The natural evolution of craft

With opposable thumbs and capacity for abstract thought, we primates have the ability to hold and manipulate tools to achieve imagined ends. Through symbolic representation, man has the added capacity to use tools to manipulate symbols, further abstracting our unique abilities as homo faber, man as tool-maker. Through our conscious evolution, we continue to develop new tools – cheaper, faster, better, and more enjoyable ways of doing whatever it is that we do. Over centuries of accumulated knowledge, we have added enormous capacity in power and precision to these five-fingered extensions of ourselves.

With this ubiquitous use of tools, trying to define what is ‘hand made’ is a slippery slope and one of the shortest paths to an argument among craftsmen. Technical arguments are used to prove what are essentially moralistic positions. In an attempt to clarify the argument, David Pye supplants the term ‘hand-made’ with ‘the workmanship of risk’ contrasted with ‘the workmanship of certainty.’ ‘Workmanship of risk’ is associated with human-centered processes dependent on judgment and dexterity, while the ‘workmanship of certainty’ depends on ‘determiningbased’ methods of manufacturing using mechanical or computer control. Yet Pye states that, “In fact the workmanship of risk in most trades is hardly ever seen, and has hardly ever been known, in a pure form, considering the ancient use of templates, jigs, machines and other shapedetermining systems, which reduce risk.” (1) He explains that we maintain a romanticized view that before the Industrial Revolution, everything was made without machines. However, the reality is that even medieval craftsmen used machinery to reduce risk and multiply labor. In fact, the aspect of pre-19th century production that most interested William Morris was not the use of machines, but the lack of division of labor. (2)

It is, therefore, a question of autonomy, not technology, which defines the boundaries of craft. Humans have always worked to extend their capacity with tools. It wasn’t until separation by specialization in industrial manufacturing isolated the individual from the whole of the process that we experienced our loss of participation. The romantic term ‘hand-craft’ is more about a level of autonomy that existed at a time when manufacturing was done by an individual. In Abstracting Craft: the Practiced Digital Hand, Malcolm McCullough writes, “The degree of personal participation, more than any degree of independence from machine technology, influences perceptions of craft in work.” (3)

If craft is thus defined by breadth of participation rather than historical technique, then the technical argument is irrelevant. The goal is no longer moralistic preservation but optimistic evolution. Before the reaction to mass-production that pushed craft into romantic historicism, the crafts were the source of innovation, product development, and new means of manufacturing. Continuing in that tradition today, the craftsman has the capacity to borrow from industry in the same way that industry borrows from craft. Technical and industrial processes are not the enemy; they are an option (an option that can be recombined with other methods to engender something new). And the maker is free to use any technology at his fingertips to materialize his vision.

The natural evolution of technology

As calculus emerged in the 17th Century to explain concepts for rate of change, the rate of change for technology became exponential. Through an evolutionary process, each successive technology builds on the knowledge base that preceded it, complementing the accumulated knowledge in society. And with each new development evolves new possibilities for application and expression. Pye writes: “In its early days the Modern Movement… held that machine tools and mechanical processes, i.e. determining-systems, ought not to be used to reproduce forms which originated in hand work, but that The Machine should be used so as to evolve its own characteristic forms.” (4) Much of modernism worked to develop characteristic forms for the technology of the time. But for most of the 20th Century machines followed Euclidean geometry, isolating movement and form development into arcs and lines. Most books currently available on the geometry of design reflect the same Euclidean perspective. Today, however, computer-aided design and manufacturing allows the Machine to generate objects composed of complex curves and surfaces. And beyond the processes of material removal and deformation, additive Rapid Prototyping processes have been included in the repertoire of The Machine: SLS, SLA, FDM, LOM, and other acronyms have been added to the vocabulary of form-giving that give us the capacity to generate extremely complex forms, detailed to a thousandth of an inch, with interior surfaces never possible before. Considering this expanded palette, what are the characteristic forms that The Machine should now be used to evolve?

Growth structures in nature

Consider that the machine and our ‘man-made’ reality are not outside of nature, but a continuation of its evolution, subject to the same physical and mathematical laws. Historically, the applied arts have looked to nature for inspiration in structure and aesthetics; and today we can look more deeply. By mapping the human genome, we engender an understanding of the world as the developmental expression of underlying encoded structure. Through our understanding of chaos and other complex mathematics, we believe that the world is an expression of emergent systems. In his book, Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ant, Brains, Cities and Software, Steven Johnson describes how trees, lungs and ant colonies emerge through an accumulation of discreet responses based on a series of simple rules. The study of fractals, chaos, and swarms have changed our understanding of the development of forms, both natural and man-made. What were mathematical monsters, the ‘pathological’ exceptions to Platonic and Euclidean ideal forms, have become natural expressions of universal systems; clouds and coastlines are not what they used to be. Fractal geometry provides a means of deconstructing the forms of nature into primitive elements for more complex compositions based on selfsimilar, repeating patterns. As our understanding of nature changes, so does our interpretive expression of it.

Biophilia – the nature of our nature

Man is a product of, as well as an integral part of, nature. Edward O. Wilson “…proposed the existence of a genetic basis for the human predilection towards the natural world. This concept, which Wilson called ‘biophilia,’ is loosely suggested by certain affinities and aversions which occur in societies widely separated by geography and ritual.” (5) His ‘Biophilia Hypothesis’ was about our socio-biological development, in which culture developed in tandem with the genes of our existence. Genes and ‘memes’ (Richard Dawkins idea-genes) are not two isolated systems of transferring information through time, but two interdependent systems developing in a symbiotic relationship.

Paul Weiss detailed some of the structure of our biophilic proclivity:

(1) The pleasing aspects of organic forms stem from their high degree of general regularity combined with an infinite variety of detail. (2) The order expressed in the developed form, however, is but the result of the orderliness of the underlying formative processes which have led to the formed product and have left their imprint on it: what we read in the finished form is the historic record of it formation. (3) Even if two organic systems were to start out in absolute identity, the fact that in their subsequent developmental histories they would be faced with nonidentical incidents and environmental contingencies would necessarily make for divergence in the details of their final products. (4) Yet, since their overall results still turn out to be reasonably similar, we realize that capricious and unpredictable deviations form the standard course must have been kept, if not strictly in line, certainly within a safe margin by the governing action of their respective systems, which resist disruption; a system owes its orderly self-realization and self-preservation to its very capacity to moderate or compensate the excesses of its members. (5) The overall result thus gives us the satisfying impression of a collective task well accomplished by the harmonious cooperation under mutual control of members of a group which, but for these restraints, would yield blind chaos. (6) The viability of an organic form depends on the precarious balance between rigidity of overall design on the one hand and flexibility of adjustment left to its execution on the other; too much aberrance on one side or the other would jeopardize survival. This is the biological foundation of what we call ‘sense of proportions.’ (6)

I would like to focus on the third point from Weiss’ list: organic systems that may start from an identical position, inevitably diverge into unique outcomes. This is the biophilic explanation for variance. Nothing in our biological surroundings is a direct duplication-nature is very efficient that way. Reproduction in nature, whether the splitting of an amoeba or the replication of human DNA, inevitably results in slight mutations, which over time, translate into significant changes.

In evolutionary terms, nature creates variety to ensure survival. Multiple mutations are generated, and only some will thrive and survive. There is no one answer to continuously changing environmental conditions, no way of predicting the future. So the best answer at any given moment is the greatest number of answers possible, some of which will succeed and propagate. What if designers mimicked nature, and designed greater and greater varieties of things, letting individual choice decide what goes forward? Why not design for variety, for distinction, for individual nuance, as nature does?

Variance

Modernism and the Industrial Revolution standardized production. Prioritizing consistency over variety, quantity over quality, industry took the lowest cost approach to serially produce identical multiples. The Craft Revival fought to sustain the unique object through more autonomous, human-centered means of production. The laments of Walter Benjamin and David Pye are based in duplication, on methods of manufacture that create copies of an original prototype. In an essay titled “The Technologies of Self-Fashioning,” Tufan Orel explains that the model-series relationship of duplication is not the only possible format. He describes another option; that of theme and variation, where each reproduction in the series is a unique application of the model with changes. In this type of system, the outcomes vary rather than duplicate the original model. (7)

As a part of this natural order, our perceptual skills are tuned to change, and we are drawn to such variation. In Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Christopher Alexander writes that it is “departures from the norm which stand out in our minds, rather than the norm itself. Their wrongness is somehow more immediate than the rightness of less peculiar behavior, and therefore more compelling.” (8) Similarly, Gombrich wrote about how this awareness by difference then keys in our scrutiny in perception, moving from ‘seeing’ to ‘attending,’ or from an unnoticed equilibrium in the dynamic of ‘seeing, knowing, and expecting’ in a more actively engaged investigation. (9)

Pleasure in perception exists somewhere between monotony and confusion, where there is a level of order that keeps the eye moving without overwhelming the mind. (10) Identical elements are quickly rendered into pattern as the mind searches for peculiarities and differences. A line of identical beads are quickly reduced to pattern. However, if one perceives complexity through variety, self-similar rather than self-replicating elements, then the eye continues searching for relationships, keeping perception engaged.

Towards a new system of production and a new aesthetic

If Wilson’s sociobiological gene-culture co-evolution is true, and our cultural cravings and perceptual systems evolved in tandem with nature, then it is no wonder that we find pleasure in variety. How can we reestablish that sense of variety in the products with which we surround ourselves? Ruskin, Morris, and Ashbee, leaders of the Craft Revival, advocated ‘the hand’ as the savior against the machine, returning to individual making as a social resistance to the homogenization of machine culture, heralding the individual object as a metaphor for humanity. However, they lost the war to economies of scale, and the mighty Bic pen won out over the hand-made.

New means of flexible manufacturing could attain what an earlier generation sought to accomplish. By integrating rapid prototyping and desktop manufacturing, we have the potential to bring manufacturing back into the atelier. Ruskin might turn in his grave at this suggestion, as it does not share the same romanticism for the pleasure of handwork, but it does share the goal of individual production for the masses, personal objects for every-day use.

Organic Programming

As digital manufacturing processes open up new means of making, they will also afford new aesthetic formats. Peter Fuller, in his insightful essay “The Search for a Postmodern Aesthetic,” advocates a rejection of modernist machine aesthetics and looks to the emergence of a new aesthetic rooted in nature via digital processes. He explains that “the problem for a new aesthetic based on an imaginative response to nature, on the recovery of biophilia, has been our inability to ‘read’ and make sense of these ‘natural languages’, or to find any effective symbolic equivalents for them. But it may be that it is just here that the higher mathematics, physics and new information processing procedures associated with advances in computer technology, can help.” (11)

Utilizing natural simulations in programming, we can create generative systems for the design and manufacture of objects of use. By integrating the mathematical structures of nature responsible for variance, along with the continuous changeability of computer-controlled manufacturing systems, each object produced has the potential to be an original, sharing characteristics and evolutionary history with its sibling (same genetic code, different expression).

What if objects are generated like trees; if the object is the expression of the entelechy, or intention, not in an absolute way, but more through methods of suggestion rather than command, evolutionary rather than deterministic. In writing code to generate objects, elements of organic growth can be included. Describing such generative systems, McCullough explains this “design process really occurs in two stages: composing a structure, and then exploring the consequences of that structure. (12) Parameters in code establish the boundaries and proclivities of the design, while the specific outcome is a product of the program.

Negotiating the space between control and chaos, allowing the affordances of unpredictability to be a significant part of the process of form generation is akin to the ‘happy accident’ of craft. One cannot know the outcome until the process is complete. Describing similarities in software development, Steven Johnson writes, “The first few decades of software were essentially creationist in philosophy-an almighty power wills the program into being. But the next generation is profoundly Darwinian.” (13)

From hand to machine and back again

In this enhanced cyborg reality, as we reprocess cultural content, the ‘digital’ enhances our man-made reality. But because we are physical, sentient beings processing our empirical experience through polysensory input, it is important to acknowledge the need for the digital to cycle back to the analog for our apprehension. We do not think, see, or feel in binary. Sound, image, and touch are the major inputs, followed by synaesthetic experiences of taste and smell.

The development of the digital is dependent on a feedback loop through the analog. The immediate example of this is the hand-eye coordination of the mouse interface. The hand moves the mouse, which moves the cursor; the eye sees the cursor, tracks the motion; the brain redirects the hand to redirect the mouse… It is a cyclical feedback loop through physical+artificial intelligence, executed dynamically, on-the-fly.

Expand this model to the processes of computer aided design and manufacturing. Just as one follows the signs and feedback of moving a knife through a loaf of bread, the process of moving from physical to virtual to physical is an informative feedback cycle of input and output. At each step there are affordances and limitations of the tools being used. Consider a virtual CAD model executed through a series of mouse clicks and menu choices then output to a 3D prototyping machine to manifest a physical representation of the virtual model. That step requires a translation resulting in changes to the form (like the old game of ‘telephone,’ where an idea is whispered from one person to the next resulting in a radical transformation via sequential shifts in translation creating an informational butterfly effect). Most 3D prototyping processes divide a model into a stack of layers to varying degrees of resolution, resulting in tiny visible steps in the model. The grainy, opaque, stepped, slightly warped object result from a prototyping machine can be surprisingly far from the digital rendering of the virtual model. Results from the process can be a supreme disappointment or a ‘happy accident.’ Either way, it informs the process going into the next cycle.

Tightening the loop

With the tools of industrial design and production becoming more accessible, both technically and financially, the divisions of labor decried by Morris are being reversed. Just as a single individual using desktop publishing technology can now run a publishing house or recording studio from their living room, so they will soon be able to build their own integrated manufacturing plant and design office. Desktop manufacturing systems are being designed to not only manifest a form, but to manufacture a product replete with internal circuitry and user-interface.

Through the process of making, by whatever means chosen, one must negotiate the space between vision and actualization. Whether drawing or drilling, there is a feedback loop between action and reaction that informs process. By tightening the loop, speeding the circuit of communication between visualization and tangible production, the process of design and making becomes a more direct manipulation of material. Reading the prototype is like reading the saw cut or hammer-mark- action, affect, adjustment, action… It’s a conversation with the medium through process. Discussing how this applies in the digital context, McCullough writes, “Tightening this loop between conception and execution has the potential to reconcile some of the separation of design and fabrication… Thus, after two centuries of separation, the conception and execution of everyday objects are once again in the same hands.” (14)

Returning to the idea of craft as breadth of participation, we now have a new model of something between craft and design, more akin to a time when craftsmen made the products of a society. We are moving towards something between mass production and the ‘hand-made,’ a way of creating individual objects on a mass-production scale.

Designer as Programmer

Code is currency; it is an equalizing environment that is text as object. Rule structures become the basis of form evolution. The specific outcome is an emergent result of the execution of the program. The idea is scripted; the result is experienced. For what is the designer responsible? What is the designer’s product? The designer-as-programmer determines the parameters and establishes the basis of form generation.

John Frazer of the Architectural Association in London has been working with similar processes in architecture. He describes the approach as a packet-of-seeds as opposed to a bag-of-bricks process, in which the architect is a catalyst rather than a designer. The architecture is then a form of artificial life subject to replication and selection. (15)

How much control does the designer/programmer maintain or how much is relegated to the process/program? Consider that any software environment is a collection of options, relegating control. Even the underlying language behind it is a rule-based system with its own limitations. For example, in Rhino3D a derivation of Visual Basic, RhinoScript can be used to drive the command structure of the software. In the end, it seems akin to using sign language to a direct a crane operator; the communication is very limited, but effective.

The tool affords a limited range of possibilities to the user. What about customizing the tools? As Mike Cooley explains in an essay titled “From Brunelleschi to CAD-CAM,” “The computer excels in analysis and numerical computation, the human mind in pattern recognition, the assessment of complicated situations and the intuitive leap to new solutions. If these different abilities can be combined, they amount to something much more powerful and effective than anything we have had before.” (16) By hybridizing the human-computer skill-sets, the designer/programmer can maximize the symbiotic potential of digital tools by climbing behind the graphical user interface and making changes. By including flexibility and interactive development in the digital environment, the tools can grow and change, departing from, but still a product of, the original intention.

One of the departures here is that the designer is making the tools he uses. This is similar to the tradition of the blacksmith – for whom, if a project warrants a tool that is not at-hand, such as a chisel or pliers, then the smith makes it (interestingly, out of the same material he will be affecting with the tool). The designer-as-programmer creates his own scripts, toolbars, and icons, tailored to the job at hand – fulfilling the evolutionary role as homo-faber, or tool maker, using the medium to affect the medium. By customizing tools, one opens up new possibilities for what they might do. By getting behind the scenes of the virtual stage of digital design, a new level of control and exploration is exposed.

Footnotes:

1. David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 10.
2. Ibid., 10-12.
3. Malcolm McCullough, Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1996), 69.
4. David Pye, The Nature of Design (Reinhold Publishing Corp., 1964), 60.
5. David Stairs, “Biophilia Technophilia: Examining the Nature/ Culture Split in Design Theory,” Design Issues 13, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 37-39.
6. Paul Weiss, “Organic Form: Scientific and Aesthetic Aspects,” in The Visual Arts Today, ed. Gregory Kepes (Connecticut, USA: Wesleyan University Press, 1960), 181-194.
7. Tufan Orel, “The Technologies of Self-Fashioning: Beyond Universality and Variance of the Industrial Product,” in The Immaterial Society (Prentice Hall, 1992), 46.
8. Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1964), 22.
9. Ernst Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1984), 151.
10. Ibid. 54.
11. Peter Fuller, “The Search for a Postmodern Aesthetic,” in Design After Modernism, ed. John Thackara, (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 130.
12. Malcolm McCullough, Abstracting Craft, 229.
13. Steven Johnson, Emergence – The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York: Scribner, 2001), 169.
14. Malcolm McCullough, Abstracting Craft, 178-179.
15. James Steele, Architecture and Computers: action and reaction in the digital design revolution (London: Lawrence King, 2001), 38.
16. Mike Cooley, “From Brunelleschi to CAD-CAM,” in Design After Modernism, ed. John Thackara (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 205.

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