Papers
What's in a name?
Gilbert Riedelbauch
June 2004
Over the last few years I have noticed that craft practitioners increasingly like to call themselves 'Designer/Makers'. In my view the term of 'Designer/Maker' is hardly more then a label, it does not give credit to craft but bows before design, a vaguely defined term itself.
In Old paradigms for new: designer-maker models and the dilemma of globalism versus regionalism. 1 Noris Iaonnou describes the development of the Designer/Maker model in Australia, from the village craftsman as far back as 1851 in the Barrossa Valley to acclaimed local success stories like Fink Design in Canberra and internationally respected designer Mark Newson.
Iaonnou identifies eight distinctive models within the ever-changing disciplines of craft, design, manufacture and production. These models include: Studio, Collective-workshop, Collaborative, and five permutations of that Designer/Maker thing. There are the Studio Designer/Maker, Designer/Maker employed, Designer/Maker cooperative Designer/Maker institution and a Trainee-in-production model.
I find all of these labels confusing and ultimately meaningless, a simple and straightforward 'Silversmith' or 'Potter' would have done it for me. The argument that people's expressions start to glaze-over when one mentions the term craft, does not sit well with me. I think there is a lot in a title and a lot of currency left in these traditional terms. We as practitioners can reinforce these titles and educate the public-at least the ones with glazy eyes-rather than, at the blink of an eye, inventing another pretentious label.
However, if I am wrong and the term Designer/Maker becomes a widely accepted synonym for craft practitioner, then it has to be our task to define and to encompass a clear skill-set beyond that of traditional craft education. This skill-set would have to embrace a high level of information literacy together with the use and knowledge of technology on top of a solid base of traditional/manual skills. Such requirements are nearly impossible to deliver in the three, short years of a university degree or as 'patch-up' in mentoring arrangements.
Information literacy with all its advantages is non-material specific and can be applied to any craft sector therefore lending itself to the Designer/Maker model. It opens up new ways to communicate with the manufacturing industry as well as directly employing new technologies as part of ones professional practice. Technologies like laser and water-jet cutting have been applied within the craft sector for years to shape materials like glass, metal and wood. Computer skills can assist the practitioner in promotion, research, record keeping/admin, marketing and e-commerce as well as audio/visual presentation and general communication.
I believe there is room for postgraduate degrees to promote such skill-sets and to allow for the transition from practitioner to Designer/Maker. Again, a careful and consistent use of terms should make sure that professional titles do not turn into ill considered labels. Given that only one out of five artists in Australia has the luxury of devoting 100% of their working time exclusively to their creative activity, employability can be seen as an important goal of education.
In my role as co-ordinator and lecturer at the Computer Art Studio at ANU School of Art, I teach complementary studies classes, one in 3D computer modelling, and together with several colleagues, the CoreComputer studies course. The aim of both courses is to understand the underlying principles of the medium rather than focusing on becoming fluent with the software. While the 3D computer modelling course aims to link ideas developed in the students' sketch book to the potential of advanced manufacturing, the CoreComputer course introduces first-year students to whole gamut of computer related activities at the School of Art. Students finishing CoreComputer will be able to make informed decisions as to the extent of computer studies they take on as part of their wider course.
I am aware that allocating one day out of an already short three-year undergraduate degree is a big ask of students and one has to carefully evaluate if the advantages of computer/information literacy outweigh the effort expended to master them. I see it therefore as positive that about 69% of craft practitioners between thirty-five and fifty-four years of age are still prepared to be engaged in training. I would be particularly interested to see this age group taking up digital technologies as an extension of their creative activities.
This brings me to the question, how can these boxes be a typewriter one minute and a photographic and painting studio or a sophisticated three-dimensional modelling (CAD-CAM) work-station the next? These tools are obviously designed to function as typewriters and calculators, discrete characters ordered in lines are an easy task for these number-crunchers. But why do we accept these machines as a drawing board, a painting canvas or model making tool?
The answer is-we accept less-less texture, less resolution, less definition. As long as we accept less, we can see a digital image as a representation of a photograph, despite being broken up in rows and columns of tiny coloured squares or pixels.
A similar relationship exists when producing three-dimensional objects based on computer aided design using Rapid Prototyping. Rapid Prototyping is the name given to a host of related technologies also known as layered manufacturing. In Rapid Prototyping, a virtual computer model is physically reconstructed in material fused together layer by layer. The thinner the individual layer, the smaller the visual stepping. As a result the object produced will more closely resample the computer model, the virtual original. Again this is an approximation of the original, which we have to accept.
For my own work Rapid Prototyping is the ideal technique. I explore and exploit mathematical equations to calculate surfaces to describe the shape of my objects. I am interested in the event that occurs when a self-intersecting surface is suddenly perceived as an object. When shape becomes form. The recognition of this event is triggered by personal aesthetic perception.
The computer with its virtual space has become a physical extension to my metalworking studio. This virtual space provides me with additional room for thinking, exploring and sketching as well as the making. I fuse new technologies with traditional silversmithing techniques and take advantage of computers at the concept, making and production stage.
Despite these advantages new technologies can offer for contemporary craft practice, the Don't give up your day job 2 report by the Australia Council showed that craft ranked lowest in the use of personal computers. Only 41% of craft practitioners run software to facilitate their creative practice, this is well below the average of 56% of all other artists. Initiated by the Australia Council, this economic study of professional artists in Australia was undertaken by David Thorsby and Virginia Hollister at the Macquarie University, Sydney. In this study the arts are divided into eight disciplines, craft being one of them.
When I distilled everything relating to Craft out of this document, a picture appeared that left me somewhat frustrated, the most worrying factor being
We observe that total numbers of artists have grown steadily over the last fifteen years, with the largest increases among writers, visual artists and actors. The only occupation to show a decline since the early '90's is craft practitioners where numbers hve fallen at a rate of 2-5 percent per year.
This is very worrying indeed, this slow attrition of peers. This shrinking field of professional practitioners may one day slip below the critical mass. On the bright side, we seem rather safe from a major extinction event, unlike the one graphic designers had to survive when new technologies appeared which completely changed their working environment. We have some time to turn this development around and I believe that in this context new technologies have a lot to offer.
Considering this, why would anyone still be a craft practitioner committed to his or her field? Well for me personally, there are good reasons to keep making. Because it matters what we do and how we do it. I would like my children and their generation to inherit a future that is not merely driven by ever changing design-values fed to them by designers. I would like them to be able to find and appreciate these special objects crafted by someone who cares, which can be enjoyed for a long time to come, ignoring the latest doctrine of lifestyle choice.
An edited version of this paper appears in Object Magazine Issue 44 June 2004.
Footnotes
- McCullough, Malcolm, Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand, Mass, MIT, Cambridge, 1996, p.201, Accessed 10 January 2004
- Throsby, David and Hollister, Virginia, Don't give up your day job, An economic study of professional artists in Australia, Sydney, Australia Council, 2003
