Craft

(see also the Creative University Futures article and keywords such as Handlearning and tacit knowledge)

Industrialisation v. Craft

In the 1880s, the UK government saw design as a way to sweeten the shift from a craft-based to an industrialised society. By creating new forms of beauty in electric lamps, telephones, railway trains, automobiles and fashion garments designers made useful objects desirable. However, by the second half of the 20th century designers had discovered how to create new products and attune them to prevailing tastes and predilections. In emphasising the rhetorical appeal of products (Buchanan, 1989) they then learned to attune those tastes to the will of the corporations (Forty, 1986). If designers had known how to deliver a more circular, waste-free revenue stream for corporations we might all be in a better place now. Instead, they became the dependable foot soldiers of economic growth through planned obsolecence and styling changes.

John Ruskin

• John Ruskin (1819–1900) mapped benefits from the act of handcraft to show multiple mutual beneficiaries.
• Although he did not show this craft-based ideal as a visual diagram it is a four-fold system.
  • (See also creative quartets).

• As we do not wish to show the 4 themes in any order or hierarchy we can show them interconnected.
• Whereas the one above is shown in a flat (2D) diagram the one below uses a 3D volume
  • (c.f. This is a tetrahedron

References

• Buchanan, R., 1989, "Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument, and Demonstration in Design Practice", in "Design Discourse", Margolin, V., University of Chicago Press
• Forty, A., 1986, Objects of Desire: design and society, 1750-1980, London: Thames & Hudson