Craftsmen have catered to the material needs of society for thousands of years, making pots out of clay for cooking, goblets out of glass for drinking, and fashioning chairs from wood for sitting. Nearly everything was made by hand until the Industrial Revolution. Then the objects that skilled artisans had once crafted began to be made more efficiently and economically by machine. Even though theorists such as John Ruskin bemoaned the fact that the machine age had lessened the quality of life, mass production was here to stay.
Crafts did not die but began to occupy another place in industrialized society. Today, crafts are a leisure activity for many. A surprising number of people list “arts and crafts” as their hobby but professionals focus on the art of the craft. Many university- or art school-trained artists have chosen to express their creativity through the traditional craft materials of glass, clay, fiber, wood, and metal. They have been well rewarded for their efforts. The woodworker Wendell Castle's furniture can cost $100,000 and more, while glass artist Dale Chi-huly's blown-glass vessels, when combined into large-scale installations, fetch similar prices.
Craft artists making one-of-a-kind objects raise the question of what is the difference between art and craft, but that's another story. There are also many artisans still doing production work, turning out hundreds, if not thousands, of brown-glazed clay mugs and exquisite iridescent glass vases, as a visit to any craft fair confirms. They may have been drawn to crafts in the sixties when living more simply - supplying one's needs from the land and making one's own objects - was seen as an attractive alternative life-style. Some of these craftsmen have changed their philosophy and joined the entrepreneurs of the nineties, realizing, as had their crafts-making forebears, that they were “in business.” What interests us here is another development in the craft word: the evolution of the hands-on craftsman into the designer of objects.
In many ways this is a logical evolution. After all, the role of the craftsman has always been to make useful objects in series, repeating the same designs, to meet the needs and desires of the marketplace. Historically it was the creator who designed the object: the potter shaped the bowl; the master glassblower fashioned the stem of the goblet; the weaver chose the colors of the yarn. Now that these products are supplied by industry, it seems only natural for craftsmen to design, if no longer to execute, these objects. And this is what is happening with enough frequency to be considered a serious development in design.
The design process seems to be similar whether for limited or mass production. Jeweler and metalworker David Tisdale, now a partner in Fresh Design working on projects in glass, metal, and graphic design, explains that “basically you come up with an idea. You work it out. You figure out what it is going to look like and what components it's going to have, and they you either sit down at your bench and make it or you call in subcontractors, order the metal, have it polished, and then assembled at the end. Or you have another company do it all.”
Of course, there are differences in hand production and factory production. But that is not always negative. Painter, sculptor, potter, and now ceramic and textile designer Dorothy Hafner tries “to exploit industrial processes for what they do best and hand
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