Figure 7. Small shelter in South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China (left); a module highlighted in a digital model (centre); a robot arm milling a groove on one side of a module (right) (images by Xiong Lu (left) and Miao Bowen (centre and right)
Australia and 3D printed in France. Communities of digital craftspeople rely less on local contact than on global communication and the internet.
In Fox’s work, the achievement and promotion of responsive cohesion is the foundational value in his Theory of General Ethics (Fox, 2006). The goal of making the ‘whole’ as good as possible is captured in a ‘Theory of Contexts’ which asserts that responsive cohesion in a whole (a part with its contexts) is more important than responsive cohesion in any part, al-though both should be sought. The largest and most important ‘whole’ is the natural or biophysical environment, because that sustains all other systems. The next largest ‘whole’ is the social environment. Craftwork and the products of craft are not exceptions. Given the social and environmen-tal challenges that exist in our globalised digienvironmen-tal age, the ‘skills in planning and making’ in good craft should sustain those who do craft, those who use craft, and their social and physical contexts in the wider world.
Conclusion
If we focus on craft as the use of skill and experience, and objects or ac-tivities that are produced with or require skill and experience, then craft continued through industrialization and into the current digital age. In-deed, we can argue that the scope of craft is enriched and expanded be-yond the limits of ‘hand-craft’ to include the products and processes of in-dustry and digital media. The skill involved in generating craft-like prod-ucts via a neural network can be recognized and appreciated. But this is not the perception of craft held by most people. The idea of craft has con-notations beyond skill and experience. The label suggests care and pleas-ure for a maker who connects with the materiality of a final product that carries the mark of the maker. The products are unique, although they may be one of a series of similar products. They are local.
I live in a country town where every year there is a week of ‘open studios’
where we can visit places where printing, photography, woodblocks, met-alwork, painting, weaving, and other arts and crafts take place. Art and craft often overlap, and most are operated by people motivated by pleasure rather than profit. I have yet to encounter a studio with a 3D printer, but there are studios where images have been created or photographs modi-fied with computer software and the people involved consider themselves to be artists and craftspeople. I expect soon to come across small, cheap, 3D printers. Whereas industrial products are almost inevitably standard-ized and obviously the product of mass production, the products of digital craft can share the cultural identity and ‘unique instance in a series’ qual-ity of handcrafted products.
Early in this essay, I posed the question of whether all the objects in my studio crate (figure 1) could be perceived as craft objects. Using craft as a
metaphor, the answer is arguably ‘yes’. Even an animal bone (row 5, left) can be metaphorically ‘crafted by nature’, although the idea of water craft-ing the smooth surface of the rock is less acceptable. Uscraft-ing craft as a term for ‘produced with skills in planning and making’ by a human, the answer is ‘most’. Using craft to include the additional need for an object to ‘carry the marks of the tools’, the answer is still ‘most’; with a little knowledge of relevant technologies we can see how they were produced, although the in-dustrial and digital products distance the objects in the crate from the pre-production physical or digital models crafted by their designers. Adding a requirement to be able to see local cultural origin, many of the industri-al products remain. We can recognize Danish and Finnish design (row 2, centre and right) and the characteristic styles of their makers. The digital products are excluded; the culture of digital design is international, with-out clear local distinctions. Adding a requirement for handicraft, only the products of traditional craft remain: Estonian woodwork, Chinese ceram-ics, Vietnamese raffia work.
The perception of craft in a digital age depends on what is craft and who perceives, and both are variables. However, there is always an expecta-tion of interactive mutual relaexpecta-tionships, of responsive cohesion, between makers, tools, and products, and between products (carrying traces of the makers and the tools) and their users. In craft, as in all human activities in the contemporary world, there is an additional responsibility to consid-er the impact of processes and products on widconsid-er social and environmen-tal contexts. The ideal (and possibly idealistic) digienvironmen-tal craft artisans will exploit the potential of computation, dataflow and digital fabrication to make things that carry their marks, give pleasure to people, and contrib-ute to better personal, local and global wholes.
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Introduction
The intention of our study is to investigate the relationship between three key domains: craft, technology and design. The study itself is based on the concept of visual design and illustrated by examples of selected aspects of typography. The key domains, on the other hand, are driven by visual per-ception – from a creative perspective. However, in order to understand the interaction between the user and the designed object, we need to look into the process, which consists of numerous ‘acts of attention’ often re-ferred to as visual queries. It leads to the concept of dynamic perception, which is the resultant of external graphic information and a constructive mental process (Ware, 2008). Such dynamic perception is often associat-ed with the concept of favourable circumstances which influence percep-tion of particular objects considerably. Needless to say – the way they are perceived depends on the perceptive abilities of the individual, his/her ex-perience and other skills.
An interesting example of the combination of the craft and design process is evolution of the font shape stemming from the craftsman’s creativity to the algorithms of the UTF encoding. The evolution relates to a variety of tools used to create text (from chisel to computer) and the need to consoli-date a different set of signs (e.g. alphabets in different languages) into one, visually coherent whole. Coexistence of craft and design in the evolution of the font design is visible also in terminology – the term font, which is used nowadays, is seldom related to a metal typesetting, but it is mainly understood as a general lettering design, i.e. typeface. Although the font comes from the word fount, which referred to the foundry where met-al fonts were cast, any conceivable association between letters and their functionality or legibility have been effaced over time (Austin & Doust, 2007). Designing patterns with literal motifs represented by interesting fonts is very popular nowadays.
It is known that our reality has been represented by images across mil-lennia. First images appeared on cave walls while nowadays we watch pic-tures mostly on computer screens. In the age of Internet, designers of-ten use visual design as a cognitive tool to amplify their mental abilities.
While searching for a relationship between craft, technology and design
illustrated by typography, we will inevitably come across basic concepts of typography such as a letter, word or block of text, which, in modern times, have been restored to a form or image-like element by our gifted designers.