Old Hat: Craft Versus Design?

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 like-ly 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 come-back 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 com-plicit in this shift, orienting our research and teaching toward questions of materiality and lon-gevity, and instantiating these concerns in projects involving knitting, IKEA hacking, home-making, 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 fac-ing design education: whether to include the mastery of a craft in the execution of design.

Big D, Little cDesign 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 think-ing”—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 formu-lating the rebranding strategy of an institutional laboratory. But is this the same skill set required for designing its buildings? Its hard-ware facilities? Its communication technologies? To call strategy the primary work of design is to under-cut 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 think-ing 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, engineer-ing, and design, a set of social rela-tions 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 avoid-ance 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-in

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danIeLa roSner California College of the arts | daniela.rosner@gmail.com

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.

JonaThan Bean Parsons the new School for Design | beanj@newschool.edu

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.  

ing (big D) design to the politically weighty STEM fields: science, tech-nology, engineering, and math [2,3]. The designer is imagined as the sole orchestrator of action, mediat-ing the work of engineers, social scientists, politicians, consumers, and a whole host of unimagined others. This vision of design’s future retains the modernist for-mulation of what design is: a mech-anism 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, eliminat-ing the creativity and pleasure of cooking from scratch with what’s on hand; object printers create flawless prototypes, eliminat-ing messily glued-together chip-board 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 construc-tion of which was the reason for enrolling in a woodworking class.

Materials MatterThis 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 mate-rial 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 any-thing but disembodied, impersonal, or generic. Design requires working P

hotograph by Katian Witchger

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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 ele-ments that structure and constitute the work of thinking, making, and managing design involve new sub-strates, infrastructures, and ser-vices: social networking sites, soft-ware 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 engi-neers 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 dematerial-ized music are crafted of metal and glass by robots and anonymous, but skilled, human hands; and the nonelectronic technology that makes mechanical things more effi-cient—dual-flush toilet valves, tur-bochargers, 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 conver-sion of a possible future into a pre-ferred 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 ThinkingDesign 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 trans-lation 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, engineer-ing, and math, but also through an incursion into politics (as in design for sustainability) and management (as in design thinking). The execu-tion of strategy and coordination, it should be remembered, is the prov-ince of well-respected academic disciplines—political science, social psychology, organizational behav-ior, 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 mis-represents 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, possibili-ties, and actants (or however you prefer to think of them in your per-sonal 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 academ-ics in the field. Their projects are better served by crafting connec-tions between the fields of human-computer 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 under-standing 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 $10.00in

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