Dear Mind and Body boarders:

About guild knowledge I’m a little bit surprised that no one mentioned two
facts (although Terry and Ken have done so indirectly):

1. At the medieval guilds apprentices entered at the age of nine.
2. Modern Design thinking (I’m speaking about the Modern Age and not
about Modernism) was created as an opposition to Guilds.

1. The young age in which apprentices were starting to be trained on a
craft implied that an individual mind structure was built according to both
the characteristics of a particular craft and of a group of practitioners
doing such craft.
In fact, craftsmanship was more of a growing process rather than a learning
process. In that extent the body also grows according that process.
On the other hand, a learning process needs, at least from the ones that
teach, a certain amount of conceptualisation in order to, at a minimum
level, to know when and what to teach.
Some extreme examples of such mind construction can be given like
Michelangelo or Mozart. They were not intellectuals, not normal
practitioners but what I should call ultra-practitioners. In a certain
extent their minds was not filled with useless knowledge since they had a
mind constructed not on “normal” language but on artistic language acting
as normal language. Their bodies were also built to be fit to the extreme
conditions of mastering their skills. Extreme successful artists or
scientists seem to apply to those characteristics: Precocious
demonstrations of skill. In fact they are not precocious they are simply
extremely focused as if they have been trained (or self trained) from
extreme youth. The paradox is that the emergence of Modern Age artists
occurs outside the system of guilds or even against the system of guilds.
Somehow the guild system preserved and promoted efficiency on a limited set
of production features thus limiting innovative behaviour.
Somehow Society started to believe that a general and intellectual approach
to knowledge, progressively directed to conceptualisation should produce
better results than precocious specialisation. From Newton to Dalton,
Science won the possibility of being purely intellectual. The same happened
from Alberti to… Hoops, it seems that the artistic fields never won such
detachment.
From the Guilds to Academia the institutionalised precocious apprenticeship
changed to institutionalised holistic basic knowledge preceding specialised
learning and training.
A right amount of both systems and, most of all, a right amount of
connections between them seem to have triggered and sustained the
technological/cultural “western” civilization. In this very “civilization”,
guild apprenticeship is, now, almost a rarity. This means that minds are
being constructed, on a pessimistic view, on a blur holism in which
specific knowledge will be built. No wonder that places like India, China
and South America where a well-advanced scientific training coexists with
guild training seem to be at the verge of a giant development leap. No
wonder, also, that Ken maybe astonished by ingenious solutions made at a
time were scientific knowledge was entangled with craftsmanship knowledge.
The ascent of what was called in the 16th century the minor arts (includes
the embryos of most of what we currently call Design) to the “dignity” of
academia and university determined their scientifisation or their predatory
behaviour towards other instituded sciences and disciplines.

2- Guild knowledge relied on the methodoxy that by repetition and imitation
some expertise would emerge.
The methodoxy of the early Modern Age relied on the knowledge
of “practical” sciences like Mathematics and “Disegno” that could be
taught. The shift from practitioners to intellectuals was decisive for the
re- institution of disciplines like Architecture, Painting and Sculpture
and set the fuse for the institution of all Design disciplines at an
academic level.
The modernist methodoxy relied in the social awareness of progress.
The “ist” suffix indicates an extreme expression of some of the
characteristics of the Modern Age.
(Maybe it is important to clarify what that means: The History Ages are
defined like a continuum. Modern is not opposed to Ancient. Both are
opposed to Middle Age, which was nothing in terms of that continuum.
Modern, should be something that followed Ancient. Historiography didn’t
have a name for the period between the falls of two Roman Empires. For
historiographers, it was, also clear that they were living on another
period with no name that they called Contemporary Age because it was simply
their time. There were no characteristic features that could surpass the
continuum Ancient/Modern but they felt that something had changed
dramatically at the French Revolution.)
If those divisions make sense we must think of almost universal changes on
minds and how they were being constructed. Or at least, think what was
underlying those convictions when the Ages were invented.
We can think of the French Revolution as the dramatic way to make global
(in Europe terms) an idea of economical/political liberalism but, most of
it, as an idea of generalised education with faith in Science and respect
for the Arts. Along with the complete institution of Universities as
research centres came the epidemic of Museums. The irrefutable tension
between Romantics and Neo-Classicists was one of the signs that The Modern
Age was over and the world was entering a Post-Modern age.
Ruskin and Morris, along with others, like pre-Raphaelitism, were clearly
on the Romantic side coexisting with the strength of the technological
development. The world was starting to move in Hegelian way, curling
differences producing new cultural units prepared to be curled with
different cultural units.
Guild knowledge was assimilated by the modernist methodoxy along with the
conceptual Euclidean ideas of space and form.
The Bauhaus educational proposal was nothing more than the effort of
synthesis of the two fields identified on the previous century.
Nevertheless, there was no doubt about that conceptual work should be in
command of craftsmanship. Abstractionism and essentialism commanding
craftsmanship could be put at the same level where Science was, commanding
Technology.
In short, this corresponded to a victory of Neo-Classicism over
Romanticism, absorbing the delirious regressive utopias under the rule of
rational Euclideanism.
No doubt that the mind frame had changed from pure guild system in medieval
days to a system where craftsmanship and apprenticeship were part of
conceptual dominant frame.
Somehow this discussion shows how instable was that arrangement.
The questions that were underlying the fight of early Modern Designers like
Brunelleschi and Alberti against the Guilds are still on. They are of
social nature.
The current methodoxy relies on a specific weight of scientific behaviour
inside design processes either by social sciences or natural sciences. The
way in which those sciences are manipulated in order to obtain design
results is still the “hand-made” part of the process. The weight of science
or scientific is, no doubt about it, the result of the social pressure
within the academic and market conditions, so that Design could sustain or
attain the same recognition as other revered disciplines.

A discipline means that you have disciples. And this is what we are talking
about, isn’t it.

Sorry, if this mail came on the wrong time in the discussion. History moves
very slowly.

Best,

Eduardo

PS: Lisbon woke up with 0º Celcius. This will be a day to remember.