20 Aug 2008
Article - 10.01.2007
The 19th Century Industrial Revolution sparked moral debate about the virtues of the hand- versus machine-made. Today a similar debate is simmering as we embrace the digital information age. Rebecca Roke explores the middle-ground where craft and digital technology in design meet.
Crafted and digital methods of production may at once appear an odd companionship; 'craft' instinctively implies a time-worn approach to piecing, stitching or honing materials to produce decorative items that reflect the hand of the maker. By contrast designs produced with digital technologies conjure images of sleek plasticised forms and moulds, exhibiting efficient machinic logic as they progress along an assembly line, or through computer-aided machines.
These initial impressions are each useful for their ability to evoke poignant imagined realms to which the terms may attach themselves, but limiting for the binary oppositions they suggest, eclipsing the less visible territory that 'craft' and 'digital' may share.
As part of the larger social currency of our digital information age there is an implication that design will also have made a seamless transition from homespun charm to sleek efficiency but is this possible or desirable? Where do designers sit in relation to wider sweeping claims for social change in a digital world? A 'paperless office', interchangeable work/home hierarchies, or upgrading from print to electronic books, are a few examples indicative of 'revolutionary' changes that digital technologies have been suggested to promote but for now, the majority of books are consumed hand-to-page, commuting to/from work is a daily reality for most, and filing cabinets and drawers still bulge with reams of information recorded on paper.
As Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT's Media Lab, has written: 'the information superhighway is about the global movement of weightless bits at the speed of light'. The effect of such speed and efficient transferral of information has integrally affected the way designers - and much of Western society - conduct business and quickly send and receive 'packets of bits'. However, the physicality that designers contend with means that the way in which these 'bits' become translated into accumulated 'atoms' - tiny molecules that have accreted to form a particular materiality - means that the crafting of atoms is primarily how design is manifest in reality. For example, on screen stone may be represented with attributes of perhaps, 'greyness' yet through sight and touch we learn physical conditions of stone - cold, wet, hot, smooth, shiny or dull. Ultimately, such a material may be honed only to a particular breaking point, where the atoms pull apart and stony dust is all that remains.
Initially this appears a simple transaction, yet in the disciplines of architecture and design, the connection between bits and atoms relates to a historically fraught legacy. Too easily 'bits' of computers and 'atoms' of things are polarised and coerced into a wider moral debate pitting machined work (bad) against that of the human hand (good). This conflict can be traced from the Industrial Revolution through designed and written work of figures such as William Morris and his advocation for the nobility of craftsmanship through a medieval guild-based approach, to the fantastical utopias conjured by Antonio Santī Elia and the Futurists who revelled in imagined built opportunities of the future. Each carried admirable vision for improved societal ills, yet respectively failed through unsustainable costs of production and eventual bankruptcy, and tragedy in a motor accident; extreme ends to extreme visions.
Is it possible for contemporary design to achieve a seemingly necessary crossover between the poles? How might bits become pieces, without falling apart? The work and ideology of American designers Charles and Ray Eames is an inspiring precedent to draw on. Their enduring plywood chairs identify a design approach that negotiates between the then-technologically progressive experiments with moulded plywood splints for military use, and foresight for the aesthetic, ergonomic and financial advances of production. Imagery and accounts of the way this design process developed reveal hours of adjustments and testing crafting to transform the US Navy splint into celebrated seating. Though Eames 'designer objects' have been co-opted by real-estate agencies and media into imagery that advertises 'desirable lifestyle living', the plywood experiments are illustrative of a productive and questioning relationship between designer, material and new technological processes.
All the same, they were conceived in the 1940s. What are designers making now that actively work between new technologies that Negroponte reminds us are driven almost 100 per cent by the ability of [a] company's product or services to be rendered in digital form, and the physical limits of architecture and design, combined with a designer's hard-won intuition?
Hella Jongerius is one such designer who critically addresses the relationship between material limits, existing and new production methods, and her particular design sensibility. For Jongerius, this nexus is often reached through re-examining archival material of a commissioning company. 'Repeat', a series of upholstery fabrics she designed for Maharam in 2002 that carries a design repeat at the unusually extended length of four metres is an example of this. She describes the design process in her eponymous monograph: 'When I was commissioned from Maharam, I pored through the archives, using existing patterns and adding a new concept to them, the beauty of the fabrication process, of random factors. That beauty is a complete contradiction to the old way of thinking.'
Jongerius selected and combined distinctive motifs that Maharam had traditionally used, such as hound's tooth, twisting vines or flying geese at a magnified size. The digital fabric pattern was then overlaid with abstracted dots, numerals and notations drawn from the out-dated weaving cards used for instructing direction at the fabric mills. The resulting fabric carries an unusually extended length of pattern particular in its ability to allow for 'one off' patterned furniture: no two chairs are likely to carry the same motifs.
In this way, Jongerius translates traditional context into a thoroughly contemporary form that accommodates a savvy marketing logic and renders vibrant what could have remained stuffy motifs. As such, this project shrugs off the conventional mantle of nostalgia. As Emily King has noted, most often in uncoupling nostalgia from conservatism, design no longer warrants a bad name.
This effective uncoupling also points to a fascination many people have for 'stuff' and the way things are made, especially in tracing an understanding of how these processes change with time. Huw Morgan, co-director of London-based Graphic Thought Facility (GTF) has commented: 'what holds people's attention is probably GTF's ability to translate their collective interest or voyeurism in the way things are done through inventive ideas.As Morgan observes: 'People are all a bit interested in peering into that process, you know. It probably goes back to watching Playschool, and seeing how milk bottles are made, which is much more interesting than just the milk bottle itself.'
The efficiency with which digital tools present and conduct themselves mostly obscures their intricate workings; unlike the physical cause-and-effect communicated by mechanical machinery such as cogs and wheels, electronic circuitry is highly invisible and for most of us, unable to be tinkered with when things go wrong. For this increasing seamlessness and frustration when such efficiency fails there appears to be a growing interest in work that reveals its constituents in some measure. In the sense that Grace Cochrane has described craft as 'an interaction with materials and process in the pursuit of ideas' it seems the rich interaction between digital efficiency and physical necessity is a companionship contemporary designers are at a pivotal point to interpret thoughtfully.
Graphic Thought Facility with Emily King. 2001, How Does Digital Technology Affect You? GTF Bits World. Switzerland. Directions, Gabriele Capelli Editions.
Negroponte, Nicholas. 1995. Being Digital. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Verweij, Lucas (ed) with Louise Schouwenberg, 2003, Hella Jongerius, London: Phaidon Press Limited.
Cochrane, Grace, www.craftaustralia.com.au/ nationalForum/2004/papers/paper004.php
Graphic Thought Facility
Hella Jongerius
Maharam
MIT Media Lab
Nicholas Negroponte
Futurist Architecture
William Morris
Rebecca Roke is an architect and is currently undertaking her PhD at RMIT University where she is researching possible shared relationships between digitally informed technologies and processes for design and crafted approaches. She leads design studios in the School of Architecture at RMIT and has recently formed Maunu, a collaborative studio examining potentials for hand- and computer-generated design.
TAGS
+ Handmade
+ D.I.Y.
These initial impressions are each useful for their ability to evoke poignant imagined realms to which the terms may attach themselves, but limiting for the binary oppositions they suggest, eclipsing the less visible territory that 'craft' and 'digital' may share.
As part of the larger social currency of our digital information age there is an implication that design will also have made a seamless transition from homespun charm to sleek efficiency but is this possible or desirable? Where do designers sit in relation to wider sweeping claims for social change in a digital world? A 'paperless office', interchangeable work/home hierarchies, or upgrading from print to electronic books, are a few examples indicative of 'revolutionary' changes that digital technologies have been suggested to promote but for now, the majority of books are consumed hand-to-page, commuting to/from work is a daily reality for most, and filing cabinets and drawers still bulge with reams of information recorded on paper.
As Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT's Media Lab, has written: 'the information superhighway is about the global movement of weightless bits at the speed of light'. The effect of such speed and efficient transferral of information has integrally affected the way designers - and much of Western society - conduct business and quickly send and receive 'packets of bits'. However, the physicality that designers contend with means that the way in which these 'bits' become translated into accumulated 'atoms' - tiny molecules that have accreted to form a particular materiality - means that the crafting of atoms is primarily how design is manifest in reality. For example, on screen stone may be represented with attributes of perhaps, 'greyness' yet through sight and touch we learn physical conditions of stone - cold, wet, hot, smooth, shiny or dull. Ultimately, such a material may be honed only to a particular breaking point, where the atoms pull apart and stony dust is all that remains.
Initially this appears a simple transaction, yet in the disciplines of architecture and design, the connection between bits and atoms relates to a historically fraught legacy. Too easily 'bits' of computers and 'atoms' of things are polarised and coerced into a wider moral debate pitting machined work (bad) against that of the human hand (good). This conflict can be traced from the Industrial Revolution through designed and written work of figures such as William Morris and his advocation for the nobility of craftsmanship through a medieval guild-based approach, to the fantastical utopias conjured by Antonio Santī Elia and the Futurists who revelled in imagined built opportunities of the future. Each carried admirable vision for improved societal ills, yet respectively failed through unsustainable costs of production and eventual bankruptcy, and tragedy in a motor accident; extreme ends to extreme visions.
Is it possible for contemporary design to achieve a seemingly necessary crossover between the poles? How might bits become pieces, without falling apart? The work and ideology of American designers Charles and Ray Eames is an inspiring precedent to draw on. Their enduring plywood chairs identify a design approach that negotiates between the then-technologically progressive experiments with moulded plywood splints for military use, and foresight for the aesthetic, ergonomic and financial advances of production. Imagery and accounts of the way this design process developed reveal hours of adjustments and testing crafting to transform the US Navy splint into celebrated seating. Though Eames 'designer objects' have been co-opted by real-estate agencies and media into imagery that advertises 'desirable lifestyle living', the plywood experiments are illustrative of a productive and questioning relationship between designer, material and new technological processes.
All the same, they were conceived in the 1940s. What are designers making now that actively work between new technologies that Negroponte reminds us are driven almost 100 per cent by the ability of [a] company's product or services to be rendered in digital form, and the physical limits of architecture and design, combined with a designer's hard-won intuition?
Hella Jongerius is one such designer who critically addresses the relationship between material limits, existing and new production methods, and her particular design sensibility. For Jongerius, this nexus is often reached through re-examining archival material of a commissioning company. 'Repeat', a series of upholstery fabrics she designed for Maharam in 2002 that carries a design repeat at the unusually extended length of four metres is an example of this. She describes the design process in her eponymous monograph: 'When I was commissioned from Maharam, I pored through the archives, using existing patterns and adding a new concept to them, the beauty of the fabrication process, of random factors. That beauty is a complete contradiction to the old way of thinking.'
Jongerius selected and combined distinctive motifs that Maharam had traditionally used, such as hound's tooth, twisting vines or flying geese at a magnified size. The digital fabric pattern was then overlaid with abstracted dots, numerals and notations drawn from the out-dated weaving cards used for instructing direction at the fabric mills. The resulting fabric carries an unusually extended length of pattern particular in its ability to allow for 'one off' patterned furniture: no two chairs are likely to carry the same motifs.
In this way, Jongerius translates traditional context into a thoroughly contemporary form that accommodates a savvy marketing logic and renders vibrant what could have remained stuffy motifs. As such, this project shrugs off the conventional mantle of nostalgia. As Emily King has noted, most often in uncoupling nostalgia from conservatism, design no longer warrants a bad name.
This effective uncoupling also points to a fascination many people have for 'stuff' and the way things are made, especially in tracing an understanding of how these processes change with time. Huw Morgan, co-director of London-based Graphic Thought Facility (GTF) has commented: 'what holds people's attention is probably GTF's ability to translate their collective interest or voyeurism in the way things are done through inventive ideas.As Morgan observes: 'People are all a bit interested in peering into that process, you know. It probably goes back to watching Playschool, and seeing how milk bottles are made, which is much more interesting than just the milk bottle itself.'
The efficiency with which digital tools present and conduct themselves mostly obscures their intricate workings; unlike the physical cause-and-effect communicated by mechanical machinery such as cogs and wheels, electronic circuitry is highly invisible and for most of us, unable to be tinkered with when things go wrong. For this increasing seamlessness and frustration when such efficiency fails there appears to be a growing interest in work that reveals its constituents in some measure. In the sense that Grace Cochrane has described craft as 'an interaction with materials and process in the pursuit of ideas' it seems the rich interaction between digital efficiency and physical necessity is a companionship contemporary designers are at a pivotal point to interpret thoughtfully.
Graphic Thought Facility with Emily King. 2001, How Does Digital Technology Affect You? GTF Bits World. Switzerland. Directions, Gabriele Capelli Editions.
Negroponte, Nicholas. 1995. Being Digital. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Verweij, Lucas (ed) with Louise Schouwenberg, 2003, Hella Jongerius, London: Phaidon Press Limited.
Cochrane, Grace, www.craftaustralia.com.au/ nationalForum/2004/papers/paper004.php
Graphic Thought Facility Hella JongeriusMaharamMIT Media LabNicholas NegroponteFuturist ArchitectureWilliam MorrisRebecca Roke is an architect and is currently undertaking her PhD at RMIT University where she is researching possible shared relationships between digitally informed technologies and processes for design and crafted approaches. She leads design studios in the School of Architecture at RMIT and has recently formed Maunu, a collaborative studio examining potentials for hand- and computer-generated design.
TAGS
+ Handmade
+ D.I.Y.