Dear Danielle,
Thank you for a lovely analysis of craft in design, complete with references. (Lubomir, please note that I cannot find any book at all written by a John Christopher Johns in the database of my local university, Amazon, or ABE books. Is there any other clue you can offer?)
A nice diatribe on the topic of "contempt for manual skill" published in Nature in 1943, which still makes fun reading today for anyone who doubts the importance of hands-on knowledge in the development of intellectual ideas.
Best wishes,Heidi
Hansel, C. W. (October 1943). Culture and manual skill. Nature, 3861, 513-514.
On Sunday, March 21, 2021, 03:31:34 a.m. EDT, Danielle Wilde <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Dear Lubomir,
in response to your comments and concern:
> Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2021 18:13:32 +0000
> From: Lubomir Savov Popov <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Design was a craft: Can -- should -- it be more than craft?
>
> I am not sure what we gain from this hands-on thinking when design is about heads-on thinking. It is crystal clear. At least for the architectural designers. The problem comes from the industrial designers who still have adversity to a simple bachelor program of study and want to touch everything with their hands.
— snip —
> My concern is that designer want to think with their hands (if this is possible at all) rather than with their heads. So much about designers. Take no offence. This is just an intellectual exercisei
my concern is that some designers believe they can design by thinking alone, as if thinking is best undertaken as an abstract, intellectual endeavour. However, thinking is a phenomenologically rich undertaking that is, and can be consciously, amplified by moving, making and (situated or not) doing. Architecture is not my field, though I recall concerns being voiced when architecture moved from the physical act of drawing at a drafting table, to drawing in a CAD program, as well as away from model making as thinking, to representation.
Even abstract forms of thinking such as undertaken in mathematics, physics and philosophy engage the body in the thinking process; in acts of making tangible. See physicist Richard Feynman’s infamous disagreement with historian Charles Weiner, who pointed out how good it is to have a record of Feynman’s thinking in his notebooks. Feynman pushed back strongly, asserting that the notebooks are not a record of his thinking, in fact the notes in the notebooks are the actual thinking, unfolding, in process (see the opening note in Andy Clark’s (2008) Supersizing the Mind). and when I think of Wittgenstein, I think of him as pacing... possibly due to Derek Jarman’s 1993 film, Wittgenstein, though my memory is cloudy and it may simply be an impression informed by the walk down the hill from the metro to the cinema
As a design researcher, interested in process and transformational change, I rarely make tangible things. Rather I do what I am starting to describe as ‘infrastructure agency’ — my (hardworking, talented and incredibly creative) team and I do as little as possible, to support people to develop a sense of their own agency so that they might become agents of change in their own lives—move from personally responsible, to participatory, to social justice oriented forms of (enacting) citizenship (building on Westheimer, Kahne & Rogers, 2000. p.3-6). In large part, this requires involving people in embodied forms of thinking—through moving, making and doing. It involves thinking through tinkering, through prototyping and through other engagements with materiality; through making, doing, eating, experiencing, reflecting. Thinking with the whole body, through all of our senses. These ways of thinking, and indeed this way of doing design, draws directly from acts of crafting. As Sennet tells us: in craft, there is a constant interplay between tacit knowledge and self-conscious awareness (2009, p.9). I quote myself quoting others, to unpack this:
> Rosner et al. speak of how a craftsperson playing with their materials is led towards finding what it is they want to make (2013). Craft and working with one’s materials provides an openness of enquiry. Such a process permits using the materials and tools to think with. What emerges is a research process that is a “speculative indeterminate progression (...) reminiscent of what Tim Ingold (2006) terms wayfinding in comparison to navigation: feeling one’s way rather than using a map” (in Bardzell et al., 2012). This way of thinking creates a continual feedback mechanism within the research structure that is open, flexible and responsive. Just as craftspeople calibrate the motions of their work in direct response to the work just performed (Adamson, 2010), researchers [and, I suggest anyone engaged in thinking] also need to be open to where the data, research, design enquiry, and participant reactions might lead them.
—in Wilde, Underwood & Pohlner 2014, p.368
> There is strong precedence of textile-based craft metaphors as tools for thinking: devices for elaborating new meaning, and communicating processes that may be complex and non-reductive in form. Researchers are re-thinking art, aesthetics and knowledge production through metaphors such as “spinning to elaborate new meanings” (Jefferies, 2016. p. 4) and “patchworking ways of knowing” (Lindström & Ståhl, 2016): both to know and to make the world in one move. But do such approaches offer a new foundation? Ajun Appaduri (2014. p. 9) posits design as a practice that continuously reimagines its own conditions of possibility, drawing focus to the forces of materiality in relation to design. He proposes that “materiality can be viewed as a design context, and design can be treated as a form of vibration (in the sense of Jane Bennett’s idea of “vibrant matter”) that disturbs and creatively animates the material world and adds new forms of movement to already moving and dynamic materials” (Bennet, 2010; and/in Appaduri pp. 9–10).
>
—in Wilde & Underwood, 2018, p.10
and while I readily acknowledge that the thinking that is done with the hands and other parts of the body is not always attended to mindfully, and when it is, is not always easy to bring into an articulate space because most people are not practiced at doing so, and in Western (formal and non-formal) educational approaches we are not typically trained to do so. Nonetheless, I strongly believe that when we imagine that thinking only occurs in the grey matter in our heads, we are mistaken, and are short-changing our understanding of what we are, and are capable of, as embodied beings.
Best,
Danielle
—
www.daniellewilde.com
Adamson, G. The Craft Reader. Berg, Oxford, UK 2010
Appaduri, A. Forword. In Design as Future-Making; Yalavich, S., Adams, B., Eds.; Bloomsbury: London, UK; New York, NY, USA, 2014; pp. 9–11.
Bardzell, S., Rosner, D., Bardzell, J. Crafting Quality in Design: Integrity, Creativity, and Public Sensibility. In Proc. DIS 2012, 11-20, 2012
Bennet, J. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things; Duke University Press: Durham, UK; London, UK, 2010.
Clark, Andy. Supersizing the mind: Embodiment, action, and cognitive extension. OUP USA, 2008.
Ingold, T. “Walking the plank: meditations on a process of skill.” In Defining technological literacy: towards an epistemological framework. New York, Palgrave Macmillan. 2006.
Jefferies, J. Editorial introduction. In The Handbook of Textile Culture; Jefferies, J., Wood Conroy, D., Clark, H., Eds.; Bloomsbury: London, UK, 2016; pp. 3–16.
Lindström, K.; Ståhl, A. Patchworking ways of knowing and making. In The Handbook of Textile Culture; Jefferies, J., Wood Conroy, D., Clark, H., Eds.; Bloomsbury: London, UK, 2016; pp. 65–78.
Rosner, D., Ikemiya, M., Kim, D., Koch, K. Designing with Traces. In Proc. CHI 2013, 1649-1658, 2013
Sennett, R. The Craftsman, Penguin, London, UK 2009
Westheimer, Joel, Joesph Kahne, and Bethany Rogers. "What kind of citizen? The politics of assessing democratic values." (2000).
Wilde, D., Underwood, J. Designing towards the Unknown: Engaging with Material and Aesthetic Uncertainty. Informatics 2018, 5(1), 1; doi:10.3390/informatics5010001 Available [online] at: https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/informatics/informatics-05-00001/article_deploy/informatics-05-00001-v2.pdf
Danielle Wilde, Jenny Underwood, and Rebecca Pohlner. 2014. PKI: crafting critical design. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS '14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 365–374. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2598510.2598603
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