Tarkko Oksala & Tufan Orel
Craft, Technology and Design Introduction The testimony of the persistence of craft heritage in some cultures, in design practices and in recent craft sensibility of consumers, can help us better understand today’s design reality. Meanwhile, it also sheds light on the choice of this special theme – craft, technology, design – for this book project. What is more, this theme hopes to bring together and be beneficial for all the participating scholars, researchers, designers and artisans, allowing them to exchange/coordinate their points of view and their expertise, and hence find new solutions for the major design challenges of today. Design knowledge has its origins in Craft and the works of Craftsmen. We can refer back to the Poiesis of Aristotle and the builders of the cathedrals in the Middle Ages. In the sixteenth century, the idea of Disegno was well propagated in Italy by Zuccari and in Portugal by Francis Hollanda. In England, Thomas More defends in his Utopia the idea of Craft, in the The New Atlantis, Francis Bacon was already talking about material and immaterial Designs of everyday objects (such as light, sound, perfume and food designs). During the first Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, when trade was passed to the manufacturers, it was the energy problem (electromagnetic, kinetic, automatic power control) which dominated the main debates in the scientific milieu, and at that time design also made itself an autonomous activity, as was witnessed in the manufacturing projects of Wedgwood. Now the new workman - the designer - is paid twice as much as the craftsman, and is mainly involved in drawing design objects according to market demands: differentiation of sex, social classes, and age groups. In the nineteenth century, the heyday of the rise of Capitalism, the new factories and their normalisation and uniformalisation of human gestures and tastes created a counter movement: the Arts and Crafts Movement of William Morris and Mathew Arnold. In that century of revolutions, the craft problem will not be an easy case to deal with for some other intellectuals like, for example, Oscar Wilde, who will defend the cause of Craft in the UK and will be a publicist of design when he visits The United States. So, before Craft completely evaporates in what becomes an outright ‘design affair’, it will pass by this transitory period that we may call the 10
