Context

Digital Manual was conceived in the context of the perceived threat posed by automation to the manual crafts. It was influenced by sociologist and philosopher Richard Sennett’s argument in The Craftsman (2008) that working with our hands is fundamental to humans and our desire to make things well is innate. Yet while acknowledging that digital fabrication has marginalised the crafts, does it follow that manual skills will disappear altogether?

The threat to manual workmanship has been a key concern from the industrialisation of the eighteenth century to the digital revolution of the twentieth century. The industrial era saw a powerful argument emerge in defence of craftspeople of all kinds, who in the words of William Morris were needed to elevate the purely utilitarian from ‘ugly’ to ‘beautiful’. In Morris’ view, ‘applied art’, meaning an ‘ornamental quality which men choose to add to articles of utility’, was vital to dignify design in a mechanised age; craftspeople such as ‘the mason, the joiner, the cabinet-maker, the carver’ remain essential (Morris 1901).

In the same way that industrialisation threatened craft production in the nineteenth century, so too does contemporary digital fabrication threaten manual crafts today. In architecture, trades such as bricklaying are supposedly headed for obsolescence. In 2006, Swiss architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler led a research project entitled Programmed Wall, which constructed a brick wall with an industrial robotic arm. Three years later, they constructed a brick wall in situ, Pike Loop. These two events made the demise of bricklaying seem inevitable. According to Sennett, the craftsperson’s skills are developed over time with continued practice, to the point where bodily movements are ingrained and the process of making becomes automatic. If robots can be programmed to do the same without extensive practice and time, why would we continue to lay bricks by hand?

Programmed Wall and Pike Loop were designed to be sculptural, in order to show the potential of a robot versus a mason. For Gramazio and Kohler, walls built by robots can afford an infinite number of design configurations and patterns without ‘extra effort’ (Gramazio and Kohler 2016). Unlike the brick layer, the robot has the ability to position each brick in a different way without optical reference or measurement. The overall wall designs, therefore, have unique spatial disposition and procedural logic, but they do not perform any differently to the wall made by hand. This sets up a key position for Digital Manual: that the added value is in the design aspect. For example, a wall can be assembled with more geometrical compositions and optimised for structure, porosity, performance and design language.

Digital Manual also proposes that there is added social value in maintaining a balanced human and automated workforce. The project acknowledges the social and economic implication of industrial realities but introduces practices such as craft, design and decorative art as equally vital considerations. David Pye, a professor of furniture design at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s and 70s, presented a clear distinction in his book The Nature and Art of Workmanship (1968) between made by hand with risk and made by machine with certainty. Workmanship for Pye is making that employs ‘any kind of technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgement, dexterity, and care which the maker exercises as he works’ (Pye 1968). Departing from this rigid characterisation, Digital Manual explores

design manufacture as always involving varying degrees of risk and certainty. It rejects the romanticisation of hand-crafted work and maintains its relevance in an age of automation. Ensuring that future generations of makers can continue to lay bricks and render walls by hand is an issue of social sustainability.

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7 View of Code-Bothy’s oculus, 2020.