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Mak e It work
Jonathan Bean
Parsons the New School for Design | [email protected]
Jonathan Bean is a postdoctoral fellow at Parsons the New
School for Design in New York City, where he is helping to start
a new program in design studies. His work is interdisciplinary
and deals with domesticity, technology, and consumer culture. Daniela Rosner
California College of the Arts | [email protected]
Daniela Rosner is a Ph.D. candidate at U.C. Berkeley’s School
of Information and lecturer at the California College of the
Arts (CCA). Her research focuses on how cultural histories are
woven into our interactions with the things we create.
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Old Hat: Craft Versus Design?
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Craft is enjoying a renaissance. Visit
a hip neighborhood in Portland,
Brooklyn, or San Francisco, and the
signs are everywhere—most likely,
painstakingly hand-lettered on a
chalkboard. Take a walk down a
street in these cities and you‘ll likely find the opportunity to learn to
make pickles and enjoy some craft
beer and artisan cheese, all before
recrafting your body through yoga.
From our vantage point in design
schools on both U.S. coasts, we see
a parallel in academia to the comeback of craft in popular culture. The
prefix “DIY” has been applied to
fields such as urbanism and biology.
Craft is aligned with a new interest
in making and doing, encouraging
an appreciation for experimental
and small-scale interventions, such
as World Park(ing) Day, where the
everyday urban space of a parking
spot is repurposed into temporary
park space. These examples reflect
a renewed understanding of craft as
promoting human-scale activities
and sensitivities.
As authors and researchers,
we’ve been more than complicit in this shift, orienting our
research and teaching toward
questions of materiality and longevity, and instantiating these
concerns in projects involving
knitting, IKEA hacking, homemaking, and bookbinding.
This turn back to craft—and the
response to it—both in popular
culture and in academia, seems
to represent a critical choice facing design education: whether to
include the mastery of a craft in
the execution of design.
Big D, Little c
Design education has blossomed in
the past decade. We have observed
the growth of new disciplines,
such as interaction and strategic
design, and the development of
new concepts to go with them,
such as design strategy and design
management. It is this notion of
design—design as “design thinking”—that has become fruitful for
certain activities and not for others.
For example, an understanding of
organizational theory, politics, and
law is perhaps useful for formulating the rebranding strategy of
an institutional laboratory. But is
this the same skill set required for
designing its buildings? Its hardware facilities? Its communication
technologies? To call strategy the
primary work of design is to undercut a host of other practices that
require thinking of another sort.
When the designer is positioned
as the ringleader of an operation
rather than as only one of many
actors involved in creation and
maintenance, the work of design
can be made into management,
narrowed and disconnected from
the other processes necessary for
its execution. It becomes thinking without design—a sense of the
whole without an understanding of
the methods of making.
Craft has an uneasy relationship
with big-D design. Craft doesn’t
square well with the image of a
designer as master puppeteer; it’s
hard to work the strings with dirty
hands. But we need not oppose the
mastery of a craft to the execution
of management and strategy. To do
so would reflect the longstanding
social status of craft as subservient
to the purportedly more important
functions of production, engineering, and design, a set of social relations reflected in everything from
the social organization of medieval
craft guilds to the vast difference
in status between the avant-garde
practice of collage and the creation
of scrapbooks at the kitchen table.
Craft is big, but design is often big
enough to eclipse the procedural
knowledge lurking behind it.
Removing Craft from Design?
From one corner of the design
world comes a more extreme avoidance of craft: the call, expressed
by powerful forces in both the U.S.
and the U.K., for design to continue
an upward ascendancy by append-
Mak e It work
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Materials Matter
This is intended not as yet another
elegy to the beauty or value of
handiwork, but rather as a call to
consider design as the crafting of
connections rooted in the material world. To put it simply: Craft is
not only the province of the potter
working at a wheel. The design of a
mobile phone or a building is anything but disembodied, impersonal,
or generic. Design requires working
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Photograph by Katian Witchger
ing (big D) design to the politically
weighty STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and math [2,3].
The designer is imagined as the
sole orchestrator of action, mediating the work of engineers, social
scientists, politicians, consumers,
and a whole host of unimagined
others. This vision of design’s
future retains the modernist formulation of what design is: a mechanism through which efficiency,
order, and progress (whatever that
means) are achieved.
A central element of these and
other visions of the future is that
craft is done for us: Kitchens tell
us what and how to cook, eliminating the creativity and pleasure of
cooking from scratch with what’s
on hand; object printers create
flawless prototypes, eliminating messily glued-together chipboard and toothpicks. In this new
world, craft becomes fetish—the
proudly displayed collection of
vinyl records shelved alongside an
iPod and digital files [1]. What is
forgotten in this view is the skill
of making. Those records may
have been “only” purchased, but
the collection itself took months
of scouring flea markets and the
three remaining music shops in
town, and now sit atop a set of
purpose-built shelves, the construction of which was the reason for
enrolling in a woodworking class.
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Mak e It work
with one’s hands in the “soil” of
computing infrastructures, just as
crafters handle wood or clay. The
complex products of cooperative
and corporate production are more
than products of strategy; they are
the agglomeration of craft through
coordination. iPhones and museums
are also reshaping what it means
to be human. As many others have
said, we are what we make, and
what we make makes us.
If we take craft as the material
instantiation of design, it becomes
important to recognize a broader
range of material. The raw elements that structure and constitute
the work of thinking, making, and
managing design involve new substrates, infrastructures, and services: social networking sites, software encodings, and computational
patterns such as inheritance and
modularity. Technologies and their
constitutive parts influence design
as much as the environment in
which they are placed. Technology,
in this sense, is also material. No
longer only the domain of engineers or interaction designers, it
becomes fundamental to the means
by which design becomes craft. As
has been noted elsewhere, for all
the ballyhoo about the cloud, server
farms occupy immense buildings;
the iPods that carry our dematerialized music are crafted of metal and
glass by robots and anonymous,
but skilled, human hands; and
the nonelectronic technology that
makes mechanical things more efficient—dual-flush toilet valves, turbochargers, batteries—is made out
of stuff, such as plastic, metal, and
rare earth elements [4]. Without
the skills to manipulate and shape
this stuff, the work of design is
limited to one trajectory. That is,
if in our focus on end product or
result we forget about the process,
we eliminate the basic elements of
what makes design in all its forms
delightful: the tacit knowledge of
craft, the awareness of atmosphere
and emotion, and, yes, the conversion of a possible future into a preferred one. The object of design, the
tool with which it is made, and the
stuff it is made out of all appear to
fluctuate depending on the practice.
Rethinking Design Thinking
Design is done by human beings to,
for, and with other human beings.
Design is also done among objects
and the world we live in. Perhaps
craft is best thought of as a verb
that represents the material translation of the work of design. As
such, we may question the call for
design to transform itself into some
sort of supra-discipline intended
to coordinate, corral, and control
the work and craft of others, not
only in the politically charged fields
of science, technology, engineering, and math, but also through an
incursion into politics (as in design
for sustainability) and management
(as in design thinking). The execution of strategy and coordination, it
should be remembered, is the province of well-respected academic
disciplines—political science, social
psychology, organizational behavior, communication, and sociology,
to name a few. And the study of
how coordination is maintained in
the manufacture of knowledge is a
primary focus of the field of science
and technology studies. Claiming
that strategy and coordination are
the essence of design hijacks these
practices from other fields and misrepresents design in the process.
Arguments about what constitutes
craft—or, for that matter, design—
are doomed to fall directly into the
endless loop of tautology if we do
not take a wider view.
We suggest putting aside the
false dichotomy between craft and
design in favor of viewing design
as a form of craft. Design could be
considered an embodied material
translation of work or as a way of
connecting ideas, needs, possibilities, and actants (or however you
prefer to think of them in your personal theoretical toolkit, whether
from psychology or actor-network
theory).
From our perch in schools of
design, we see an awareness from
students and faculty that design
has never been as describable or as
pure of a discipline as theories of
design methods would lead us to
believe. We also have observed that
students, in particular, do not have
much use for the hardened lines
that matter so much to academics in the field. Their projects are
better served by crafting connections between the fields of humancomputer interaction, consumer
behavior, urban planning, fashion,
and communication, just to name
a few. One thing that all of these
fields have in common is stuff:
bits, routers, and wires; buildings,
roads, and trees; dresses, sewing
machines, and runways; billboards,
websites, and printing presses. We
believe the way to instill an understanding of the ways people use
stuff—and the ways some things,
such as roads, organize human
action—is best achieved through
the doing of craft.
EndNotes:
1. Maguadda, P. When materiality ‘bites back’:
Digital music consumption practices in the age of
dematerialization. Journal of Consumer Culture 11,
1 (2011).
2. The Science Council. ‘The missing D…’ The value
of design to STEM and business education; http://
www.sciencecouncil.org/content/‘-missing-d…’value-design-stem-and-business-education
3. Norman, D. Design and the university: An uneasy
fit. Doctoral Education in Design (Hong Kong, May
22-25). 2011, 1-5.
4. Miller, D. Stuff. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 2010.
DOI: 10.1145/2065327.2065344
© 2012 ACM 1072-5220/12/01 $10.00