft makers it has an ideological position which, while largely ill-defined and diverse, represents a constructive reaction to the inequities and politics of the market economy. It is clearly using the market economy as a means of developing sustainable livelihoods, but is bringing economic and cultural innovation to it. Above all it is dealing with the politics of work and consumption in ways that the professionalised sector cannot.

Neocraft

2007-12-18T23:41:00.000Z

Hand Made Theory has lain dormant for over a year owing to my attentions to the Craft Research blog and posts of a non-craft related nature to my other blog. However, I feel the time is right to restart my posts and to focus Hand Made Theory (HMT) on continuing work on trying to make sense of making in the 21st century. Some recent links made to HMT has given the blog quite a bit of new traffic, so I owe it to new visitors to provide relevant new content.

What better way to breathe life into this blog than to draw attention to the excellent Neocraft conference organised by Sandra Alfoldy at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Held in November, this event attracted a large audience and some excellent speakers. Many of these can be viewed as podcasts from the conference website in the new year. I have posted on this at the Craft Research blog, giving my own view of the conference.

In addition to the conference, Sandra also edited an excellent book which is described thus: "NeoCraft: Modernity and the Crafts unites an international, interdisciplinary range of writers who are actively contextualizing modernity and the crafts. Drawing upon writings in the fields of craft history, art history, philosophy, museum studies, anthropology, fashion theory, history, women’s studies, and design, this book explores in detail the shifting and influential cultural position of the crafts."

Further details on the book are available here.

Positioning the arts at the heart of society

2006-09-28T11:32:00.000+01:00

An interesting discussion has just got underway on the demos blog about arts and cultural policy, with references to cultural policy in the UK, Australia and France. Not explicitly about craft, but has implications for policy that could further and support it.

There is also reference to a recent demos book entitled "Cultural Value and the Crisis of Legitimacy" which is available as a free download from here.

This looks like "craft research"

2006-09-27T11:36:00.000+01:00

Indeed it does. The Craft Research blog has developed well over the months, and in the run up to the craft conference in July will provide a vital role in furthering discussion around its themes. As one of the contributors to that blog, I felt it appropriate to spin off my own research interests as Hand Made Theory, so that they don't dominate the discussions. I will continue to contribute to Craft Research when appropriate.

In the meantime I have placed here some of the postings I've made to Craft Research, so that thoughts, reflections and threads can be kept in one place.

In favour of craft based education

2006-09-22T10:57:00.000+01:00

A recent piece by Matthew B Crawford, writing in The New Atlantis provides a spirited case for craft-based education. He argues for the importance of making in education and culture:

"Perhaps the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world. Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hard-headed: the hard-headed economist will point out the opportunity costs of making what can be bought, and the hard-headed educator will say that it is irresponsible to educate the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as the jobs of the past. But we might pause to consider just how hard-headed these presumptions are, and whether they don’t, on the contrary, issue from a peculiar sort of idealism, one that insistently steers young people toward the most ghostly kinds of work."

In Shop Class as Soulcraft he provides a well argued case for 'shop class' (to use a US term) citing Braverman (whose Labor and Monopoly Capital, pictured above, remains a critical text in this field) and Marx is an essay which makes key points about both the degradation of blue-collar and white-collar work. Many of the arguments reflect those coming from the 'new' craft activitists / DIYers, but rooted in an analysis of work in a more Marxist sense.

The politics of knitting

2006-09-22T10:56:00.000+01:00

Anne Galloway, on her blog Purse Lip Square Jaw, has written a great piece on knitting and public politics. As she concludes in the post:

"...It is this making of culture that is so important and valuable when it comes to public politics. Knitting's strongest contribution, then, is a persistent demonstration of the ability to craft culture materially, socially and ideologically. The question that most interests me at the end of the day is what kinds of culture and politics are being crafted, and by whom?"

Problems with the F word

2006-09-22T10:55:00.000+01:00

For many of us working in craft research, we have spent a not inconsiderable time anguishing over the use and validity of the C-word. Some prefer not to use "craft" at all, using handles such as "designer-maker" or "intelligent making" to describe their practices and research interests. Now, as debates on this blog have shown, we face new complications with the F-word.

"Fine" craft opens up a new contested territory of practice and understanding. As I've said previously, I think that it is a categorisation of creative practice that is useful to explore, but I would appreciate some clearer definition from somebody about what it is.

It seems to me that the idea of "fine craft" could be derived from one of two things. The first is "fine jewellery", a well used and understood term that broadly means:

Jewels with precious gem set (diamond, ruby, emerald, sapphire in platinum or gold setting) differing from semi-precious jewels (such as amethyst, aquamarine, tourmaline in gold or silver setting) and costume jewellery (imitation stones in base metals, gold-plated settings). The difference is in the distribution and sales channels since fine jewellery is most exclusively sold through high-end independent sellers or exclusive jewellery chain stores.

In other words, the "fineness" refers to its economic value: craft for rich people. However, it is clearly the case that craft for rich people in the 21st century need not be defined simply in terms of the economic value of the materials from which it is made.

David Poston's laser welded armlet made of treacle tins was one item in this year's Col lect exhibition. Germaine Greer referred to this piece in her review of Col lect in The Guardian, which stressed both the high cost of much work on show, and its lack of utility:

"There was only one basket maker, almost no cutlery, few textiles. Everything was meant to be displayed, not used. It is a feature of 21st-century life that craft is discontinuous with our lives; our dwellings have become showrooms for conspicuous consumer durables."

So, to take "fine craft" as a definition related to "fine jewellery", we are talking about symbols of conspicuous consumption - beautifully crafted, but exclusive and "discontinuous with our lives."

The second derivation could be "fine art", where we are stressing the conceptual content of the work. Caroline Broadhead, whose work is shown above, is prominent amongst those makers whose work bridges craft/fine art. The difficulties of bridging this divide, especially in terms of the institutional obstacles presented, are very well explored by Jorunn Veiteberg.

The semantics of the f-word itself aside, a further interpretation of "fine craft" could be that which is professionally-defined - in other words, craft produced by art school graduates. This professional segmentation of creative practice is also noticable in fine art, where the art establishment is rigorous in its policing. The reason that the UK's top selling and highest profile painter is in the permanent collection of only one public gallery in the country (in Kircaldy) is less to do with quality of his work, and more to do with the fact that he's a former mining engineer from Fife who is self-taught. As Sir Terence Conran says of Jack Vettriano:

'They turn their backs on him because his work has been reproduced on posters, which I think is incredibly elitist and snobbish. In Scotland the art establishment has sneered at him because he is self-taught."

So, which is it?

As we await responses, check out a recent article in The Guardian on the new political crafters. It quotes Betsy Greer, who says:

"Each time you participate in crafting you are making a difference, whether it's fighting against useless materialism or making items for charity ... it is possible to go beyond banners, email petitions and chants as ways of fighting for a cause you believe in. You could have a knit-in, papier-mache puppets or teach a crafty class for kids."

This, it seems to me, follows the long historical role of craft which is a way of thinking and acting upon the world as a means of self-development, critical reflection, education and making culture. And at times, to pay the bills, it's about making stuff for rich people.

Craft is fab

2006-09-22T10:54:00.000+01:00

Neil Gershenfeld is the Director of MIT's Centre for Bits and Atoms, and author of Fab: the coming revolution on your desktop - from personal computers to personal fabrication which is a vital read for anyone interested in the future of craft. Recommended to me by John Marshall, the book not only helped me to make sense of his doctoral research (finally) but also raised some vitally important issues about craft practice, and the potential of digitally connected craft practice to quite literally reshape social and economic systems.

Fab Labs basically are places for making things. Typically they pull together a laser cutter, sign cutter, a milling machine and the kit for programming microprocessors. Together with the software and control systems, fab labs cost less than $25K. In the book Gershenfeld demonstrates their considerable potential as liberatory tools for students, for communities in India and Africa, for marginalised communities in the US. Together with pragmatic detail on how the kit and the labs work is a highly vibrant text on the primacy of craft and making for creative, intellectual and community development.

Crafters of the world unite.....

2006-09-22T10:48:00.000+01:00

Karl Marx was perhaps the original prophet of the Pro-Am economy. In The German Ideology, written between 1845 and 1847, Marx maintained that labour – forced, unspontaneous and waged work – would be superseded by self-activity. He evoked a communist society in which: ‘. . . nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes . . . to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.’ By the mid-1850s Marx had already modified this utopian vision and instead looked forward to a time when ‘material production leaves every person surplus time for other activities’.

The Pro-Am Revolution: how enthusiasts are changing our economy and society is a book by Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller published by Demos. Available as a download from here, the book describes the rise of "amateurs who work to professional standards", and who are transforming all fields from music through to software, business and astronomy: "The Pro-Ams are knowledgeable, educated, committed and networked, by new technology. The twentieth century was shaped by large hierarchical organisations with professionals at the top. Pro-Ams are creating new, distributed organisational models that will be innovative, adaptive and low-cost." In the passage at the top of this post, the authors are making the point that technological and cultural changes are moving us very close to Marx's ideal of how a communist society would actually work. A more recent article in Fortune suggests the significance of the DIY economy. DIY is thus a mash-up of the post-industrial enterprise economy and good old unreconstructed communism.

Today I received an email from the ever-perceptive John Marshall who was trying to link together some of the issues I've been raising in this blog with issues that he too has been exploring. Links he provided led me, somewhat accidently, to the Leadbeater book and the Pro-Am thesis, which strikes me as one way of framing some of this stuff. To quote from John:

I was reading your posts at www.craftresearch.blogspot.com when I made a mental connection to something I was reading at Anne Galloway’s blog:

“In the past I would have considered these things amongst the ill effects of capitalism, but now I think it's a bit more complicated than that. After all, some of this labour is actually being done for free. Out of love even, like with Flickr or any number of mod communities. The DIY ethic, in fact, is based on the power of creative re-use and re-appropriation. But these terms are now being tossed around in software and hardware development like organisations and companies only care about democratic participation, and not profitability. Jean Burgess knows much more about mass amateurisation and vernacular creativity than I do…”

There are some interesting posts at Jean Burgess’s blog creativity/machine on vernacular creativity (see under categories in her sidebar). I think that is a great academic term to describe this type of activity.

I agree with John that Vernacular Creativity is a useful term to describe these emergent activities which focus around craft and making. The digital culture that manifests VC appears to be growing rapidly: there is HobbyPrincess and her Craft Manifesto, there's the Make blog, from which is arising Craft Magazine. Then we have Readymademag, and the making things blog. Taking an interesting and explicit political position is Craftism. I am trying to document as many of these as I come across on my del.icio.us page.

I have thrown all of this down, not to make a point, but rather to pose some questions:

What implications does all this have for "fine craft", and how does it change the culture of consuming such craft?

How should we regard the rise of vernacular creativity?

How should we curate and critically comment on the digitally connected vernacular crafts?

What are the political implications of this new culture?

DIY Craft

2006-09-22T10:46:00.000+01:00

Right now we are witnessing a remarkable cultural phenomenon which is the spiralling interest and participation in DIY crafts. Just take a look at the del.icio.us links for craft, and you will see what I mean.

Here's one attempt to pin down what's driving it - from the HobbyPrincess blog.

On the Redefining Craft blog, Dennis Stevens poses an important question:

Where is the definition that addresses craft with respect to the flurry of creativity that we are currently seeing within the DIY community?

Certainly this is craft or crafting, just not craft as we commonly know it. It is slightly reminiscent of the 1970’s craft movement, but this a remix; it is witty and it is often nostalgically ironic and it offers biting sarcasm with regard to the presumed role of domestic creativity within our culture. However, a common definition remains elusive.
A number of bloggers are addressing this field and their taglines are descriptive of the common themes among DIY craft practitioners, i.e.:

Extreme Craft: Compendium of craft masquerading as art, art masquerading as craft, and craft extending its middle finger

Craftster: No tea cozys without irony

SuperNaturale: Celebrates ingenuity, creativity and the handmade

Craftivism: Documenting the crafty life, stitch by political stitch

WhipUp: Handcraft in hectic world

New definitions of craft

2006-09-22T10:38:00.000+01:00

I've recently been reading research by Cathy Treadaway, whose doctoral research is investigating the impact of digital technology on creative textile practice. This page has links to her on-line publications and projects. In her discussion she raises Walter Benjamin's notion of aura, that describes the emotive aspect that appears to be absent from industrial product. She argues that aura comes from David Pye's idea of the workmanship of risk. Cathy's research shows that practitioners (design and craft), who are working in the main digitally, acknowledge the vital importance of hand making in the creative process. As she says (in a currently unpublished piece) "the emotional content of digitally produced artefacts therefore, resides in the perceived evidence of physical interaction of its author".

So, at the risk of summarising a very fullsome argument, craft in the early 21st century can be defined in terms of a process whereby designers provide emotive engagement for consumers through physical innteraction with materials and process. Craft may be a minor part of the development process (or not).