Good news, the Smart works exhibition¹ at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum has been extended. Equally good news, for those who missed the opening symposium, videos of the speakers are now online². The symposium and exhibition combined to stimulate a broad discussion about the relationship between craft-based practice and industry in Australia and New Zealand, and the way practitioners negotiate their commitment to handmade values in that interface.

Marc Harrison
Husque bowl, 2004
The process from shell to bowl
Recycled macadamia nut shell and polymer
Photography - Florian Groehn

Wherever you live, practice "has to be a viable, sustainable reality, and successfully find its marketplace."³ Keynote speaker Peter Day set an optimistic tone, describing the 21st century emergence of a creator economy - a global economy of "millions of markets of dozens of people", using manufacturing as a service industry and emphasizing mass customisation and local provenance - a model which clearly favours "design that reflects the values of the handmade".⁴

That's one type of sustainability, but it needs to mesh with another, recently summarised by the New Zealand Ministry for the Environment as living "in a way that meets our social, economic and environmental needs - now and in the future." ⁵ These two things aren't natural enemies, but for designers and object-makers today, they present a conflict.

It's hard to sustain yourself when you can't sell enough or charge enough for your work, and that's familiar territory to many people engaged in object-making in Australia and New Zealand. As fashion designer Karen Walker says, "when you live half a block from Antarctica, you need to get up and going,"⁶ and establishing a production range, and selling internationally, are seen as solutions to our limited markets. Designers such as Robert Foster, Marc Harrison, and David Trubridge have all taken that approach, with differing results.

F1NK and Co
F!NK water jugs, Designed 1993, made 2006
Pressed and anodised aluminium
Photography - Russell Pell

Foster initially set up F!NK and Co "to produce the F!NK water jug ... and establish a business that would support his one-off handmade works".⁷ This business now has seventeen products selling internationally. Almost all are made in-house; two are manufactured in China, but still involve some finishing by F!NK and Co. Attempts to out-source manufacturing within Australia, even investing in tooling development, proved unworkable due to poor quality and high manufacturing cost.⁸ The present arrangement means Foster is freer, in terms of income and time, to focus on his creative practice, although the outsourcing arrangement requires close monitoring for quality control.

Marc Harrison's objective with his Husque vessels, made from crushed macadamia nut shells mixed with polymer, was to create a unique product with a strong Australian identity. He sees manufacturing within Australia as fundamental to that. However, quality problems, and reluctance by manufacturers to engage with an entirely new product, have led Husque Pty Ltd to set up its own pilot factory, developing an optimum production process which can be transferred to the manufacturing sector in due course.⁹

David Trubridge's designs are primarily CNC cut production pieces, which are sold internationally. Some are made in Europe under licence, but otherwise they are manufactured in New Zealand by David Trubridge Limited at Cicada Works, which he set up with two partners in 2001. While selling internationally is a strong focus, manufacturing is different: "I refuse to go to China to manufacture ... We might have a problem with green miles here, but our production is less polluting and more sustainable."¹⁰

David Trubridge
New Coral light shade, 2006
Hoop pine plywood, plastic clips
Photography - David Trubridge

Trubridge has been drawing attention to ecological issues for some years now, and his work has a strong green branding, including a listing in ecoDesign: The Sourcebook.¹¹ His remarks highlight that while designing for production may contribute to economic sustainability, it's less beneficial to environmental sustainability. This comprises a slew of pressing issues, among them climate change and its associated impacts;¹² oil, "the resource upon which our lives have been built";¹³ waste, pollution, and levels of demand for energy and water.

After much argument, there's a current consensus that these things are problems and need action, but what should that action be? Balancing social, economic and environmental needs may require considerable compromise even within a single household; balancing them across different communities is a Sisyphean task, in which you're constantly comparing apples with oranges in order to determine the value of a banana.

For example, despite its significant percentage of wind and water powered energy, New Zealand's ecological footprint - the amount of land required to supply a population with its living and lifestyle needs, including land to deal with its carbon emissions - is "over four times larger than China's, approximately eight times larger than India's and significantly larger than the footprints of Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Japan."¹⁴ A Canadian life-cycle energy analysis summarised by the Institute for Lifestyle Environmental Assessment in 2002, indicated that based on the energy used in manufacturing, and taking into account the energy cost of washing after use, a ceramic cup needs to be used more than 1,000 times before becoming as energy efficient as a polystyrene foam cup. ¹⁵ ecoDesign: The Sourcebook "showcases a wide spectrum of objects ... designed with the earth's future in mind"¹⁶, yet includes furniture made with MDF, generally reviled by antipodean designers as a toxic substance; the book itself was manufactured in China.

Designers, like everyone else, have to navigate through these inconsistencies and dilemmas. Most come to the same conclusion as the energy analysis summary: "One should use one's best judgement".¹⁷ This comes down to reducing, minimising, and determining relative harm. Coral lightshades manufactured in New Zealand instead of China may incur more green miles, but less burning of coal. Husque vessels recycle a natural material which would otherwise be thrown away, but are themselves difficult to recycle. Having sales of the F!NK water jug ticking over means contributing to China's use of energy, but together with a resourceful approach to F!NK's in-house tooling and processes, this allows Foster to sustain his practice and make a living.¹⁸

Is this kind of double entry enough to balance the environmental books? The director of Friends of the Earth thinks not: "If we're going to have a world that is in a fit state to live in by the end of the century, we're going to have to drastically reduce the amount of material demand."¹⁹ Sir Jonathon Porritt, chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission agrees: "... in the rich world very large numbers of us need to get used to consuming less ... we have to make the limited resources available to all, not just the lucky ones living in rich countries like ours."²⁰

From an object-maker's perspective, this asks a brutal question: what justification do you have for adding more objects to the world? There's enough stuff already out there - use your grandmother's lemon squeezer, as Douglas Lloyd Jenkins once put it. Craft practitioners are accustomed to justifying their output by reference to craft values, but here it may be useful to think in terms of the broader 'lasting value' described by Gareth Williams:

The term 'lasting value' ... can mean the use of high quality materials and techniques to ensure the longevity of an object. It can mean finding an afterlife for materials or components that would otherwise be discarded ... But it can also mean the perpetuation of traditions and conventions valued in the past, now threatened by social, economic or other changes. Similarly, the phrase can pertain to the spiritual or symbolic meanings inherent in objects, such as their emotional associations or individual characteristics. For a discussion of craft, it must also mean the added value in a handmade object that we preserve and respect above mass-produced commodities. ²¹

On his website, and as reported from a recent lecture at the American Crafts Council, Trubridge suggests ways in which these values make objects worthwhile: "The only justification for me is not the object itself but its message. If it acts in some way as an agent for change, if maybe it causes a few thoughts and reflections then it has a value.²² He further suggests, "If more designers focus on making things on a small scale using local materials, building things with care and love, then we would want to have them for a long time, and thereby we wouldn't be wasting materials and resources by buying temporary or disposable items."²³

You would, as journalist Nancy Banks-Smith might say, be looking at a CNC machine for some time before the words love or handmade came to mind. But craft, as a cultural medium, has always adopted new technologies to its own uses. Trubridge is clear that the qualities of the hand persist in his process through a deep experience of materials. The CNC machine has become part of this, something he can experiment with, pushing boundaries,²⁴ just as Foster innovates and experiments with F!NK's tooling and equipment.²⁵

One argument, then, is that objects produced by designers that reflect the values of the handmade are intrinsically worthwhile, and can also make a difference in a consumerist world by displacing less valid objects. While this is persuasive, can it stand up to the reality of production for economic reasons? It's a fine line between difference and point of difference. Viewed alongside something like the Pot-in-Pot cooler in the exhibition Design for the Other 90% currently showing at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum²⁶ works like Coral, Husque and the F!NK water jugs become beautiful, exotic objects for people with disposable income, for whom the problems of the vessel and the lightshade and the way to make tomatoes last longer have already been solved many times over.

Handmade values connect us to our culture, to each other, and instil in objects the ability to evoke emotions beyond those associated with direct experience. These things should not be commodified too lightly. Attacking the Goliath of consumerism requires extensive economic and political change, and according to George Monbiot, "... better consumption by itself is an entirely useless means of achieving political change. Those who have the most votes - the vote being the money you have to spend as consumers - are generally inclined to use them the least."²⁷ Or, as Paul Sheehan puts it, "Technology, not conservation, will have to deliver the revolution."²⁸

However it happens, that revolution must come. Douglas Lloyd Jenkins expressed at Smart works something that struck a chord: the dissonance between contemporary design aesthetics and the contemporary world. Modernism, while it began by framing a modern world, became instead a symbol of modernity which has never been effectively updated. Entering the new world Peter Day described, we need a new framework, one which relates to the reality of life now, not to the future as it was imagined a hundred years ago. If we can redefine what is relevant, without losing what's important, in that process design that reflects the values of the handmade may find its full potential as an agent for change and a means of sustainable practice.

Rigel Sorzano
Auckland
23 August 2007

Rigel Sorzano is an object maker and writer based in Auckland. She has written about objects and design for a number of publications and exhibitions in New Zealand and Australia.

Footnotes

1. Smart works: design and the handmade, curated by Grace Cochrane, Powerhouse Museum, 30 March - 4 November 2007.
2. http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/smartworks/symposium_speakers.asp
3. Grace Cochrane, "Smart works: design and the handmade", Smart works: design and the handmade. Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing, 2007, p10.
4. Cochrane, ibid., p8.
5. NZ Ministry for the Environment, "State of the Environment" http://www.mfe.govt.nz/state/reporting/sustainability/, 18 August 2007
6. Karen Walker, quoted in Linda Tischler, "Fast Talk: Kiwi Fashion", Fast Company, Issue 111, Dec 2006/Jan 2007, p38, available http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/111/fast-talk-walker.html
7. Merryn Gates, "F!NK and Co", Smart works, op. cit., p36.
8. In conversation with Robert Foster, 8 August 2007.
9. In conversation with Marc Harrison, 11 August 2007.
10. David Trubridge, speaking at the Smart works symposium, 31 March 2007, transcribed from the writer's contemporaneous notes.
11. Alastair Fuad-Luke, ecoDesign: The Sourcebook, 2nd Ed. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004, pp23, 24
12. See for example, Thomas et al, "Extinction Risk from Climate Change", Nature, Vol 427, 8 January 2004, p145; IPCC, 2007: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 6 April, 2007; available http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM6avr07.pdf
13. George Monbiot, "The Bottom of the Barrel", The Guardian, 2 December 2003.
14. NZ Ministry for the Environment, "State of the Environment" http://www.mfe.govt.nz/state/reporting/sustainability/, 18 August 2007.
15. 1994 analysis by Professor Martin Hocking of Victoria University, Canada, summarised by the Institute for Lifecycle Environmental Assessment at http://www.ilea.org/lcas/hocking1994.html; according to the website, the Institute is now closed.
16. ecoDesign: the Sourcebook, front inside cover.
17. ILEA, op.cit.
18. In conversation with Robert Foster 8 August 2007.
19. Tony Juniper, director, Friends of the Earth, quoted in David Smith, "Stop shopping ... or the planet will go pop", The Observer, 8 April 2007.
20. Jonathon Porritt, quoted in Tanis Taylor, "We need to get used to consuming less': Porritt on climate change", in New Consumer, July/August 2007, available http://www.newconsumer.com/interviews/with/2913/
21. Gareth Williams, "Creating Lasting Values", in P. Greenhalgh (ed) The Persistence of Craft. London: A&C Black, London, 2002 p61.
22. David Trubridge, Structures for Survival, www.davidtrubridge.com
23. Reported by Greenjeans Adventure (Amy Shaw & Jae Kim) 17 May 2007, http://greenjeansbrooklyn.blogspot.com/2007/05/david-trubridge-at-american-craft.html
24. David Trubridge, speaking at the Smart works symposium, 31 March 2007, transcribed from the writer's contemporaneous notes.
25. In conversation with Robert Foster, 8 August 2007.
26. http://other90.cooperhewitt.org/Design/pot-in-pot-cooler
27. George Monbiot, quoted in Tanis Taylor, "'I am very sceptical of consumer power': Monbiot talks", in New Consumer, July/August 2007, available http://www.newconsumer.com/interviews/with/i_am_very_sceptical_of_consumer_power_monbiot_talks/
28. Paul Sheehan, "Kicked by my carbon big foot", The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 July 2007.