Let’s look a little more closely at manual skills, material goods, artisans . . . and skill as a value.
I referred above to Sturt and the displacement of a whole class of ‘wrights’ from the sphere in which substantial, individual means of production were locally produced. Wrights were involved in the construction, keeping in service and fitness for purpose of the *machines* of pre-industrial economic life: cartwright, millwright, wheelwright, shipwright, wainwright, ploughwright . . . I’m less sure about the arkwright! There likewise were varieties of smiths (copper, iron, tin, silver; also armourers and blade-makers) and the masons.
These latter generally were makers of more prestigious, less mundane, more extensive assemblies of materials although, certainly by Victorian times, shipwrights and millwrights had large and expensive configurations of stuff to be accountable for too, and had also become implicated in the middle and upper echelons of quite complex divisions of labour and social class.
The tacitly held knowledges of these people (these men) enabled them to do work of elegance and produce objects that were beautiful and useful - and it paid you to use them if you wanted your outlay on ‘capital goods’ and infrastructure to be repaid with a long and effective working life. The beauty arose from the fitness for use and from the account that skill was able to take, of the *suchness* of the materials - the oak, the ash and elm, the chestnut and pine, the iron, the bronze - and of the tools (and the genres of their deployment): the adze, two-man pit-saw, plane, beetle and wedges, drawknife, bellows and fire, cold chisel, forge-hammer and anvil, block and tackle.
And the fitness for use arose on one hand from the teaching-and-showing of the masters, and on the other, from the generations of little-changing use (changing more in ships and mills than carts and ploughs, until Sturt's time) and the visibility - to the users - of the local, known makers, who were seen to be responsible for the qualities-in-use of the objects, which were required to last a lifetime and more. In such people over generations, skill began to become an agent of investment; a guarantor of place in a status hierarchy for the artisan; and remained a source of pride and sensual pleasure and social gratification for the craftsman.
# Emerging 'craft-art', emerging 'design' Things shifted for an early-20th century generation of ‘art’ craftspeople. I think of Eric Gill and the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic in Ditchling, and of Frank Brangwyn - who also retired to Ditchling - who believed (on the Morris model) that as well as directly **making** art (a painting, an engraving) an artist should be able to **design** anything for beauty or use: book, mural, house.
During their era, though, there was increasing use of machine tools, industrial materials and industrialisation (corporatising) of requirements: technological and commercial innovations in printing, building-usage, public works, advertising and corporate identity. Edward Johnston (another Ditchling producer) designed for the London underground network.
With these shifts there began to emerge disciplines of *design* separated from execution, out of what earlier had been tacit components of practice in the direct production by hand of unique artefacts or configurations of gear. The Bauhaus is a noted instance of this emergence of design practice; so is the innovative (and now iconic) work done by both Gill and Johnston (both craft-producers) on new typefaces for commercial printing and lettering. ’Typography’ only appeared in this period as a ‘professional’ practice, having previously been a tacit aspect of work done by craft producers - printers or compositors.
At the present time, design has become an utterly commonplace field of skill, to the extent that ‘design-based industries’ have become a staple of national and local government industrial investment strategies, serving a fundamental expectation of innovation in products, services and forms of communication, consumption and social organisation; which in turn, is an artefact of a deep liberal belief that ever-expanding growth in economies is the only possible way to go.
# The baby-boomer, at home in design I have to say that I find myself - a designer (educated as a chemical engineer, self-educated as a typographer; later, schooled - self-schooled, self-skilled - in learning-design and the design-of-design) - quite happy with this.
As a teenager I fully accepted ‘beautiful form follows well-specified function’ as an ethos of 60s modernist architecture: I remember loving the lines and spaces in buildings of Pier Luigi Nervi and structures of the Ove Arup partnership. I deeply appreciate the elegance of form and function in the functional-aesthetic products of industrial design in my everyday life: my very simple IKEA food grater, my Mac operating system, my technical-fabric Rohan trousers, my digital realisation of the hand-cut Doves type that Thomas Cobden-Sanderson threw into the Thames at Hammersmith.
And I love also my few small luxurious items of craft contemplation: some wood-fired ceramics, some wooden bowls, some books (on design), a hand-painted buddhist tangka painting.
So: what is the relationship today between ‘craft’ and ‘design’? Whatever it is, it is different from the relationship that existed for Sturt’s generation, or Morris, or Gill and Johnston. And what *are* the skills of design-of-objects - and of the *design-of-genres* - that has become an inseparable (if un-attended-to) aspect of innovation in workplaces and forces of production; and the genre-skills of design-based production, and craft-based artisanal production as a livelihood, and **design-of-work**?
Next (back): Politics of skill, crisis of skill