Using most current design software, designers can save multiple versions of files or store partial alternatives on separate layers and flip from one to another. A more radical change is the development of software that will work directly and simultaneously on whole fields of possibilities instead of individuals, because this is a mode of working that is impossible in tra-ditional art and craft. Then “parameters can control any feature of a mod-el, that is, can be used to effectively switch between models. Thus two al-ternatives can result in arbitrarily different design configurations” (Wood-bury, Mohiuddin & Cichy, 2020, 51).
Whether working with individuals or fields, every instance can be traced to the choices and actions of a human. The operators in a parametric mod-el are essentially sets of rules by which alternatives are generated. Such rules are set by humans using skill and experience to exploit a sophisti-cated tool. What if the software operates with neural networks that “learn”
to perform tasks by analysing lots of examples without being programmed with task-specific rules? Computer systems might generate whistles and snuffboxes having been “taught” to do so by finding commonalities and permissible variations in a large corpus of examples. In painting and mu-sic, these techniques have been used to generate products that are not eas-ily distinguishable from those of human painters and composers (Avila &
Bailey, 2016, 6). The identities of the ‘craft people’ are then diffused. They include those who made (crafted) the examples used to ‘train’ the soft-ware, the person or team who wrote (crafted) the software and selected the ‘training set’ of examples, along with the person or people who used the software as a very sophisticated tool in some kind of collaborative pro-cess to generate and select the products. The user (or viewer or listener) may not be aware of its origin.
A craft object is not routine, not mass-produced, not ignorable, not ordi-nary. There are assumptions of individuality and of time and care invested in the crafting which gives the crafted object value, prompting a repeated sense of wonder, of pleasure in use, and enhancing a sense of living.
The imprecision of the crafted object, with its ambiguity and hence acces-sibility to many interpretations, also facilitates responsive cohesion be-tween the object and a human. Architect Geoffrey Twibill, in 1988 one of the early adopters of digital media in architecture, commented on doing design drawings with a computer drafting system:
A bit of a disaster really. The design drawings looked ugly. The Councils didn’t like them, saw them as some kind of technical thing – trees looking like pyramids and so on. The client didn’t like them either; the first sketches had been done in 2B pencil, very soft, but the developed design versions looked hard. They preferred the first versions and turned down the second. We had to do it all again by hand. (Radford, 1988, 60)
Now this can be faked; a computer program can make ‘hard’ CAD draw-ings look like hand drawdraw-ings, and they would presumably get the same reaction from the client as ‘real’ hand drawings. If a neural network gen-erates the data to cause a numeric-controlled machine to make an object that looks and works like one of my African whistles, my response to it will presumably be the same, at least if I do not recognize it as a fake. Faked handcraft is usually obvious, but appropriating the craft label without ob-vious subterfuge is common: multinational brewers sell ‘craft’ beers as if they are small-scale local products and there is a long history of non-In-digenous people mimicking Innon-In-digenous people’s craftwork. Without overt faking, appropriating the associations of craft products is even common-er. IKEA’s range of domestic products do not claim (and are not mistaken) to be hand crafted, but many of their designs are evocative of Swedish tra-dition and handcraft.
I have referred to architecture that pushes the boundaries of traditional crafts. The brickwork in the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building in Sydney and the woodwork in the Harbin Opera House needed skillful bricklayers and carpenters, but neither is constructed using the conventional knowledge and techniques of those crafts. The bricks are clamped with steel rods to a frame that holds them in place, and without the frame the wall would collapse. While designing the Indian Institute of Management (1974), the American architect Louis Kahn famously talked of asking a brick what it wanted, and the brick said it wanted an arch (Wurman, 1986, 252; Srivas-tava, 2009). I cannot image a brick wanting to be clamped to a frame. The wood strips in the Harbin Opera House are glued to a shell of glass rein-forced gypsum, not screwed to a timber framework. Looking at them, we can surmise that the surfaces were designed with computer modeling and
we can admire the skills of those involved, but unlike traditional brick-work and carpentry, looking at them does not reveal how these walls are built, and that feels like a loss of integrity in the expression of those crafts.
The architecture of Murcutt Lewin Lark’s (architects) Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Centre in Riversdale, Australia (1999) (figure 6) was de-signed and documented without digital tools (the engineers did use com-puter-aided design and drafting). The expression and precision of the building testifies to the craft skills of the builders, applying their skills in conventional ways. The building’s ‘users’ can occupy and explore, and en-joy its qualities of function, art and craft. Verdy Kwee’s digital version was built using the same architects’ and engineers’ drawings as the physical building but with different intent and very different skills. This version’s users can also explore, by ‘taking apart’ and ‘slicing through’ the building to reveal and focus on its elements. The responsive cohesion between ob-ject and users in the physical and digital versions are both apparent but different, and neither can replace the other.
Figure 6. Physical (left) and digital (centre and right) versions of the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Centre (1999), designed by Glenn Murcutt, Wendy Lewin and Reg Lark, Australia. Centre and right images by Verdy Kwee.
Sometimes craftspeople do craft digital models, personally supervise their translation into physical elements using digital machines, and assemble the resulting parts. A small shelter (figure 7) designed and built in 2019 by students of the School of Architecture at the South China University of Technology, guided by Xiong Lu (who crafted the parametric digital ob-jects in figure 2) is an example. Whereas the hard edges of the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Centre contrast with its natural setting, this struc-ture appears soft and organic. Its construction is not immediately obvious, but it looks hand made. There is a concrete surface, but it is cast on fabric formwork and appears fragile, without the thickness and mass that we ex-pect of concrete. The shelter is very much a product of a digital age, using parametric modelling in its design and both robot arm milling and laser cutting in its fabrication (AGF, 2019). The frame and modules vary without the exact repetition expected in mass-produced industrial products, and more like the variations on a theme found in the branches and leaves of the plants in the surrounding garden.People engage with it, and few would say that it is not a crafted product.
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)