I should perhaps apologise, to those who come to this blog thinking it concerns furniture, that so many of the recent posts have been about the world and politics. Yet I have been reflecting, from a furniture designer-maker’s perspective, on skill, tools and machines – though I fear that, through them, we shall get to society again.
Skill in making, I reflect, is only expressible through tools – which is the only reason the dolphins have not surpassed us. And machines – are they not another form of tools? We use the word now to mean motorised devices, although it was not originally so, and that, I first think is the key distinction that makes a tool a facilitator of skill and a machine a limiter of it. Yet perhaps it is not so. Is there really any essential difference between the pole lathe and the electric one, the treadle fret saw and the electric one?
Let me take a step back, or sideways, and consider the meaning of the term ‘designer-maker’, which is so important to some small-scale producers of furniture. We style ourselves furniture designer-makers not simply as a description but in something of a declaration (honoured perhaps more in theory than in practice) that the furniture, and the person, actually benefit by being ‘designed’ and ‘made’ by the one person. It is not simply that knowing how to make something helps avoid having the design lead to faults and shortcomings in the made thing. Rather it is a belief that ‘design’ and ‘make’ are inseparable, that the quality of each is actually different when they are carried out by the one person. I have found that to be so in my own experience.
I don’t deny that there are attendant dangers, of being constrained in one’s imagination by one’s knowledge of making practicalities and difficulties, or that there can be some virtue in the unfettered design imagination that challenges someone to find a way of making it. Yet it is a particular and limited kind of virtue, often seen in a rather humble form in architects’ furniture designs, which typically call for the impression of lightness or disconnectedness at the very point where furniture needs maximum structural strength – and sometimes seen in its most extravagant form in some admired ‘art’ furniture where, as a colleague remarked, the desiderata are that it should be ‘unusable, unaffordable and preferably unmakeable’.
I have myself, in a mood of relief, sometimes designed upholstered furniture, about whose construction I know very little, and I have found the design process becomes largely a manipulation of forms – a not unworthy but a limited aspect of design.
So what, in this single human engagement with both designing and making, is the essential nature of the second element. Am I still the maker regardless of the extent to which I mechanise and automate the process?
People often say they would not go back to the drudgery of doing all the making by hand. Even William Morris welcomes the ability of machines to remove drudgery from hand work, and I myself would not go back to hand planning all my timber (as distinct from using the planer-thicknesser, to employ a now rather antiquated example). I would not do so even if the organisation of society would still allow me to make a living that way, which, largely, it does not. Yet I know that, even with the simple machine planer, something is lost in return for the liberation from drudgery. The loss is in the engagement with the material, and it is therefore a coarsening of the process of making - and the process of making is inherent in the object. In that sense machine manufacture, in artistic (without the metaphysical capital A) terms, is regressive.
People then accuse one of romanticism, based on an unreal idealisation of hand work. It is not so: I actually know from experience what that hand work is like, and, as I have said, I choose not to go back to it. Yet I know what is lost as well as what is gained. I recognise that in all aspects of our lives – making, living, consuming, aspiring – we are not saints.
‘Hand’ versus ‘machine’ is, I think, obscured by regarding machines as simply another manifestation of tools. Motorisation is perhaps not a distinct but still a key distinction, and it is what removes one from interaction with the material, as all makers know – and all the more so when one is kitted out in the health and safety ear defenders, goggles, face mask, with guards, push sticks and hold downs.
Who has not had the experience of putting a plank into the thicknesser, after anxious deliberation about feed direction and depth of cut, and having to stand helplessly by, listening to the painful sound of an awkward piece of grain tearing out?
People say the CNC machine does only and exactly what it is instructed to do by the operator (is he here designer or maker?). Maybe so, but the dual point is that the machine does it itself, instructed, pre-programmed rather than guided, and that it can be instructed to do things against which the material resists. Indeed the perfection of the machine (far advanced on my elementary planer-thicknesser) is to be able to overcome flawlessly the resistance of the material, to treat wood as if it were plastic. Wood is a very resistant material, more so than almost any other. Stone may be harder, but wood has more active resistance, or reactive resistance: it responds to what we do to it, or to how we change its environment, not always in ways we welcome, nor always immediately – wherein lies the flaw in the perfect woodworking machine.
With lesser machines and tools we strive for a balance between overcoming the resistance of the material and the resistance of the material overcoming the process. We achieve that balance by controlling the application of power, so that one knows when one has overcome the resistance of the material cleanly or when one has broken it, sensing immediately, or preferably anticipating, the clean cut or the tear. It almost parallels good and bad governance, applying power with assent.
