Craft skills celebrated in a technological age

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Power of Making: The Importance of Being Skilled

Edited by Daniel Charny

Power of Making is a stand-alone publication derived from a small exhibition at the V&A in 2011 curated by Daniel Charny. The theme is continuity and change: the survival and revival of craft techniques in the 21st century, and it brings startling ideas to change one’s view of the potential for making in an ante-virtual age. Three examples are the innovative prosthetic limbs, graceful and flexible (TouchBionics, Livingstone), which use i-LIHB electronic impulses to perform micro-movements; the Delft ceramic eye patches by Damian O’Sullivan (proAesthetics, Rotterdam); and the ‘QR U?’ digitized clothing, embroidered with beads and Swarowzski crystal, that connects to the designer’s website through your phone (Thorunn Arnadottir, London).

Conversely, there is a repertoire of art constructed from ‘reused and recycled’ functional objects, such as David Mach’s terrifying, life-size gorilla made from coat hangers, and Ti Yong Ho’s slinky, sinewy shark made from interwoven car tyres. Inversely, there is Hyun Suk Sim’s square-frame camera, precision engineered from silver, gold, steel and glass, and familiar objects made from unfamiliar material, such as the polished mahogany bicycle made by a boatmaker.

This book is a bargain. It allows the reader to celebrate the power of making in all aspects of life, as Daniel Miller tenderly encourages: ‘being good at putting on make-up before going to work in the office, at spotting a promising football player so that you can impress your mates in the pub, at assembling just the right combination of clothes from your wardrobe or at planning an expedition that makes all the children equally happy. An attitude that only celebrates the craftspeople who have “made it”, but fails to recognize the way that all of us, every day, strive to do some things well, ignores the breadth as well as the depth of craft and skill in everyday life.’

While manifesting the undiminished importance of making and our need to reconnect with it, it also demonstrates how computer technology has revolutionized the design process beyond CAD, into areas of collaborative design that can transform an idea into a medium or material specification in moments.

The exhibition crammed 100 objects of vastly different scale into one room, a device which emphasized the vast variety, but which was crowded and claustrophobic. The book, by contrast, is spacious in its design, the typeface large and open, with a 1930s feel to the capitals that brace the cover and the whole-page quotations that punctuate the text. Daniel Miller’s title essay is marvellously humane, overturning the idea that ‘the contemporary represents the end of a history of an original craft that was richer and better’.

Sir Christopher Frayling’s essay takes up that theme (‘We must all turn to the crafts’). Martina Margetts (‘Action not eords’) sums up the manifesto neatly: ‘contemporary making relies on an accommodation between the handmade and the digital’. Ele Carpenter (‘Social making’) makes the vital point that computers can be essential in re-skilling: helping us to discover how objects and machines work by using software programs to deconstruct them. She also expounds collaborative making and the democratization of computer design – or is it, rather, ‘democratically elite’, as suggested by a conversation between Professor Neil Gershenfeld, of MIT (Fab Labs and the Fab Academy) and Daniel Charny?

The helpful glossary of techniques and processes could have been complemented by a similar guide to computer-speak and acronyms, especially in the last two contributions. Sharing may be, as Gershenfeld concludes, ‘an operational consequence’ rather than imposed requirement, but open sourcing doesn’t necessarily bring with it transparency of interpretation. Bruce Sterling’s essay ‘The future of making’ requires some syntactical stamina, ironically, since codes are a feature of his argument, which revolves around the reforming of the past and the resilience of folk art. I’ve watched enough episodes of Star Trek to be comfortable with the notion of replication, but not so with the syntactical collision of ‘API’, ‘mapping onto’, ‘mashup’, ‘DEC PDPs’, ‘people pull’, ‘centralized or nodal’, but perhaps I show my age.

Other benefits of the book over the exhibition are that some photographs show objects in use, rather than static in display, and are captioned with rather beautiful poems by Patricia Rodriguez. Below Ron Arad’s fibreglass, body-shaped chair:

You might adopt
the shape of a teardrop
to go unnoticed in the wild.

Or a ‘cornflower centaurus’ ring made of dyed and knitted nylon monofilament by Nora Fok:

Borrow beauty from nature.
Appropriate
flora’s fine filaments,
the electric hues of abyssal fauna.

My personal favourites from the making threshold were the bright orange flexible repairing substance Sugru, made by Form, Form, Form Ltd (London), a cross between Blutac and biscuit dough, which hardens to form an almost indefatigable, but decorative, repair. The Woolfiller by Helen Klopper, Amsterdam, which fills holes in knitwear by meshing with the fibres, creates discrete patches of colour that blend decoratively with the garment. I also loved the knitted Aran rug with giant-sized cable stitch (Christien Meindertsma, Rotterdam), the L-shaped suitcase (Sarah Williams, London) and the handmade lace g-string that ties neatly at the side (Koniakow Co-operative, Poland). I could go on.

Power of Making:The Importance of Being Skilled edited by Daniel Charny is published by V&A Publishing, 2011.  80 pp., 47 colour illus, £9.99. ISBN 978 185 177 653 5