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.

The Trojan Horse and the Great Gasp

Generally speaking, digital manufacturing (3D printing) is seen as a benign development. People may be bewildered – how can it possibly work? – but underneath they accept that in some way they do not understand clever people will make it work and that it will be, somehow, liberating for ‘ordinary’ people.

What threatens our liberty, our autonomy, our ease with the world and its objects now is not so much the methods of manufacture as the economic and commercial structures of society within which those methods are set.

So our attitude to digital fabrication is at odds with public attitudes to new methods of manufacture – machine manufacturing – a century and a half ago when machines were seen as the new way in which ordinary people’s lives and livelihoods would be constrained and destroyed.

The tide has turned. It has turned already in the sense that few people now have much direct or meaningful involvement with the processes of manufacture. The machines won decades ago. As far as people now are involved in manufacture they are likely to be a minority of the population, their roles probably confined to tedious and uncomprehending assembly, probably not in our society but in third-world countries. In our own countries those who are meaningfully involved in manufacturing, those who actually produce objects, are likely to be marginal relicts – like furniture ‘designer-makers’.

So the 3D printer will set us free – one in everyone’s basement. It is a sign of the slight unreality of the debate that we think of basements, when few, in our country, have one. But, never mind, the general thought is valid.

How will we use them? Some people can, and are using them already, but the horizons are limited. Some part on your toaster, say, breaks. If you have another you can 3D scan it and print a replacement. Very useful, but essentially housekeeping – the duplication of trivial objects.

If it is a more substantial or larger object it is likely to require a design made available to you and your machine, which you can download. It may be available for free and thus begin to threaten commercial interests. It may enable you to vary in particular ways – size, additional elements for example – but essentially you are constrained by the design you have been ‘given’ – or maybe bought.

You may have the skills to create your own design from scratch to feed into your printer, but there is little sign that any but a small minority of the population are being educated to the level of computer skills necessary for that.

Nevertheless, manufacturing has come to our basement. You have choice. You can even choose your material – to some extent – including, if your machine is advanced enough, the manufacturing medium. It could even be wood, but it must be ‘engineered’ wood. Essentially, as I understand it, the manufacturing process requires that the material be mashed up, or melted, or dissolved so that it can be extruded or laid down in thin layers. So the connection with the material is lost not just by the fact that there is no hand involvement in the manufacturing. The process requires that the material, if it is not plastic or something similar in its properties, be denatured.

Manufacturing, fabrication, hitherto has largely evolved from the consideration of the particular properties of materials – wood, brass, stone, glass – and the invention of tools and methods to manipulate them. It is staggering to consider that such a vast array might be swept aside in digital manufacturing.

Amongst those larger and more substantial objects that might be considered for this new process, furniture plays a leading role. Substantial, universally required, various in appearance and not very complex in structure. What could be better? And perhaps the prime candidate amongst furniture types would be the chair. Essentially we would be making our chairs out of MDF. Not unprecedented but perhaps not ideal in use. The most extreme – and crudest – stage in the development of engineered timber whereby pieces of material that would formerly have been too small or substandard to be used are combined in manufacturing processes and with machines of staggering accuracy and complexity that hand skills, no matter how highly developed, could possibly emulate – thus covering our extinction of material of higher quality.

The chair is the Trojan Horse of furniture. Designers and architects have elevated its status to art object, design paragon or moral exemplar. Amongst furniture it has unique requirements for structural strength and, desirably if not essentially, ergonomic correspondence. All the rest of furniture – cupboards, tables, shelves – has relatively modest requirements in those directions and the qualities that shape its appearance and our relationship with it concern more the choice of form and pre-eminently the nature of the material, to the extent that material properties govern structure. Material properties, at least in wood, struggle to keep up with the engineering demands of the chair. The chair demands so many joints and joints are wood’s point of weakness.

The chair is a Johnny-come-lately in the world of furniture – there were tables and cupboards and benches long before it appeared and allowed the pretensions of designers, engineers and architects to find their expression, crowding out the skills and knowledge of mere furniture-makers – humble carpenters (who also built houses in the days when their engineering requirements were simple) and relegating them to an inferior or outdated status. We don’t have books published titles the Cupboard or even, I think, The Table, but there must be many books called The Chair (or perhaps 100 Chairs).It is ironic, but not of course contradictory, that the chair becomes the supreme example of ergonomic design and is also the piece of furniture that does most damage to our bodies: it is not desirable to spend much of one’s life sitting in even the most ergonomically designed chair.

Digital fabrication is the latest stage in that process. As yet it produces objects with a low quality of finish but one can be sure that will rapidly change and this will be another mechanised and automated process of manufacture that achieves things impossible for even the best tooled hand. In this respect also the chair has become the supreme furniture type for showing off such achievements. Often in contradiction to the ergonomic chair, the virtuoso maker’s chair, sumptuous and fantastical, clamours for our attention and bankrolls the reputation and status of the star craftsman in a way in which mere tables and cupboards struggle to keep up – though in this case they make the attempt.

Much has been achieved in the pursuit of the immaculate object by hand skills in the past twenty or thirty years (and of course in earlier times and cultures) but one suspects that, once the human hand is firmly excluded from the computerised machine’s operating cabinet, new heights will be reached by methods incomprehensible to most men.

When the reaction is the gasp of incomprehension or disbelief rather than the murmur of informed understanding what shall we have lost? What will be the point?

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.

Work in progress

Some readers of this blog might think the design and making of furniture occupies none of my time. Just to set the record straight, I am about to post on New Work some images of my current project for an extending dining table and ten chairs.

Heath Robinson - furniture designer

The name of the chair

The Windsor chair makers in the forests were probably doing it since the 16th century but it may be that it was first done not by forest bodgers but, as a sideline, by wheelwrights in their shops. It wasn't called the Windsor or acquired the distinctive steam-bent bow back until the 18th century. And why 'Windsor', in Berkshire, when it was mostly made in the beechwoods of Buckinghamshire? It is thought to be because it was middle-men in Windsor who were first responsible for buying up the chairs and shipping them off to markets in London. Another nail in the coffin of the idea of the self-sufficient craftsman and an early case of London being where the money was. Metropolitan domination plays a role in the development of the Buckinghamshire beechwoods too. They were first actively managed on a large scale to send coppiced firewood for the domestic hearths of nearby London - nothing to do with furniture and bodging. But the canals and coal put paid to that trade and only then did the bodgers move in, finding a convenient and underused source of small-section timber. They continued to coppice much of the woodland but towards the end of the nineteenth century furniture manufacture in High Wycombe had become sufficiently mechanised in factories for it to be using a significant number of local large timber trees. It was, however, a short-lived phenomenon, because it very quickly became cheaper to import beech timber from Europe. Thus the substantial markets for both the coppice wood and timber of the Buckinghamshire beechwoods disappeared, leaving them to become 'amenity' woodlands (at least for the owners, if not for the masses). And, of course, it soon became the case that the complete chairs themselves, at least for the mass market, were imported.

'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.

Back to furniture

“To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.”

Blake was protesting against the culture of the eighteenth century in which all particularities were referenced to and judged against general standards of good taste, correctness and politeness (a quality then seen as much an essential component of art as of social behaviour).

Originality was thought as likely to be absurd as enlightening, and so slightly valued that Joshua Reynolds, whose Discourses Blake was annotating, could observe, "invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory."

T S Eliot remarked that so positive was the culture of that age that it crushed a number of smaller men who thought differently but could not bear to face the fact.

With Blake it was his own perception and vision that was positive and not to be crushed and his apprehension of the particular was not to be referenced to the general.

In our own times, we seem not to know whether we wish to particularise or generalise, and to have lost our confidence in both. We cherish the particular but have lost the sense of accumulated experience into which it might be placed. We are surrounded by a plethora of cultural signs so clamorous that they have driven out meaning. The world and its history has become a cultural and natural supermarket which we loot for our individual satisfaction.

So furniture designer-makers have recently been berating themselves for how infrequently they indulge in any critical commentary on furniture, but the response is thin, and focussed on assessment of this or that designer’s whole body of work rather than on the examination of individual pieces of furniture. Such comment puts us in the realm of claim and counter claim, some doubtless more intelligent or discriminating than others but none able to validate itself, as individual criticism could do.

The debate is more political (in a cultural sense) than critical. We have an unsatisfied need to give shape to our inchoate culture by ranking and sanctioning practitioners rather than artefacts, although usually it is done politely, by quiet selection or exclusion rather than by manifesto or denunciation. Yet, however it is done, the process of creation, whereby individual perception is transmuted into something less limitingly personal is devalued, vulgarised or commercialised.

We have lost confidence in meaning or significance: objects are classed as ‘iconic’, without any sense of what they signify, simply because they are striking and frequently referenced. Furniture is ‘expressive’ without our having any sense of what it expresses. Little did Le Corbusier know what he was about to visit on the poor humble chair when he declared it to be ‘art’. Modern designer-maker furniture sometimes seems more ‘gestural’ than ‘expressive’, typified by the extravagant curve or the enveloping surface texture, offering a route to distinctiveness, sophistication or soul, bypassing the kind of design or cultural awareness necessary to achieve that sense of newness and rightness that dawns quietly on the observer rather than loudly assaulting him.

Exhibition now running

My exhibition in Lyme Regis is now open. See the News and exhibitions page on this blog for details of location and opening.

Aging and maturing

There are few sadder sights than some of the pieces of furniture in the study collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum: some of those modernist items from the early years of the last century, once so smart, bright and shining, new materials once so glowing, pure lines once so crisply defined, now faded, scuffed and dowdy.

Their aging has been so less gracious than the sturdy solid timber tables and chairs of past centuries, whose marks, distortions and patina add to rather than detract from their appearance and attraction: their meaning enhanced rather than declined. Yet it is not only the solid timber work that matures in this way, Even the sophisticated cabinet work of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which too (unlike the early English oak table) were once sharp, bright and crisp but where now the ravages of time, use and dehumidified atmosphere have warped surfaces and opened up cracks, look, with the well polished care of the years, as if they have acquired a bloom rather than lost it.

What is it that determines whether an artefact will be capable of maturing over the years rather than aging, and what is it in our modern aesthetic, our manner of making and our philosophy or productive work that has lost us the ability (sometimes) to express our creative impulse in things that will have a positive participation in history’s progression? And which pieces from the work of current furniture designer makers will fare well or badly in this respect?

Exhibition of my furniture in Lyme Regis

I am holding an exhibition of my furniture in the Town Mill Gallery in Lyme Regis, here in west Dorset. It opens this coming Saturday and runs until Wednesday 15 June.

The furniture exhibited will be drawn from thirty years of my work designing and making furniture to individual commission.

(For those who might want to know what I was doing before then, the answer is that I was working in academic publishing – and the really curious will be able to find a few fruits of my erstwhile labours on the shelves of one of the exhibits.)

Although some of the furniture in the exhibition will be for sale, and other items can be repeated (or modified) to order, virtually all of them were designed (or their originals were) for particular individuals – even if that individual was very occasionally myself – and for individual locations. They are therefore very varied in character and type, but they are not confined to their original application. Some of the designs have found more than one home already, although most do remain unique.

Some of the exhibits have been borrowed back for this event and visitors may observe a few marks of their history of use. My furniture is for use, though it also seeks to embody something that may be unexpected, yet right seeming.

Designing and making furniture to commission is a fusion of the intentions and creative impulses of several people. For the commissioner the experience should not be daunting, it should be pleasurable – but it cannot be predictable. You don’t have to know what you want. You do need to know what you want the thing to do for you, and where you might put it: function is important, even if, sometimes, the main function is just to look attractive. Furniture does, after all, furnish a room. But you don’t have to be able to visualise it as a piece of furniture, know what shape it should be, what wood it should be made of, although there is no reason why you should not discuss all that if you do have ideas, positive or negative.

I hope visitors will feel free to talk to me about the process and possibilities, even if they do not think they want to embark on it themselves.

For full details of opening times and of the location please go to the News and exhibitions page on this blog.

Accuracy

As a footnote to my earlier reflections on Hand or machine? and Designer-makers: the world we have lost, it has struck me that the nature of accuracy in craft work has completely changed between hand and machine skills.

In hand work accuracy is the exercise of dexterity and poise, arising from judgement in the combination of the perceptions of the senses and the application of the hand. Skill is a constant response to, and if required, correction of what has been done to the artefact before.

Accuracy in machine work is all about consistent referencing to the established datum.

Sophisticated, modern, automated machines can establish a new accurate datum with each process, as programmed in advance. Hand operated machines, with scope for manually introduced error, need to be referenced back, as far as possible, each time to the original. Correction and modification is likely to result in unintended deviation.

Schleswig-Holstein digested

The long-running tale of furniture designer-makers reforming their association has reached some kind of conclusion, but in the two or three year long process has become rather like the Schleswig-Holstein question. When I die no-one will understand it except our founder, who, by then, will be in a lunatic asylum after his long battle against the committee-ising tendency.

So, before I forget all about it, here, for the benefit of posterity, is my digested read.

There once was an association called DMOU without rules or leader. It had an internet forum called Discuss, or the forum, but you couldn't join Discuss except by being a member of DMOU, though you could be a member of DMOU and not take any part in Discuss. Being a member of DMOU was if existing members recognised you as such. After the Two Hundred Years War a majority of members of DMOU voted to call themselves FDMA, call Discuss the Forum, adopt a set of rules which nobody read but everybody thought were jolly good, and elect a committee which wasn't meant to do anything except keep the money, answer the post and deputise for each other when they fell ill from too many committee lunches. (Some hope there!) Since DMOU had no rules, no-one could say whether this was legitimate or not, but FDMA had 'force majeure' on its side. Following the example of David Owen when the Social Democratic Party merged with the Liberal party, some old lags from DMOU declared the vote was not legitimate and that they embodied the continuing DMOU. Others, like aging bishops slumped in their armchairs in the library of the Athenaeum, no longer knew what they belonged to. There then ensued the War of the Succession, which lasted for the next five hundred years, outlasting the survival of furniture as it was once known, and which, as I hardly need tell you, in our day has been totally replaced by Gravity Control Differential Force Fields and Invisibility Cloaks. If you're interested to know what 'furniture' actually looked like back then I think you can still find a few examples in Reserve Collection 5C of the European State Museum of Antiquities (normally open every third Wednesday afternoon of the month by appointment). As I recollect, there are even one or two pieces reputed to have been made by members of DMOU or FDMA. It is now difficult to know what functional purpose theses strange-looking objects possessed, and at least one of them has a peculiar mark called a 'Guildmark'. No-one now knows what that mark represented, but it is thought to have had some significance in the War of the Succession. Or not.

I hope that makes it all clear

Pivot point

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axel-tree.

Recently a fellow furniture designer-maker commended another’s account of the development of our work for knowing ‘which pieces were pivotal’. Whilst I don’t want to dispute the ability of either of them to know what work is genuinely remarkable, I do query whether there is anything so specific, in the collective body of the current work of small furniture designer-makers, as a pivot, or whether we are actually aware of our work turning on (or ignoring) any key development.

We are in fact remarkably ill informed of what the rest of us are currently up to. Our work lacks a mode of publication and a nexus of sociability. We have the misfortune that our product is of sufficient substance to make it difficult for us to move around (we are unlikely to up sticks on a whim and go off to make furniture with our fellows in the south of France), but not of enough substance to make it impossible to ignore as hundreds troop by it on their way to work. It is insufficiently artistic, insufficiently valuable, insufficiently new to be much remarked by critics and commentators. It is too expensive to matter much to the masses. The old network of patronage that used to advance fashions in interior taste has passed away, and those who come closest nowadays to setting public taste or fashion often do so without much commissioning or patronising the work themselves.

So how is new work communicated, even amongst ourselves? We might expect to see our fellows’ work at exhibitions, but furniture exhibitions are in notoriously short supply, unprofitable for their organisers and not always well supported by exhibitors with their best and newest work. Nearly all of us have websites, but few are good at updating them with their latest work. We could in fact quite easily do more than we do to communicate our newest ideas and designs: our association could easily – but does not – have a place in the members’ section of its website specifically for such communication.

I believe we don’t do more to communicate our latest work because we do not want to. We do not want to partly for our own reasons of ‘commercial confidentiality’ (I have more often seen members fret about plagiarism than enthuse that others are developing similar ideas to their own), and partly because we simply do not have much in the way of ideas to communicate.

Having claimed that our work collectively lacks particular direction or sense of purpose, I will now contradict myself (up to a point) by trying to identify some common elements in the most noticed furniture.

One recently discernible is the creation, almost the imposition of textured effects on timber surfaces. Pieces of furniture with this characteristic have been the leading items in several recent group exhibitions in London associated with DMOU. Sometimes, not always, rather than exploiting texture inherent in the material, the surface effects are created with techniques similar to those needed to produce the dead-smooth, high-finish surfaces of the ‘I can’t believe it’s not plastic’ type that many have come inescapably to associate with expensive ‘bespoke’ furniture. Sometimes in these pieces, also, the surface texture is the focus to the noticeable neglect of interest in underlying form.

In that respect it may possibly be a parallel to Martin Grierson’s belief that ‘the success and beauty of a design lie as much in the quality of detail and choice of materials as in the overall concept’. I don’t entirely disagree with that, but I do think it may beg the question whether there is a stable and mature vocabulary of form on which the designer-maker draws. Yet perhaps that is what Martin encompasses in his reference to ‘proper pieces of furniture that exploit traditional forms’.

So, if that is the garlic, where are the sapphires? Elsewhere in these London exhibitions an interest in differentiation by conspicuous form still thrives, with, sometimes, a virtuoso predilection for forms that dramatically challenge methods of timber construction and making ability. A delight in pushing things to extremes – in construction, detailing, refinement, and, in consequence, probably cost – has something to be said for it, and something against. It could be seen as part of the overloading of our culture with a multitude of signs. It can hardly form the basis for a movement – flux perhaps but not a movement in any direction. It cannot be that ‘pivot point’ we seek.

It is, however, what frequently receives the prizes and guildmarks for ‘bespoke’ furniture, although, ironically, the particular pieces that receive these accolades are sometimes not bespoken at all but are instead deliberate speculative punts at awards by designer-makers, and, even so decorated, they may struggle to find purchasers thereafter.

Whether any of this can amount to a continuation of the Arts and Crafts ‘legacy’ (the theme of these exhibitions), beyond a degree of self-regard in our work as furniture designer-makers, I personally doubt. It certainly does not constitute ‘wonderful furniture of a commonplace kind’, to use Ernest Gimson’s description of WR Lethaby’s furniture in the 1890 Arts and Crafts exhibition.

What exactly is meant by that phrase is a little problematic. It perhaps applies more to Gimson’s work than Lethaby’s. Lethaby did not actually design much furniture (or architecture come to that) and some of it might not universally be regarded as commonplace. Nor is it without decoration. But perhaps this is a subject to which I might return.

A brand too far

Furniture designer-makers – well, British ones, mostly – well, some of them – have been busily changing their association into something more ‘outward-looking’ that will make them much better known, and much better off. DMOU becomes FDMA. It has taken more than two years of discussion and debate and some people – well, me anyway – regret that the open and fluid character of the old association will be lost for no actual gain. So this is a post only for furniture designer-makers and those with a direct interest in such things.

The association will certainly have to change the ‘About Us’ page on its website.

Now we have a committee, whereas before we prided ourselves that we did not, and it takes its first small steps into brand definition with a quest for a Iogo. To what extent, I wonder, is it possible to advance the interests of all members by the promotion of a single FDMA ‘brand’?

Members get touchy at being differentiated from other members, at least at the upper end of the spectrum, but we cannot sensibly ignore the fact that, having already taken our association down the road of ‘inclusiveness’, our membership embraces a very wide range of work.

Of course the FDMA can say, ‘At whatever level you wish to acquire a piece of furniture you can find a small independent designer-maker who can provide you with something individual and satisfying.’ But that’s hardly compulsive promotion. As soon as the promotion tries to be more effective it has to concentrate on some differentiated particulars. Can we really advance the fortunes of --- --- and --- --- in a single breath? Do we all sell to the same market? I think it is difficult to answer ‘yes’; the membership as a whole just does not constitute, in a commercially meaningful sense, a single ‘brand’. We do have a, rather frayed, ‘philosophical’ identity as ‘designer-makers’, but, although that is real, I do not think it will be much called upon in commercial promotion: it is sometimes difficult to get our membership to understand it, let alone the buying public.

There are some members scarcely involved in one-off commissions; there are great disparities of scale (some members head companies that employ around 40 people, others are one-person, or even half-person bands); enormous variation in the character of ‘artistic’ approach; there are members concentrating just on particular types of furniture; and so on. But the most obvious disparity is in – I struggle to find a word that expresses what we all recognise without giving offence – ‘sophistication’? ‘refinement’? ‘originality’? maybe just ‘expense’. Not all our members can meaningfully offer to inlay their client’s coat of arms into their purchase. A few of our members have achieved almost ‘heritage’ status, actively admired by a section of the public who cannot possibly aspire to own a piece of it. You have only to look at the published results of successful PR about our work, with that vulgar or pretentious vacuousness that so often characterises it, to see that we cannot blithely ignore unwanted externalities in constructing our promotion. These are marketing facts. The world is not about to change, even if we are.

So, ill equipped as we are to direct the public attention with any developed distinguishing discourse of our own about our work, we focus it (or allow it to be focussed) on the small group of individuals whose work we know, from experience, provokes the readiest response, a small group selected by the even smaller group that runs the project, one perhaps not completely distinct from our (non)-executive committee. So FDMA becomes a successful public brand; we have created stars, or at least buffed up our existing ones – but is it a successful association?

Once an identity of structure and an identity of brand are adopted they require, for their effective functioning, an identity of membership, and one will be acquired and imposed by process and practice if it is not chosen by discussion and consensus.

The question of our identity needs answering not only in deciding what to do in defining FDMA as such, but also in forming the relationship between individual projects and the FDMA ‘brand’. It is difficult to see that most marketing or promotional projects will not be slanted towards the ‘upper’ echelons of one-off commission work. I don’t mean exclusively so, but, given our inability to select or characterise our work by any criterion beyond a general and unarticulated notion of excellence or expressiveness (to award it a Guildmark so to speak), it seems all the more likely. That is the easiest sector to promote; those are the members most likely to have the resources, the time, the money and the appetite to support projects; that is the territory from which the FDMA idea sprang and it is quite prominent in the committee make-up.

In that way FDMA will become ‘aspirational’: with people joining expecting to serve a long apprenticeship before they can hope to participate fully in the tangible benefits of membership. That is not how DMOU/FDMA has presented itself to designer-makers hitherto, and it is not, in my view, a sustainable format for the association.

I am not suggesting there are dark forces at work here, or that this is the exclusive character of FDMA’s likely development, but I do think it is a real danger that, over time, after the initial enthusiasm, a significant body of members (including some who voted for FDMA) will come to see FDMA (with some justification) as benefiting mainly those ‘upper echelons’, those who, to their minds, least need it.

They will say nothing at first and so, in that sense, the association and its discussion forum will appear undivided. But the resentment will grow, and from time to time break out in fractious and slightly them-and-us. This is the classic path of broad-based but formalised ‘professional’ associations, especially those (and FDMA is quite likely to join their ranks) where membership is seen as essential for professional advancement.

All the talk now of course is of success, democracy and solidarity, but this minority will feel more and more ignored and become less and less inclined to take any part in the association, and so sets in its slow decline, or else its conversion into (or supplanting by) a more frankly selective and ‘aspirational’ body.

The more our committee tries to define the single FDMA ‘brand’, moving on past logos, thinking they are being ‘inclusive’, the worse it will become, because it can only be a pretence that all our interests are served by a single kind of promotion and FDMA will become effectively identified with the kind of work that is easiest to promote. It is our own backyard globalisation, our surrender to the deracinated concept of the ‘world-class’, where creativity is validated not by the individual, rooted imagination but by general commercial endorsement – a concentration on the kind of furniture whose market depends upon a globalised, high-input, low resource-cost, high wealth-polarisation economy, which, it seems to me is what the Guildmark culture links into. We are in danger of adopting a cult of mindless excellence, complete with its own external identifiers. DMOU/FDMA, despite in practice always veering towards inclusiveness over any individual membership application, has already, in its outward pronouncements, begun slipping down that slope by putting first, in its list of indicators for potential members to use in pre-assessing themselves, awards, selection for particular exhibitions, and membership of other groups.

Maybe it won’t be as bad as I fear; maybe we’ll just rub along with nothing terribly remarkable being achieved for any of us. So that we all stay a little disappointed, but no-one gets resentful of others. I doubt it, but, if we want to maintain a broad association more than we want to achieve substantial advantage for just a section of it, that may be the best we can hope for, unless we take radical and determined steps to disaggregate the FDMA commercial ‘brand’ and get back to our original vision.

Why are we so nice about furniture?

‘Why are we so nice about furniture?’ a colleague recently asked. Where is the cut and thrust of analytical criticism amongst us?

Could it be that, culturally, furniture doesn’t actually matter so much? So we are complimentary about other peoples’ creations much as we might be about a meal they served us – it would be pointlessly bad form to be otherwise. John Makepeace recently claimed that furniture was the most important art form in our society today, but I think it would require some rigorous argument to carry that case.

However it might be, I think we are nice because we lack the conviction of our own tastes and creative preoccupations to be meaningfully critical (or nasty) of other work.

Is this a juggernaut I see before me?

Sources of information: blogs versus politicians

Is it all we can do was to lie down before the approaching juggernaut of economic and social collapse?

'Juggernaut' comes from a Sanskrit word meaning 'lord of the universe' and is one of the forms of Krishna. At one temple devotees were thought to cast themselves under the wheels of a massive chariot carrying statues of Krishna as a deliberate act of devotion. Or perhaps they just slipped.

I am no kind of expert at all, but judgement is always about ranking opinions more knowledgeable than one’s own, and, sometimes, one has to nail one’s colours to the mast if only to allow others to steer clear.

The sources of information now are numerous and range from blogs to politicians. At one extreme many blogs, though of independent mind, are so overwhelmingly concerned to complete their own interpretive scheme that they are sometimes little concerned to identify which specific triggers of change are likely to occur first. Yet, in their defence, one must recognise that there is too much variability in the world, too many possibilities of both negative and positive feedback, too much irrational behaviour, and then the occasional small piece of enlightened rationality, too many unforeseen circumstances both benign and malignant, too complex a web of inter-connectedness in the political-economic structure we have erected, for anyone to know exactly what is going to happen and when.

On the other hand, information from those actually involved in trying to move the levers of power is highly compromised. Is ever a politician willing to lose office for the sake of telling the electorate something it needs to know, or do they all, like Vince Cable, believe that the marginal results they personally achieve in office completely outweigh public understanding?

Underlying instabilities

Beneath it all, at the level of historical perspective, it is not difficult to identify major and largely inexorable trends that threaten our current way of life: climate change; environmental degradation; population increase; natural resource depletion; increase of social/economic complexity; decline of state competence; decline of democratic control. Our cleverness, busy-ness and short-sightedness in coping with the here and now give us an amazing capacity for ignoring the ground beneath our feet and also for maintaining our balance, but there are good reasons for thinking it cannot go on much longer.

Which of these instabilities is most likely to hit us first, if not hardest? In my view it is the increase in social/economic complexity and more specifically the implosion of our financial system.

The only system that works?

When one posits a financial or economic collapse people tend to react that capitalism will go on for ever, that it is the only system that ‘works’, that there is no alternative system. Whether or not it is the only system that works is hardly worth debating. There certainly have been and are other social economic systems, but nothing to rival the scale of capitalism. Capitalism certainly works in its way, and it has a unique capacity to facilitate and accelerate economic growth. In our lifetimes it has produced unprecedented economic growth. People nowadays, in claiming that capitalism will go on and on, mostly identify it with precisely that phase that we have recently experienced. Capitalism inherently requires constant expansion. It is a pyramid structure, subject always to periodic collapse. It can restart after collapse, but there is no inevitability that it will regain the former level of activity and prosperity.

The collapse of capitalism? The view from the top of our pyramid

There have been capitalist booms and busts in the past, and there are always minor fluctuations in the ascents and even descents. Yet it is clear that we now stand at the peak of an economic pyramid whose summit is of historically unprecedented height.

The foundations of our pyramid were laid in the industrial revolution. It was thereafter fuelled by the western world’s colonial expansion or its settlement of new continents and dispossession of the native inhabitants. After 1930 it was further boosted by an exploitation of the earth’s material resources on a scale and with a rapidity totally unprecedented. Things were flagging a little by the time of World War 2, but reconstruction helped, and when, in the 1970s, resource limitations were beginning to be felt, trade globalization achieved essentially a recreation of the benefits of imperialism for the developed economies without the necessity for legal or physical occupation. However the engines were essentially decelerating and the final, brilliant boost from the 1980s onwards was the development of massive international financial expansion and deregulation.

That financial turbo-charging of our economy is what tottered in 2008 and is still threatening to collapse. In fact it cannot avoid collapse.

Financial instability and collapse

In the past few decades financial transactions internationally have outgrown trade in physical goods and services by several orders of magnitude. For banks the financing of trade and industry is now a very minor part of their activity and profit generation. Even a manufacturing company, such as Porsche, may make more money from financial transactions than physical production. Such financial transactions are ‘rent seeking’ activities that draw money out of the productive economy without generating wealth.

Such activity requires constant acceleration to avoid collapse. It is achieved by private finance’s destruction of state regulation, escape from state taxation and by a constant expansion of debt-based trading. Because financial trading has so enormously outstripped economic growth, this debt is backed by vastly overvalued assets (see sub-prime etc) and complicated financial insurance (see AIG etc) for which there are insufficient funds to meet eventual claims. Because the financial system is so complexly and inextricably inter-connected, financial trading insurance is far riskier than insuring casual risks such as theft or illness. In fact it is inherently unsustainable, but it is intended to underwrite the whole international financial edifice.

Banks are uniquely allowed to fictionalise their accounts. Governments, spurred on by the big international accounting firms, have recently allowed them to value their assets not according to what they might fetch on the open market (‘mark to market’), but according to what their computer models value them at if certain inconveniences and ‘disruptions’ to the market were removed – such as the fact that there are no willing buyers for their assets (‘mark to model’). Add to that all banks’ use of complicated corporate structures in tax havens, and their accounts become totally opaque.

The credit crunch was the panicked recognition of all banks that not even they could trust the solvency of their fellows. The immediate crisis was averted by state intervention but virtually every bank remains insolvent if any half-realistic valuation is placed on its assets. Since the credit crunch we have seen a series of government sponsored ‘stress tests’ applied to the commercial banks. These they have all passed, but in some cases (see Ireland) only weeks later they have required massive further state support.

Reactions and remedies

State governments have not only lost control of the financial system but their own financial ministries and advisers have become completely infiltrated by the financial classes (‘regulatory capture’). Nevertheless there is genuine alarm, even panic, at the instability of the financial system. (That is what explains the complete capitulation of the Liberal Democrats to the expenditure cutting agenda once they were admitted to coalition government.)

Governments seek to shore up the financial system by a combination of not always compatible measures.

The immediate reaction has been, and still is, to transfer the liability for much commercial bank debt via government to the tax-payer, either by guarantee or by buying bank debt at optimistic valuations. Quantitative easing injects massive amounts of liquidity into the economy through the banks, where it almost entirely remains, used not for productive investment, but for commodity speculation (see food prices and Middle East unrest). Regulatory control is fiercely resisted but governments are trying to impose higher liquidity requirements on the banks, which will make them ‘safer’, but will also reduce both their profitability and their lending capacity.

These measures may help shore up the financial system but they do nothing for the productive economy, whose fortunes come a very poor second in government priorities (see ‘Main Street’ versus ‘Wall Street’). Our economic system, as David Cameron might like to put it, is broken – and no-one knows how to fix it. It is all too complex and inter-connected. China is not the new economic paradigm; it is the last gasp of the old one.

Public burdens

Ironically, as globalisation fails, because third-world countries begin to resist the imposition of exploitative terms of trade upon them, the burdens imposed by non-democratic institutions such as the IMF and central banks are increasingly directed at first-world publics. Commercial bank debts are transferred to governments, who must then cut public spending, increase taxation or transfer it from corporations to individuals (see VAT increase and ‘internationally competitive’ corporation tax) and suppress wages and labour negotiating rights (see Wisconsin). When nations are severely distressed financially, many of these measures are effectively dictated by the IMF and other funding governments in contradiction to the inclinations and commitments of the democratically elected government. The IMF has an explicit policy of reducing labour costs in all European countries.

‘Rescue packages’, as in Greece and Ireland, are designed not to benefit the national economies directly, but first to save banks from collapse. Despite widespread public opposition to 'bailing out' 'lazy' PIGS in Germany, where Angela Merkel is caught in approaching election trap, several German banks have had highly improvident involvement with Irish banks (where regulation was lax even within its own legal requirements) and the German banks are likely to become insolvent if Ireland and/or Greece default. The Irish banks have just failed another stress test (is it the fourth?). How is it that every time these wise (and highly paid) financial people look at the Irish banks they find they missed a few score billions last time? Is it that there’s a hole in the bucket and the banks are even now creating new losses? Everyone knows Ireland will default: it is just a question of how long Germany and France can delay the inevitable. Some British banks are likely to be affected also. (Why else did UK extend its own individual loan to Ireland with money 'it did not have', even given that we're making a profit on the deal?)

European PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain) can now borrow to fund their deficits, either from private bond investors or from national or international ‘rescuers’ only at rates well above even optimistic forecasts of growth in their economy. Their debts can only get worse, cuts deeper, public unrest more vociferous. The European Central Bank has signalled a forthcoming rise in interest rates (probably now slightly delayed by the Japanese disaster). European banks have total claims on Portuguese, Irish, Italian, Greek and Spanish debt of 2.4 trillion dollars. Do they really think they're going to get it all back?

In the US the housing market is in continuing decline, and the solvency of major and minor US banks still depends on overvalued mortgage-backed securities. Rising interest rates are possible (or yet more quantitative easing further increasing US debt, except that it's just again breached the congressionally approved limit) following Japanese sale of US bonds, thus increasing mortgage defaults. There is political paralysis at federal level and growing budget crises and possible bankruptcies at state and municipal level. US unemployment has just decreased sufficiently to boost not only the Dow but the FTSE as well, but few bothered to notice that the number of employed people had also dropped. Research shows almost half of the US population of working age has no full time job. Approaching a half of all US citizens are benefitting from food stamps. (The big banks administer the food stamps system and make a nice profit on it.) Meanwhile Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase (‘the most dangerous man in America’ and Tony Blair’s new boss) is busy telling us all that the problem pre-2008 was too much financial regulation.

In the UK most economic indicators are turning down - growth, unemployment, housing market, consumer confidence. Inflation is up. Bank profits rise. The government’s Office of Budget Responsibility forecasts that private debt will increase massively over the next few years as public debt, maybe, declines. The full scale of cuts and transfers to the private sector, and the public anger at them, is yet to be felt.

Tipping points

The burdens placed upon the public in the first world, by political and business leaders seeking to maintain the financial system, are, in anything but the short term, insupportable, but there is no other plan. The burdens placed upon the public in the third world, by economic exploitation and commodity speculation, are equally or more immediately insupportable and contribute directly to popular uprisings in the Middle East, including the supposedly oil-rich nations. State forces have shot and killed demonstrators in Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. Saudi troops are in Bahrain.

Japan’s misfortunes threaten to destabilise the bond and currency markets. The Bank of Japan’s immediate reaction is a massive dose of quantitative easing. Industrial disruption in Japan is likely to ripple out to industry internationally. It may be worse than a shortage of batteries for iPads.

Against all this it is difficult to believe that we are not in serious and present danger of financial and economic implosion.

Deflation and depression

It will take the form of severe deflation and depression. The money supply will drastically reduce as financial debt cannot be honoured. Over 95 per cent of money in circulation is not government issued currency but debt-based money created by commercial banks.

There is certainly too much money (and debt) in the system now, but economies always over-react and there will shortly be too little. Money is necessary to facilitate human exchange of goods and services. People are unemployed in a depression not for a lack of any possible activities useful to themselves or their fellow citizens, but because the mechanics of the system for rewarding them for their work with some token they can use for obtaining goods and services they require from others has broken down. It is quite possible in a depression for farmers to be throwing away food they cannot sell, whilst nearby people are starving because they cannot afford to buy it. Neither supply nor demand are absent; just the mechanism to bring the two together.

There will still be rich people in a depression, but fewer of them and they will be more worried. There will still be a market for expensive goods, but a much smaller one and suppliers will be much more vulnerable.

Middle income people, even up to a quite high level, will suffer a drastic reduction in their wealth and purchasing power. The poor will grow and struggle. Asset values will plummet; the effective price of essentials will rise; governments will withdraw from public support.

It is not a happy prospect for furniture designer makers.

Where do furniture designer makers fit in?

These developments will affect every section of society, including furniture designer-makers, but there is a particular way in which we fit into them.

It is no accident that the ‘British craft furniture revival’ happened during the post-war boom and that it reached its climax of widespread public attention (not necessarily its largest membership) in the seventies and eighties. Our natural market is the inconspicuously rich (‘the lower edge of luxury’). That market has for many of us been augmented by more structured forms of wealth disposal amongst corporate customers (now largely faded) and the rich clients of decorators and interior designers. But those we access by piggybacking on other professionals. All of these markets and mechanisms will suffer severely in a depression.

A few of us have gained custom under our own steam from the conspicuously rich, and have done so by projecting a certain kind of extravagance of design and making. Only a few of us have the talent or aptitude to do that, and it depends in any case for its effectiveness on a level of exclusivity.

When we try to promote our group fortunes in any organised way, as FDMA intends to do, we have a tendency to lift up our eyes to this market of the conspicuously rich – in my view in vain. Even if we do not imagine every one of us can access that market, we slip too readily into the assumption that we need to emulate the characteristics of that furniture to make all of us more commercially successful.

In the coming depression there will still be some conspicuous-rich demand but it will be a contracting niche and it is hopeless to think that more of us will be able to climb in. The inconspicuously rich are going to be severely squeezed. There will be more localised markets for basic and durable items. In that situation I think it is very unwise for FDMA to take its character (or its leadership) from what has been established as the apogee of furniture designer-making in the preceding decades. Most of us are going to have to establish radically new models if we are to survive as businesses in a changed world.

There is a further, more particular way in which our group development reflects the unsustainable economy in which we are set. A significant number of us depend for a substantial part of our income on training new would be professional designer makers. I believe we are training more people than can expect to succeed in their own businesses. We are running in effect our own Ponzi scheme. Unless we have a much clearer idea than I have seen of a successful business model for furniture designer-making in the coming decades I do not think we should be actively encouraging people to join our ranks. There will be enough who do so without encouragement.

Recovery and its limits

The world will recover, though it took the best part of a decade and a world war to recover from the last depression. Capitalism will survive (probably), but it will not return to anything like the level of economic activity, of prosperity and of internationalism that we have seen in recent decades.

That is because other underlying limitations will catch up with us following financial collapse, in the form of energy deficiency, climate change, and general resource scarcity.

Oil and gas are certainly beyond their peak. The energy returned on energy invested ratio on new supplies is between a fifth and a tenth of what it was on the primary oil field discoveries. The boom may make new difficult (and very small) oil reserves look economically viable, but the failing economic recovery that rising energy prices helps bring about will mean that many of these new discoveries are never exploited.

Even if nuclear and renewable energy had the inherent capacity to substitute for our present level of energy use, which many informed people doubt, we do not, from where we are now, have the economic ability to create the massive new infrastructure required. That infrastructure would have to be created from the ‘old’ economy and from conventional energy. We have simply left it too late.

There will be other scarcities too, most notably of food and water. Water supplies are inadequate and compromised in many parts of the world (including the USA). It may be true that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone, that it is just in the wrong place, but that doesn’t remove the problem. China and India have difficulty feeding their present populations and are currently buying up enormous swathes of agricultural land from impoverished countries that are more inured to seeing their own populations periodically starve (see Ethiopia).

And modern food production is of course highly dependent on cheap energy and petrochemical inputs – and increasingly in competition for land usage with bio-fuels.

Is that a juggernaut? I think it is. Can it be stopped? I think not. Can we, as individuals in local communities or small groups, dodge it? Possibly.

Where are we in the world?

I recently initiated a thread on the furniture designer-makers forum to which I subscribe trying to identify our place in the wider social and economic currents swirling around us. This, I suppose, was the heart of it:

It can hardly be denied that 'We make expensive objects that few can afford'; that even our batch produced furniture needs a more than average level of disposable income; and that many of us are uncomfortable with that - just as William Morris was all that time ago.

Long ago our society and economy got to the point where no ordinary person could afford the fruits of 'hand production', except for very small items and the repair of important technologically produced goods, like fixing our cars. Yet even there the range of those mass produced items that it is 'economic' to repair by individual labour rather than just buy a new one is, as we all notice, shrinking rapidly, and many are explicitly manufactured in a way that means it is impossible to take them apart without destroying them. (How many of us incidentally have any concern for the possibility of taking our furniture apart non-destructively in decades to come?)

And things have moved on, so that here most people cannot afford even mass-produced objects unless the relatively low labour content they still require comes from third-world workers, whom we regard with an uncomfortable mixture of guilt that we are exploiting them, and moral self-approbation that we are 'lifting them out of poverty'. (Never mind that we are also lifting them out of their own cultures, and we usually put aside the thought that once we have so lifted them the added burden on the world's resources will become truly insupportable.)

And things are moving on still further, so that the globalised economy is moving towards an end where generally labour will be unable to earn sufficient money to purchase its own product and wealth becomes increasingly invested in assets of inflating value rather than in productive industry. This is, as far as I understand it, the collapse of our economy that some people predict through a combination of simultaneous inflation in one area and deflation in another.

The one indispensible item for us all where a relatively high element of hand labour is difficult to eliminate or outsource to the third world is our houses, which have inflated to a value where they become a life-time burden on our personal earnings and a key asset prop of the whole unstable financial/economic system, ripe (or over-ripe) for corruption by those who believe they can manipulate the system for their own advantage.

My point is that, however morally aware and troubled we are, it is a difficult treadmill to step off.

You are right too that we attach tags to our furniture to redeem it. 'Green' is one of the most common, but some time ago Barnaby pointed out that the carbon footprint of a small workshop was likely to compare very unfavourably with that of larger production. So we concentrate on how sustainably we source our raw materials and gloss over the sustainability of our whole operation, let alone the fact that a large proportion of our sustainable timber ends up in the dust extractor.

'Heirloom' is perhaps safer if we just mean that we expect our furniture to out-last us and we hope it will still be valued by succeeding generations. Yet we have to steer clear of meaning 'value' in any monetary sense, because when our furniture does reach the resale market it commands pretty miserable prices, and, in the 'antique' market generally it is only a very few outstanding and 'collectible' items that attract high prices, and the vast bulk of well designed and made furniture from the past sells for low prices in the sense that no-one today could possibly make it from scratch so cheaply.

That is a reflection of the nature of the asset market that characterises the wealthiest end of our society and economy, and what is, I think, most ethically uncomfortable for us as designer-makers is a tendency to aspire in our work to the trappings of that level of luxury. Mostly the hope is vain, but it results in very expensive furniture with a very high level of finish and a sophistication verging on the absurd, a rarified claim to be taking our product to unprecedented, never before thought of heights. (And here we break ranks with our Arts and Crafts predecessors.) That sort of approach of course finds willing allies in the ranks of professional marketers and promoters, publicists and even 'critics', and maybe associations. It is inimical to any more culturally distinct or articulated characterisation of a body of craft or art work. Historically, work that has been so characterised has often met, initially, with surprise, incomprehension or hostility from the contemporary market - which is not what our new association is aiming at.

Hand or Machine?

'Manufacture': literally, to make by hand.

The question whether hand work is somehow superior to machine work is s an old one that takes us straight back to our supposed Arts and Crafts roots. When John Ruskin and William Morris first objected to the Victorian mechanisation of manufacture their primary concern was for the spiritual wellbeing of the craftsman; the quality of the artefact was secondary in their minds.

Today we have almost completely lost that concern, although there is an interesting echo when we say that some more primitive methods are so tedious that the maker is unlikely to indulge in a second attempt to improve a poor initial result. There, in some sense, one is referencing Morris’s recognition that machinery could legitimately relieve the workman of unhealthy drudgery, but I’m not sure that either he or Ruskin would have welcomed the idea that the artefact is to be perfected by multiple mechanised attempts. That’s not how they built the cathedrals, as anyone can still see.

It was in this context that the Arts and Crafts objected to ‘applied decoration’: they were very far, at least initially, from objecting to ornamentation as such, and for Ruskin it was a vital expression of the spiritual content of craft.

The primary concern of Ruskin and Morris was that the craftsperson should be engaged in and should delight in the process of the making of the object from start to finish – the autonomy of craft. So hand versus machine is not a simple issue. Yet machines do inevitably tend towards a division of labour, no less in our time than the Victorian, as we (some of us) commission the computerised subcontractor for some highly specialised element of our sophisticated design.

Nor is excessive finish and unwelcome physical uniformity in furniture or any other artefact necessarily the product of the maximum utilisation of available mechanical processes. To a considerable degree, ‘craft’ making skill in our time has come to be identified with the achievement of levels of accuracy that the public might think cold normally be achieved only by machines. That may be a vulgar misperception but it is nevertheless something that designer-makers have done and continue to do a great deal to encourage. And we start to feel either uncomfortable or exhilarated as highly mechanised and automated production begins to achieve a level of individualised design that previously was associated only with small-scale ‘hand’ production.

It calls into question the whole aesthetic of the modern movement, that still holds surprising residual sway, that function could determine form without the intervention of taste or style, that there was, somehow, a styleless modern style that would be ushered in by the inevitable mechanisation of production.

Machines and tools exist in a continuum, and skill is not to be counterbalanced against them. Indeed the exercise of skill, in the context of making artefacts, is hardly possible at all without the utilisation of tools or machines. Yet there is an inescapable paradox that tools at the same time enable skills and achieve ‘deskilling’. The difficulty arises when and to the extent that the tool or machine operates without the agency of the person – though in our own context of ‘computer controlled’ (what exactly do we mean by that phrase?) machinery it is not always as easy as it might seem to say when that point is reached.

Lethaby, one of the progenitors of the Arts and Crafts as a movement, urged that craftspeople should produce good designs specifically for machine manufacture. Ernest Gimson always resisted Lethaby’s personal urgings, arguing that the mechanically produced version of his design work would drive out, commercially and culturally, the hand production that resulted in something superior at a higher cost. Both, in their different ways, had to a considerable extent abandoned Ruskin’s and Morris’s struggle with the personal cultural and spiritual problem of their (and our) day, and we now seem no closer to re-engaging with it.

Perhaps, as our national economy increasingly outsources to developing countries not just all physical production but also ‘mind-based’ work, it has come to be seen as a lost battle or an irrelevance.