Charlotte Taillet

A craft, a house, a food, that comes from one’s hands or heart, one’s shared experience with other people in a community, one’s learned ideas and symbols, visibly connects persons and groups to society and to the reality around them. That interconnection is material culture. Material culture is made up of tangible things crafted, shaped, altered, and used across time and across space. It is inherently personal and social, mental and physical. It is art, architecture, food, clothing, and furnishing. But more so, it is the weave of those objects in the everyday lives of individuals and communities.…It is the gestures and processes that extend ideas and feelings into three-dimensional form.

—Simon J. Bronner, American Material Culture and Folklife

Craft denotes a spectrum of activity that ranges from professional to amateur production, typically resulting in objects traded publically for profit and those constructed privately for pleasure. This characterization presents a false dichotomy, as the conditions of leisure often yield ideas and objects that can have a greater use value than their own self-contained pleasure. While reading various forms of how-to guides from my home workshop, I have found that literary engagement with “functional texts” not only catalyzes the design process but also offers imaginative alternatives to entrenched patterns of social relating. Furthermore, the self-initiated culture of craftsmanship promotes active self-becoming, which I believe is necessary to critically engage a culture dominated by mass consumption.

As far as production processes go, I do not believe that “mass” is inherently bad. For instance, do mass produced domestic products allow for a global culture of intimacy? How do products connect us to one another, and not simply to more products? Objects, and the processes by which they are made, contain the political and cultural ideologies that shape behavior and determine societies; products are manifestations of specific knowledges. In our climate of increasing standardization, it is important to consider the power of design to represent certain histories and values while obscuring others. Considering that the transmission of knowledge is the origin of design, craft is both a process and a product that, in turn, designs the self and the social as we form communicative landscapes.