The sharpest tool in the box

There has been an interesting discussion recently on the furniture designer-makers' forum about tool sharpening systems. There are some quite cunning bench mounted grinding and honing machines available.

Bear with me: it gets more interesting.

As often happens, what started as a 'Which is the best one to buy?' enquiry opened out into a 'Do we really need this?' discussion.

Amongst interesting postings about the details of the performance of rival apparatus there was a distinct element, coming mostly from more senior members, of 'I just use a dry grinder and a honing belt - those machines are just for teachers who have to regrind 40 mangled plane irons before the lesson starts.' (Declaration - I write as one who still has, and uses, his Washita, black Arkanas and even Charnley Forest stones and never got to grips even with Japanese water stones.)

There is clearly a deep, emotional attraction to free-hand skill, the skill of risk. My wife recalls, decades ago, the university joiner at Aberdeen who never seemed to measure anything but whose shelves always seemed to fit perfectly. But then, one senior but rather maverick member of the forum asked why was it so unacceptable to use a jig for getting the right angle on plane irons and chisels when we used jigs for almost everything else in our work - in our making.

Why indeed? In making we have opted for the skill of control. which reaches its apotheosis in computer controlled machinery. Such machinery can even be programmed to simulate the variation of hand work, but that is little seen. perhaps because it lies at the extreme of such capabilities, perhaps because we do not want it. 

We have reached this state at the point in cultural and technological history that has seen the emergence of 'design' as something distinct from (though possibly, at least theoretically, fusible with) making, or craft, or art. Design, and the making that goes along with it (especially as practiced by furniture 'designer-makers') is no longer the free exercise of individual skill so much as a process of 'problem solving'. Making is no longer something that one just does, but something broken down into a series of steps along a path from A (intention) to B (object). 

That shift seems to me exactly to mirror the technological and perceptive shift in our society from analogue to digital. The 3D printer, digital fabrication, looms, or more than looms. The least frightening aspect of the news that a firm in Austin, Texas has manufactured a fully functioning gun in metal is that it is a gun. More of that in earlier and later posts.

Moreover, our espousal of the skill of control allows us to celebrate skill in making in either austerely minimalist work or in the kind of elaborately sophisticated work so often exemplified in fine furniture -'upscale' furniture as I believe the Americans call it, not afraid to make an allusion to social and economic metrics. Everything in between, which includes the kind of Morris-Gimson-Barnsley work in which furniture designer-makers, at least in this country, usually claim to find their spiritual roots, is left looking faintly ridiculous - or dead - by the skill of control. And what Morris or Ruskin would have thought of it in relation to the life of the maker hardly bears thinking about.

Getting the toothpaste back in the tube

In my no doubt peculiar view, an ebb-point in the recent history of industrial design of consumer goods was reached when, in one of those moments of pervasive group fashion that flourish like a secret underground fungal growth beneath the expressions of commercially creative people, it was silently agreed that the tops and caps of squeeze tube and plastic bottles should not be figured as discrete items but had to be formed as continuing projections of the form of the tube or bottle.

The benefits brought to us by this demonstration, if ever one were needed, that forms follows not function but form, are a greater consumption of plastic, the near impossibility of screwing caps back on almost depleted tubes, and the ability to stand bottles and, more importantly, tubes on their ends. The last has become almost necessary with tubes, since they have become mostly made of plastic not metal, in pursuit of the expression and use of the last contents of the tube - but only until the advent of the 3D printer produced tooth paste tube squeezer when we finally reach the sun-lit uplands of individual digital empowerment. However, that leaves unaffected the true reason for standing tubes on their ends, which is supermarket shelf display - as witnessed by the fact that labels are often printed that way up. But when we finally but everything online even that becomes redundant.

So will the tide ever turn? Is the pope a catholic? - they might ask in the pub bar. Or can you get the toothpaste back in the tube? Well, you could quite easily before the tube was made of plastic.

Eggs for all

McDonald's has been upgrading some of its burger bars with an infusion of high design. Some of the more metropolitan locations have been equiped with, amongst other items, Egg Chairs, designed by Arne Jacobsen in the 1950s. Jacobsen contracted the manufacturing rights to Fritz Hansen, but in England, though not continental Europe, legal protection for the design has expired, as it here runs for only 25 rather than 70 years.

So it is possible to buy 'imitation' Egg Chairs for around £300, whilst the genuine article from Hansen costs about ten times as much. That at least is how it appears to the individual enquirer searching the internet, but reports suggest that Hansen have received 'nearly $2million' for 2500 chairs sold to McDonald's - which works out at $800 a chair.

Never mind the maths. McDonald's, it transpires, has been using the genuine Hansen chairs in its more prominent locations but also imitations in the UK. When Hansen got to know they took offence and declared they would sell no more of their chairs to McDonald's: indeed their CEO declared "we discovered that terrible copies of our furniture were also being used in the U.K. That is unacceptable. We simply will not work with people who use originals where they have to and copies elsewhere, legal or otherwise."

McDonald's respond that they have made their commercial, financial and marketing calculations and will not budge. They also say they explained their intentions to Hansen in advance. They go on to explain that they nowhere suggest to anyone that the 'imitations' are genuine Hnasen-Jacobsens. "No attempt has been made to 'pass off' reproduction chairs as originals in any references or labeling."

Not good enough, respond Hansen. Some of 'their' chairs are right alongside the 'imitations' and the differences are only visible to someone who knows what they're looking for. On the other hand they describe them as "terrible copies". Design purity, it appears is a capsule that, if suitably insulated, can be inserted into any environment. To paraphrase the excellent Hilary Mantel, I am far too snobbish ever to have entered a McDonald's, but I imagine artificial eggs are not the greatest affront to good taste to be encountered there. Apparently the full extent of Hansen's modifications to the purity of Jacobsen's original design was that they 'developed' chairs with 'special colours'.

The refits have been going on for several years and maybe misunderstandings or forgettings have crept in. The designer (of the fit-out of course, not of the chairs), as ever caught between the rock of his client's budget and the hard place of the supplier's prices, hopes for a happy resolution that will enable his project to sail on. A little cultural chauvinism slips in here (the designer, Philippe Avanzi is French): "The concept was to be authentic, and McDonald's was in perfect agreement with that," he says. "I don't feel betrayed, but poorly misunderstood by a few people in England who didn't understand the importance of staying authentic. This was something extremely clumsy, which the English are going to have to rectify. And they will." Or maybe not.

This tale of the interaction of commerce and design under the mantle of aesthetic morality seems typical of the world of design.

A word on lexicography



Caught in a web of words: James Murray, Oxford lexicographer



It would be a simple task to fill the Jekyll and Hyde Dictionary if the purpose were simply to point to words or phrases that had acquired annoyingly modish and vacuous usages, but that has never been the intention. The Dictionary attempts to identify words that in modern usage have simultaneously opposite or apparently conflicting meanings or connotations, neither of which we would wish to do without, but where we commonly have only one, or the other, in mind at any given time.

In that way it tries to illustrate a little the fascinating inter-relationship between thought and language, the ways in which each constricts or extends the other, and the ways in which we may enrich our thought by keeping alert to all the suggestions of the language we employ.

So the Dictionary is not intended as part of a campaign against annoying modern usages such as ‘going forward’ – and yet there is some area of overlap, and I wonder if it is entirely wise to tilt against some of the more serious examples of linguistic damage.

In a contribution I recently made to a furniture designer-makers’ forum I rather mocked the use of the word ‘iconic’ to describe a certain sort of design as the desired content of a future exhibition. The word has now sunk to the vocabulary of estate agents. It prompted me afterwards to search the Jekyll and Hyde papers and I found I was able to add another entry to my selection on this blog. It may or may not be connected to my mockery (but people are sensitive about these things) that the next post on that forum spoke of ‘major’ not ‘iconic’ pieces of furniture.

I suspect, however, that the contributor still has the same set of ideas in his head: he has merely sanitised his language. Words that embody concepts are used as shorthand, with a web of unarticulated ideas and thought assumptions behind them, mutually shared between author and reader or listener. ‘Iconic’ made a certain web clear, a web that exists, however much we may regret it, as a cultural phenomenon. To mock the word that identifiably expresses such debased thinking and to drive the ideas elsewhere, under cover of a less obviously perverted term such as ‘major’, may make the cultural assimilation of the web more likely.

Modish usages such as ‘iconic’ come with a pre-digested web of allusion; they are ponderous with stale meaning that has not life enough to interact with other words and phrases in the same discourse. That is what makes such terms so wearisome and annoying. Typically one follows another in a leaden accumulation. Such clotted thinking is addictive. At the opposite extreme lies Shakespearean language where startling coinages of words and usage interact with each other like quicksilver, each gaining its meaning from the context of the total expression. Meaning and thought is created by the new expression of language rather than words being press-ganged into the presentation of static and impoverished concepts.

pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air…

'Designer-maker': a problem peculiar to furniture?

The draft of some reflections on this topic, prompted by a reading of Peter Dormer's The Art of the Maker (1994) and The New Furniture (1987) can be found on the Talks and Articles page of this blog. 

Habitat loss

In its heyday what Habitat offered and was new was ‘design’. It had to be affordable to the youngish people who were anxious to buy it but cheapness was not the main attraction, and, a bit later, it offered an upward pathway to more expensive versions of the same thing, through the Conran Shop and Heals.

That particular historical moment passed. ‘Design’ became more widely and diffusely available; the market became rather more affluent; the Conran ‘style’ no longer singly characterised a particular social aspiration. You could see a dilution in the Conran Shop, but Habitat became trapped in its old model, with no clear way out or forward, and passed on to become a kind of sub-Next or Laura Ashley, unaware of its identity or place in the market (‘Next’ of course being a deliberately chosen name).

Some few years on, the new flagships in the consumer retail market are IKEA, TopShop, Primark, answering to a new need, in harder times, for permanent cheapness. ‘Design’ is important to them all, even essential to some, but ‘design’ has become a commodity, something we simply expect to be there in what we buy, and chose this or that version of. It is no longer the new dawn that Conran offered with Habitat. Cheapness is now the essential oxygen and, at least with the fashion shops, the relationship with ‘design’ has become predatory, hijacking the style of the rich for the rest of us – quite different from the old Habitat-Conran Shop ladder. The survivor and inheritor of Habitat is, I suppose, Benchmark, which, thriving though it apparently is, thrives in something of a niche.

There was no good reason to think the Kamprad family could breathe new life into Habitat when they were trying to turn it into something that was neither IKEA, their great current success, nor the original Habitat, Conran’s old success. The demise of Habitat was perhaps symbolised when they modified its logo to put a heart inside the house instead of the old table and chairs (oddly reminiscent of Wall's icecream).

Alongside the IKEA, TopShop, Primark constellation in the modern retail sky, one can faintly discern that dimly glowing star Argos, survivor of a far distant galaxy, once known as Green Shield Stamps, predating the days even of Conran, and now certainly not shining with ‘design’ brightness but equally certainly belonging in the low-price zodiac. It is this Argos that is the new owner of Habitat – the brand, the website, the marketing operation, if not of the shops, whose premises will probably swell the ranks of charity shops and pound stores.