2010 “Between Art and Design: Rethinking the Art vs. Craft Dualism in a Digital Age”
This paper outlines a way of rethinking the art vs. craft polarity by 1) rejecting dualism in favor of a three-way analysis that includes design, 2) focusing on the positive characteristics of craft rather than using it as a negative foil for defining art, and 3) considering how art-craft-design relations are being modified by digital techniques in both craft and design. Some of the ideas were incorporated into the article “Blurred Boundaries” in Philosophy Compass in 2012.
BETWEEN ART AND DESIGN: RETHINKING THE ART VS. CRAFT DUALISM IN A DIGITAL AGE
In 2002, when I learned that the American Craft Museum in New York had dropped the term “craft” from its name to become a museum of “Arts and Design,” claiming that people now associate “craft” with hobbies or fairs, I was shocked at what seemed a betrayal of its mission.[i] But then I began to wonder if there were not some deeper instability in the idea of studio craft that is finally leading to its dissolution into art on the one side and design on the other. I believe an adequate answer to that question requires replacing the traditional art vs. craft dualism – in which craft so often served as a mere foil for defining art –by a three-way analysis that defines craft in relation to both art and design. But since craft and design processes – and even those of art to some extent – are being transformed by digital technologies, I will also need to consider the ways the digital revolution is modifying art-craft-design relations today.[ii]
As a first step, we need to remind ourselves of studio craft’s relation to art and design at the moment of its emergence a hundred years ago. The use of the word “crafts” as the name for a grouping of hand made decorative arts only came into prominence after the first London exhibition sponsored by the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1888.[iii] Each piece in that exhibition was supposed to bear the name of both designer and maker in order to assert the claims of “decorative designers and craftsmen to the position of artist.” [iv] You have in your hand a copy of the publicity flyer for that first exhibition, showing female personifications of craft and design holding hands, presumably hoping to enter the sacred precincts of art together.
The Arts and Crafts movement had largely spent its force by the time of World War I, leaving in its wake, on the one hand, the studio craft movement, with its individual ateliers and small workshops, and, on the other, the design movement, linking the decorative arts to industry. Since the visual aspect of the fine arts had originally been defined in the eighteenth century as both a set of genres (painting, sculpture, architecture), and by criteria such as pleasure vs. use, in order to separate them from the mechanical arts, there was a parallel tendency to define the studio crafts as a set of genres (weaving, pottery, woodworking, etc.) and to invoke criteria such as hand made vs. machine made, in order to distinguish them from industrial goods. As the twentieth century got underway, the studio crafts could have gone in three directions:
First, they could have merged with modernist movements in the fine arts.
Secondly, they could have merged with modern design for industry.
Third, they could have remained a separate domain or artistic production.
By the end of the 1920s, the studio crafts, especially in the English speaking world, seemed well embarked on the third course, and by the 1950s there were not only separate schools of “arts and crafts,” but also distinct craft societies, craft journals, and craft exhibitions.[v] But no sooner had the crafts as a group of materials based genres become firmly institutionalized than what is sometimes called the “crafts-as-art” movement began to reject utility in a bid to enter the art world. By the 1980s the crafts-as-art perspective had come to dominate many of the leading craft institutions. Even so debates continued over whether this trend was a “sell-out” of authentic craft values to the trendy fashions of the art world with a number of craftspeople, for example, insisting on calling themselves “potters” or “weavers” instead of the now requisite “ceramic sculptor” or “fiber artist.”
Today, the various studio craft genres seem pulled between art and design, between an art world that often has only a secondary interest in making objects, and a design world that long ago took over the ideal of useful art for the people. One implication of craft’s position between art and design is that the old art vs. craft polarity that has dominated the thinking of philosophers from Kant through Collingwood to Danto needs to be replaced by a tripartite analysis that would position craft practices vis a vis both art and design.
Given the turbulent 120 year history of studio craft and its continuing transformations, it might seem foolhardy to attempt a formal definition of craft practice by identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for an activity to be craft in contrast to art and design. But if we cannot hope to give a real definition of such a rapidly moving target, we can perhaps at least characterize craft by identifying some necessary conditions of traditional studio craft as a base line for thinking about current changes. For convenience, I will give these familiar components of traditional craft practice rather lapidary names and then briefly suggest how each element relates in turn to art and design. They are: 1) hand 2) material 3) mastery 4) utility.
1) The idea of the hand made is the most familiar element, but also the most ambiguous. First, “hand” really stands for the body as a whole, the physicality of making.[vi] Second, there is the problem of tools. Most craftspeople have always used the best tools available and today that includes not only machine tools but digital tools, with the result that the extent of physical touch in each medium varies enormously. These ambiguities have led some writers, like David Pye, to avoid both the terms “hand” or “craft” altogether, and use phases like the “workmanship of risk.” [vii]
Despite such problems, the essential contrast between the “hands–on” nature of traditional craft practice and essential practices of contemporary art and design is clear.
In today’s art world, artists are no longer required to actually make anything, and if they do, they need not use their own hands, but can hire others to do it for them.
Design obviously excludes the requirement of the hand in the sense that designers are not expected to produce the object. Nor is the hand needed to make prototypes, which can either made by artisans or by using digitally guided rapid prototyping machines. Moreover, even the need for hand drawing skills has been significantly reduced by computer aided design (CAD) and many design schools no longer require courses in hand drawing.[viii]
2) A second essential condition of traditional craft practice, is a vital engagement with some material or materials, leading to the creation of a physical artifact. Of course, certain materials such as wood, clay, metal, glass, fiber, have been historically identified with “the Crafts” as the name of a group of genres, but the type of material is not what is essential to craft making. What has been distinctive about traditional craft practice is an intimate physical engagement with materials that stands in contrast to the essential practices of contemporary art and design.
Although many artists today may still focus their work on a single medium, many others see themselves primarily as generators of ideas, which they are free to embody in any material. Although multi-media and installation artist often use traditionally craft-identified materials, they need not – and seldom do -- explore materials themselves except as vehicles for ideas.
Design is not essentially tied to an engagement with any particular material, although some designers may tend to specialize in a certain range of materials. And, although designers need some theoretical acquaintance with the properties of materials, they do not need the intimate and lengthy involvement characteristic of the craftsperson. In fact, today designers need never have does direct work in the materials for which they design, as in the old Bauhaus foundation course, although this is still a point of some contention in design education.
3) The third necessary condition of traditional craft practice, “mastery,” involves an integration of bodily facility, imagination and judgment. In traditional craft, mastery has always been more than mere skill or manual dexterity; mastery consists of mind and body working instinctively together, what is now commonly called tacit knowledge.[ix]
In today’s art world, by contrast, mastery, like hand work or engagement with materials, is an optional rather than essential aspect of artistic practice, especially now that hiring professional fabricators has become rather common.[x]
Designers do not need a practical mastery of materials, only a mastery of the principles of design and of the software that is the designer’s primary tool. Whether the mastery of computer aided design itself involves the kind of flow and feedback loops at a virtual level similar to the craftsperson’s tacit knowledge in working with materials is currently a debated question.[xi]
Obviously, the first three necessary conditions for defining traditional craft practice – hand, materials, mastery – are closely intertwined. In the studio crafts, mastery is the use of one’s body and tools to work creatively with chosen materials to produce a result not fully determinable in advance, precisely what Pye called “the workmanship of risk” as compared to the industrial “workmanship of certainty,” and Collingwood completely missed in his caricature of craft practice.[xii] The craftperson’s spontaneity and improvisation, based on thousands of hours of practice is especially striking in working with hot glass, where body and mind must move together quickly and there is the constant risk of failure.[xiii]
4) “Utility,” the fourth essential element of traditional craft practice has, of course, been a subject of controversy in the studio craft world for decades. Traditionally, the studio crafts aimed at providing us with things at once beautiful and useful. The now dominant “craft-as-art” approach rejects function as an essential element of craft in favor of providing innovative and expressive objects for aesthetic contemplation. The success of the craft-as-art approach means that we must recognize two well established conceptions of studio craft, an older one for which use is essential, and a more recent one for which utility is either optional or deliberately excluded.
For the art world, of course, function is purely contingent, a position that goes back to the first eighteenth century theories of the fine arts, which often separated fine art from the mechanical arts on the basis of pleasure vs. utility.
Design, on the other hand, has, from its beginnings as a separate profession, been concerned almost exclusively with industrial products destined for a specific end.
What conclusions can we draw from this brief philosophical look at some familiar characteristics of traditional craft practice in relation to art and design?
First, with respect to the definition of craft itself, it is clear that if we require that all four characteristics be taken together as a sufficient condition for something to be called “craft,” only the creation of a hand made objects for use, based on a deep mastery of materials, would truly be “craft.” If we say that a combination of the first three characteristics – hand, material, mastery – are sufficient by themselves, then craft-as-art objects will qualify as craft, although many of those who make them would not be happy with that appellation, since they really want their works to be classified as art.
My purpose in identifying two sets of essential conditions that define two forms of traditional craft practice has been to establish a base line for discussing current changes in the concept and practice of craft. The major change in craft practice over the past two decades, has been the increasing influence of digital design tools like auto CAD and of digital production techniques such as rapid prototyping, computer numeric controlled (CNC) milling machines or computer guided looms, that have drastically reduced the sort of physical contact with materials associated with hand making. But to eliminate the hand or body as a necessary condition of craft not only changes the role of the “hand” but also the meaning of “materials” and “mastery” since, in a fully digitized craft practice, the engagement with materials would be virtual and the flow of tacit knowledge in mastery would be primarily intellectual. Of course, I am describing an ideally or fully digitized craft practice, whereas most studio craftspeople who do use digital tools are likely to engage in some hand work at various stages.
There are a variety of digital approaches to craft practice, each drawing on different combinations of the remaining three essential conditions once “hand” has been set aside: materials, mastery, and use. For example, there can be a kind of digital design-craft that combines mastery of software with a virtual relation to materials in the production of utilitarian objects. Similarly, there can be a digital art-craft that rejects utility but uses mastery of the software that guides milling machines in shaping materials into aesthetic objects. Finally, the craft theorist and educator, Mike Press, has identified what he calls a digital “craft knowledge” approach to research that calls on only one necessary element, mastery in the sense of tacit knowing.[xiv] Thus, our analysis of the essentials of craft practice in terms of necessary conditions has revealed what we might call “degrees of craft-ness,” stretching from traditional studio craft which manifests all four conditions, to hand made art-craft which integrates the three of hand, materials, and mastery, to digital design-craft which combines a different three (materials, mastery and use), to a digital art-craft which embraces only two (materials and mastery), and finally, to a digital research-craft consisting of only one (mastery). But at this point the question naturally arises: is the possession of only one or two of the original four necessary conditions of craft practice – and then only in a virtual form – still sufficient to justify calling a practice “craft” rather than simply “art,” “design” or “research?” In order to answer that question we need to reconsider how our four necessary conditions relate to both design and art.
Turning first to art, it seems clear that in today’s pluralistic art world, none of the four traditional conditions for being craft are also necessary conditions for being art, but even more important, none of the four conditions for being craft, including “hand,” and “use,” are excluded from art. That is why it is plausible to claim that works of studio art-craft, whether manually or digitally produced, should be classified as art works. But it also shows why simply making one’s craft work “useless” does not automatically turn it into art. Arthur Danto has argued that what transforms a craft work into an art work is not the rejection of utility per se, but the work’s embodiment of a self-referential artistic statement. He gives the example of the furniture maker, Gary Knox Bennett, who pounded a sixteen-penny nail into the front of his beautifully crafted rosewood cabinet and bent it over. Bennett, Danto says, drove home the truth “that art . . . is a matter of meaning . . . and furniture can be art when it is about its own processes.”[xv] We have already noted that contemporary art’s focus on concept and meaning has led many artists to have their works fabricated by others. Compared to this artistic practice, most digital art-craft production still involves the craftsperson producing the final work, even if the production is almost entirely through a computer controlled loom or milling machine. Although the lack of physical contact with the material in digital craft practice may not seem very craft-like, we should remember that all tools, from the paint brush and chisel to the loom and kiln create some distance between the craftsperson’s body and the material. But it is not just the greater “distance” from materials in digital production that leads to some unease about still calling it “craft,” but the changed meaning of “mastery” that results from drastically reducing or eliminating physical contact. To understand the import of that change we need to look again at the nature of mastery in design as compared to craft.
Given the central role of the body in traditional hand craft, “mastery” has meant that the craftsperson seldom has a completely worked out design in mind, but develops a rough idea through a dialogue of discovery with the material.[xvi] Although designers can play around with their software and engage in a kind of virtual dialogue with materials, design for industry usually requires that the designer finally produce a step by step articulation that prepares the way for what Pye called the “workmanship of certainty” in production. Digital craft practice not only uses many of the same kinds of tools as industrial designers, but is also like design in its mostly virtual engagement with materials, since intervention of the hand in digital craft is optional rather than necessary. As a result, digital studio craft might also seem like design in generating approaches that lead to a workmanship of certainty rather than risk. But digital craftspeople, unlike designers tied to industry, are making their own works and are free to deliberately create what Tanya Harrod calls, “slippage between the perfection of the [computer] file and the translation into production.”[xvii] Thus, although digital studio craft resembles design in many respects, it is not completely unwarranted to still call it “craft” in those cases where it leads to the production of unique objects.
In his book Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand, Malcolm McCullough has come at the craft-design relation from the side of design, arguing that advanced work with computers involves a rapid and spontaneous engagement with screen imagery that is parallel to the tacit knowing involved in traditional handicraft.[xviii] Not only does such work already involve some use of the hands, McCullough suggests that more intuitive, craft-like, hand/eye coordination will emerge in computing as new haptic devices replace the “mouse.”[xix] Of course, the big sticking point in calling computer mastery a craft in the traditional sense is the question of materiality and risk. McCullough tries to get around this by putting the broader notion of “medium” in the place of materials, arguing that the increasingly dense notational powers of computers are already beginning to support “quasi-continuous operations” of hand and eye parallel to the way craftspeople use tools with materials.[xx] The tools in this case are software combinations and modifications, and the medium is the computer itself, although there is obviously far less risk involved in working with virtual objects than physical ones, given the ease with which computer moves can be undone. Even so, McCullough’s idea of an “abstract craft” of computing can embrace modified versions of all four of the necessary conditions of traditional craft, although he grants that abstract craft is closer to design than to traditional studio craft.[xxi]
Our three way comparisons of craft, art and design have shown some specific ways that craft is pulled by its own essential conditions toward art on the one side and toward design on the other. The four essential conditions of traditional craft practice have proved over time to be an unstable mix, especially in an increasingly digital environment. As we have seen, three of the four conditions, “use,” “hand,” “materials,” can be eliminated, generating various modifications of traditional craft practice, culminating in an idea of “abstract craft” that radically modifies all three conditions, or in a purely digital “research craft” that eliminates all but mastery. As a result, both McCullough’s abstract craft and Press’s research craft are hard to distinguish from pure design. It is also worth noting that with the reduction of the essence of craft to mastery alone, we have left behind the specificity of the studio crafts for something close to the ancient meaning of the word “craft,” namely, skilled work of any kind, whether in pottery, poetry, surgery, horsemanship, or politics.
Before concluding, we need to note that if some of craft’s essential conditions pull it toward art and others toward design, there are practical developments within art and design that have pulled art and design toward some aspects of craft. As a result, the terms art-craft-design today designate an increasingly overlapping set rather than three tightly bounded categories. From the art side, the multi-media approach to art making long ago opened art to previously craft identified materials, and many artists, of course, still engage directly with materials in the hand production of aesthetic objects despite the growing use of outside fabricators.[xxii] The design relationship has produced even more interesting practical overlapping since some designers have begun to use CNC machines or even their own hands to make one-off pieces for art galleries, whereas others have formed small companies in things like furniture making where they do both design and batch production.[xxiii]
In these lively interactions among craft, design and art, however, the label “craft” has not fared well. Most artists and designers want to maintain the title of “art” or “design” for what they do, and some practicing designers object vehemently to the term “craft,” despite its embrace by theorists like McCullough.[xxiv] Craftspeople, on the other hand, are more inclined simply to drop the term “craft.”[xxv] One craft writer has opined that the crafts “stand at a crossroads, and it looks like we might scatter in different directions.”[xxvi] As craftspeople increasingly identify with either art or design, is the category, “the crafts,” fated to disappear? In thinking about these troubles, we need to keep in mind that “craft” with a small “c,” as the name for a practice, is not intrinsically tied to “the Crafts” with a capital “C,” as the historical name of a consortium of genres. [xxvii] One can take a craft approach to painting or sculpture or computing, just as one can take an art or design approach to any of the craft identified media.[xxviii] As the weaver, Ann Sutton, said some years ago, “I work . . . sometimes as an artist, sometimes as a designer, sometimes as a craftsperson . . . and I find that they complement each other.”[xxix]
A final caveat: I have not addressed the nature of the amateur, home, hobby, and DIY crafts that have given the word “craft” such a bad odor that the American Craft Museum felt compelled to change its name. Although much of what I have said above about the studio crafts would apply to amateur and DIY, there are questions of intentionality, context, and interpretation that require further analysis. Moreover, digital design and even digital fabrication have begun to enter the DIY crafts and at least one writer on digital developments predicts that the personal computer will eventually be joined by the “personal fabricator.[xxx] (In fact, as of early 2020 when I am reviewing past essays to determine what is worth including as I construct a personal web site, the personal fabricator in the form of “maker bots” has indeed come into widespread use and although they remain relatively expensive, many communities have established fabrication centers where almost anyone can use the latest digital makers.) Certainly, the relationship between the popular and the studio crafts would be worthy of further philosophical reflection if we could disentangle the conceptual aspects of popular crafts from purely sociologic
[i] Carol Vogel, “In New Name, Museum Goes Contemporary,” New York Times, October 3, 2002. A year later the prestigious California College of Arts and Crafts dropped “Crafts” from its name. The College’s web site explains the decision was made to better reflect the breadth of its programs and the “blurring of the distinction between art and craft.” www.cca.edu/about/name.php.
[ii] Regrettably, space does not permit discussing the important topic of how the conception of the studio crafts today is affected by the enormous activity of amateur, home, hobby or DIY crafts, as well as the perception and standing of the many skilled professions as represented by the “craft unions,” machinists, electricians, carpenters, plumbers, etc.
[iii] For a discussion of the history of the concept of art see Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001). Once the category of fine art was consolidated around 1750, relatively little philosophical attention was paid to the arts left behind under such names as “decorative,” “applied,” “minor,” or “industrial.” As Élisabeth Lavezzi has shown, neither the concept nor phrase “decorative arts” existed in the eighteenth century and its first appearance in a French dictionary was in 1877. “The Encyclopédie and the Idea of the Decorative Arts,” Art History 28:2, 174-75. There were, of course, philosophical discussions of the “mechanical arts” in the eighteenth and prior centuries. See Isabelle Frank, ed., The Theory of Decorative Art: An Anthology of European & American Writings 1750-1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
[iv] Peter Stansky, Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880s and the Arts and Crafts Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 203.
[v] In nineteenth century Europe, separate museums had been developed for the decorative arts whether produced in small workshops or by industry, whereas in Canada and America art museums developed separate departments of “decorative arts.” The products of the studio crafts usually entered these museum departments, although the American Craft Museum was initially conceived as a studio craft museum as was the Renwick Gallery. A few museums, such as Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, have separate spaces specifically reserved for exhibiting studio craft works. On craft in American museums see Jonathan L. Fairbanks, “Crafts and American Art Museums,” in Marcia Manhart and Thomas Manhart, eds. The Eloquent Object: The Evolution of American Art in Craft Media Since 1945 (Tulsa: Philbrook Museum, 1987).
[vi] I am grateful to Yuriko Saito for pointing this out.
[vii] David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968) My description of the characteristics of mastery is close to Pye’s “workmanship of risk.”
[viii] Neal French, “CADCAM and the British Ceramics Tableware Industry,” in Peter Dormer, ed. Culture of Craft (Manchester: Manchester University, 1997), 158-167.
[ix] Peter Dormer, “Craft and the Turning Test for Practical Thinking,” in Dormer, ed. Culture of Craft 147.
[x] A recent issue of Artforum devotes six articles and a roundtable discussion to the topic of fabrication. Scott Rothkopf goes so far as to claim that a “preponderance of artworks in our time . . .involve outsourced labor, industrial processes, and custom fabrication.” Artforum International XLVI: 2 2007, p 304.
[xi] Jeremy Myerson is skeptical in “Tornadoes, T-squares and technology: can computing be a craft?” in Culture of Craft, 176-186. Tanya Harrod is more positive in “Otherwise Unobtainable: The Applied Arts and the Politics and Poetics of Digital Technology ,” in Sandra Afoldy, ed. Neocraft: Modernity and the Crafts (Halifax, NS: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2007), p. 232. Malcolm McCullough is certain. See his Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) which I discuss below.
[xii] Collingwood described “art proper” as opposed to “craft” in terms similar to what I have used for mastery in the crafts; his distinction has some similarity to Pye’s contrast of the workmanship of risk (what I call craft mastery) as compared to the workmanship of certainty. Perhaps Collingwood’s polarity might apply to some mass art practices or industrial practices, but it is a gross caricature of actual studio craft practice.
[xiii] I owe this insight to watching and talking with the glassblower Doug Sheafor. See also Richard Sennett’s discussion of craft mastery in general and glass blowing in particular in The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp.173-175.
[xiv] Mike Press, “Handmade Futures: The Emerging Role of Craft Knowledge in Our Digital Culture,” in Afoldy, ed. Neocraft, 225-239.
[xv] Arthur Danto, Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations (New York: Farrar, Stras, Giroux, 1994), 78.
[xvi] Keith Cummings, “Glass Making and the Evolution of the Craft Process,” in Persistence of Craft, 74.
[xvii] Tanya Harrod, “Otherwise Unobtainable: The Applied Arts and the Politics and Poetics of Digital Technology,” in Alfoldy,. Neocraft, 225-239.
[xviii] Malcolm McCullough, Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
[xix] McCullough, Abstracting Craft, 24-50.
[xx] McCullough, Abstracting Craft, 215. See also 99-111, 194-214.
[xxi] The phrase “digital craft” has become sufficiently widespread by now to have several uses. I have used it to describe three developments coming out of the studio craft world, a digital art-craft, a digital-design craft, and a digital research-craft. Obviously, others besides McCullough in the design field could use the phrase “digital craft” for their work. For example, the School of Architecture of the University of Victoria in New Zealand offered a course on “digital craft” in the Spring of 2007 that consisted primarily of learning to use computer aided design. Or consider the paper by Neri Oxman, “Digital Craft: Fabrication–Based Design in the Age of Digital Production” www.ambient.media.mit.edu/transitive/papers/oxman.pdf. The most frequent usage of “digital craft,” however, seems to be for various aspects of amateur or DIY crafts which make use of the computer and especially for work that uses embedded digital technology in crafted artifacts. For an interesting discussion of the relation of design and studio craft vis a vis the issus of human-computer interaction see Sarah Kettley, “The Materiality of Wearable Computer-Craft and Authentic User Experience,” www.dcs.napier.ac.uk. .
[xxii] Martin Puryear, for example, focuses on a specific medium, wood, and is an undoubted master at making beautiful sculptures, although he once deflected a compliment on his “consummate craftsmanship,” as if realizing that if he went too far in the direction of craft it might put his art status in jeopardy. Arthur Danto, Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays & Aesthetic Meditations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 289.
[xxiii] On designers who make single objects for sale see Marcus Fairs,”Burning Down the Divide,” Crafts 205: March-April, 2007, p. 38. Small design/production firms are discussed in Julian Secondo, “Poor Materials Imaginatively Applied: New Approaches to Furniture,” Persistence of Craft, 117-127. If these boutique firms hit a particularly responsive market nerve, they can still sell their design to a manufacturer
[xxiv] Marcus Fairs, “Burning Down the Divide,” p. 42. It is interesting that at a time when some craft institutions are ditching the term craft and many designers fear its association with hobbyism, a leading interpreter of computing like McCullough is ready to embrace it. Of course, as a theoretician interested in computing as a practice, he finds the craft parallel enriching and inspiring in contrast to narrower views of the computer as a kind of mechanistic tool that inhibits personal knowledge and improvisation.
[xxv] Secondo, “Poor Materials,” 124.
[xxvi] Paula Owen, “Labels, Lingo, and Legacy: Crafts at a Crossroads,” Objects and Meaning, 33.
[xxvii] The felicitous phrase “consortium of genres” is from Paul Greenhalgh, Persistence of Craft, 1. The practices of glass blowing or throwing vessel forms on a wheel, for example, are closer to those art practices where artists actually make things, whereas much weaving and metal work today can be closer to design as is some furniture making, which, in addition, is not tied to any particular material.
[xxviii] See a similar point by Peter Dormer in “Craft and the Turing Test,” 151.
[xxix] Diane Sheehan and Susan Tebby, Ann Sutton (London: The Crafts Council, 2003), 8
[xxx] Neil Gerschenfeld, The Coming Revolution on your Desktop--From Personal computers to Personal Fabricators, (New York: Basic Books, 2005).