'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. 

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.

Designer-makers: the world we have lost

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.

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.