Justin McGuirk
on design Design The art of craft: the rise
of the designer-maker Justin McGuirk In a
post-industrial culture that romanticises the handmade, designers are being
called upon to do something they haven't for a century – make stuff themselves Mon 1 Aug 2011 16.08 BSTFirst
published on Mon 1 Aug 2011 16.08 BST ·
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Shares 208 Comments 5 Full steam ahead ... Jean-Baptiste Fastrez's kettles. Photograph:
Veronique Huyghe Flicking through the latest issue of Port,
a new "thinking man's" magazine, I came across a photograph of a kind
that is increasingly ubiquitous. In an article about two young design
practices, there's a picture of a box containing a hammer, some leather-working
tools and other bits and bobs of workshop flotsam. With the same pinpoint focus
that a food photographer might train at a boeuf bourguignon, the image
fetishises its subject – in this case not French cuisine but craftsmanship. It seems no
magazine about material culture, from Monocle to Inventory,
is complete these days without a behind-the-scenes story on a little-known
clothing or furniture brand featuring people in leather aprons and workbenches
strewn with chisels and offcuts. There's nothing new about the kind of products
these studios create. What's new is the desire to reveal the process and not
just the finished object. These are not-so-subtle messages reasserting the
value of the handmade over the machine-made. Read more On one level,
this is just fashion. When Levi's launches a marketing campaign called Levi's
Craftwork to sell one of the most mass-produced items of
clothing in the world, we can collectively roll our eyes. But I wonder if
there's something more profound going on. In his 2008 book The Craftsman, the
sociologist Richard Sennett makes a case for homo faber (or "man as
maker"). Harking back to the workshops of the medieval guilds and to the
studio of violin-maker Antonio Stradivari, Sennett set out to prove Immanuel
Kant's dictum that "the hand is the window on to the mind". It is
only through making things, he says – by trying and failing and repeating –
that we gain true understanding. He is not, like some latter-day John Ruskin,
arguing that handmade things are better than machine-made ones. He is simply
saying that skilled manual labour – or indeed any craft – is one path to a
fulfilling life. S Blow by
blow ... Jean-Baptiste Fastrez's wooden-handled hairdryers appeal to a growing
taste for customisation. Photograph: Felipe Ribonennett's idea of a
"craftsman" is highly inclusive, but, at least since the industrial
revolution, the designer and the craftsman are traditionally different roles.
In the world of the Fordist production line, the designer created the templates
that industrial craftsmen would replicate in the hundreds or thousands. The
conspicuous consumption that defined the second half of the 20th century was
driven by mass production; by men (though not always men) in charge of
machines. And what Karl Marx called "commodity fetishism" – that
ineffable something that gives an object a perceived value greater than its
actual material cost – is best exemplified by machinic perfection: the sheen on
an iPad, the techno-treads of a Nike trainer. But it seems that increasingly we
are swapping one fetish for another. Advertisement There is craft
fetishism aplenty at an exhibition of work by young designers currently showing
at the Villa Noailles near Toulon. The
villa, which was built by an art collector couple in the 20s and became a
productive playground of sorts for surrealists from Max Ernst to Alberto
Giacometti, has a long tradition of patronage. Now it hosts annual exhibitions
of work by young designers, and this year's was typical of the direction that
graduates' work has been taking in recent years. Almost all the designers
seemed concerned to introduce a craft dimension to what would ordinarily be
industrial objects. Jean-Baptiste Fastrez created a series of hairdryers with a
range of distinctive wooden handles. Is it so frustrating knowing that all
those plastic handles are the same, or is the hairdryer-cum-tomahawk simply
more manly? Fastrez is not
against industrial production. Indeed, you can't make the working end of a
hairdryer or a kettle without it. But his designs for kettles come with a set
of standardised plastic and electric parts, while the bodies can be chosen from
a series of hand-blown Pyrex or hand-shaped ceramic vessels. Like many designers
of his generation, Fastrez is rejecting the one-size-fits-all outcome of
traditional manufacturing. In his case, he is appealing to a growing taste for
customisation – one that new production technologies are making ever more
realistic. Others in the
show, however, have more primitive aims in mind. Icelandic designer Brynjar
Sigurdarson created a torch with a long wooden handle, like a broomstick or
spear. As many of our modern-day accoutrements – watches, calculators, diaries,
newspapers and even torches – converge into a single device, the phone, it's as
though Sigurdarson wants to rediscover the atavistic quality of this product, a
tool for the hunter-gatherer within. A number of the
designers expressed how important they felt it was to make things with their
own hands. This is partly an ethos – much like the slow food movement – but it
is also a necessity. Who else is going to make their work? The rise of the
designer-maker has a lot to do with the fact that while design is an ever more
popular career choice, the opportunities to work with manufacturers are not
growing at the same pace (and in the UK are actually diminishing). Where
product and furniture designers once aspired to get their work
mass-manufactured, many have now given up on the idea. Before the recession, a
phantom career path seemed to open up, where a select few designers could sell
their work in galleries. Once that bubble had burst, the market replaced the
notion of the designer as artist with a humbler proposition, the designer as
craftsman. The problem with
craft, of course is that it's expensive. In the 70s the Italian designer Enzo
Mari was so disgusted by the quality of affordable furniture available to the
public that he created a set of designs which people could make for themselves
with a few pine planks, a hammer and some nails. He distributed his Autoprogettazione designs for free to
anyone who would send him a stamped envelope. He had more than 5,000 requests.
If you wanted to build yourself an Enzo Mari wardrobe today, however, the cost
of materials alone would set you back more than a wardrobe from Ikea. And if
you paid a craftsman to build it for you, you'd be looking at about four times
the cost. This is how much global economics prohibits the idea of accessible
craftsmanship, at least in the developed world. There's no real
question of returning to a craft-based economy (or only in the darkest
fantasies of a global economic meltdown). What we have here is a
post-industrial nostalgia for the pre-industrial. In a culture with a surfeit
of branding and cheap mass-produced goods, we romanticise the handmade because
we yearn for quality, not quantity. The irony is that while western consumers
aspire to craftsmanship, the majority of the world's population lives in
countries that have local craftsmen but aspire to industrialised products. Mass
manufacturing will be essential to lifting a billion people out of poverty, and
providing basic goods that we took for granted long ago. Meanwhile, we'll be
seeing more crafted industrial objects coming our way, as we lust after
craftsmanship we can't afford and disdain the industrial products we can