Craft has traditionally been interpreted as a combination of individual creativity and closeness to materials or making. Recently, these phenomena have become more acutely attached to design. My World is an international exhibition for Experimenta 2005, the Lisbon Design Biennale, that considers the causes and manifestations of this trend. The exhibition is curated by Emily Campbell, Head of Architecture and Design at the British Council and freelance curator, Andree Cooke.
Globalisation and the rapid advance of digital technologies have created an anxiety about loss of identity. Products, environments and media increasingly share visual languages from which traces of geographical or personal origin have been erased.
In the last decade creative categories – between art, design and craft, for example – have also blended. A “design” product for an applied purpose may take on decorative or manufacturing qualities associated with a craft item, or conceptual thinking more usually associated with fine arts. Artists, likewise, utilise manufacturing techniques associated with mass-produced design or create artefacts with purpose and function. Finally, even as consumers we are encouraged to think about our own creative potential.
When technology makes perfection possible and even ordinary in this way, and the globalisation of business and communication makes visual language universal, designers – and consumers – get bored. The response we see in design is an assertion of personal quality: a creator’s personal story or own leitmotifs made explicit and integral to a product and are offered as alternatives to the all-pervasive, objective world of commercial brands. Inherent in this trend of personalisation are a new emphasis on and re-appraisal of the idea of craft, and a new kind of entrepreneurship.
This is the subject of My World. Within this overall theme are four areas in which craft can be seen to influence design.
Technology
Digital technology is one of the most intriguing and unexplained places we find a new kind of craft. It is clear that craft in many senses – ingenuity, brilliant technical manipulation, deliberate and unique personal expression – does exist. The practitioners that manipulate pixels with the most affecting results the are the ones that have craft – a vision of possibility combined with intimate acquaintance with software. Additionally, since the digital realm is relatively unconstrained by protocol and convention, it allows designers – and everyone else – unprecedented license to distribute their work to audiences and customers hitherto inaccessible. It is particularly true of the digital environment that design, production and distribution are all autonomous functions linked by craft.
Entrepreneurship
Many designers are “industries of one” – engaged in the production and sales of their own products. These practitioners invent new and entrepreneurial forms of distribution, especially through the internet, eliminating agents and middle-men. Maintaining this integrity of product, source and consumer community is a new craft which deliberately thwarts the conventional channels and media of commercial production and sales. Many commercial companies offer forms of customisation and personalisation in imitation of this kind of craft.
Localisation
There has been a resurgence of interest in local craft, particularly in the materials and techniques that define artefacts of a world new to design – like India, Africa and Brazil – which is more intense than it has been since the great days of exploration and Eastern trade routes. This interest is spurred by a desire to preserve as well as advance craft skills that are at risk of erasure through cultural obsolescence. It is also to some extent in spite of industrial and technical progress that force all things into the same forms, while at the same time, the global and historical perspective of design can help create new meanings and usages for traditional things, and share a sense of that meaning with makers and handcrafters.
Transformation
Designers increasingly sense and fear the apocalyptic use of earth’s resources. Recycling and the re-use of materials are often low-tech and presuppose return to craft methods of production in which the manufacturing process and history of a product is on show as a narrative, explicit element. The quasi-alchemical transformation of certain familiar or banal, industrial products and materials into artful new things is a strong current in contemporary furniture and product design. It is no longer enough for a product to have form; now it must have content, a story to tell, a metaphorical force.
My World is a project that will explore the meaning and status of craft in design in the early years of the 21st century. It is conceived as a touring exhibition and programme suitable for advanced design markets where craft and design have a more explicit separation than is the case in less developed countries. A central feature of the exhibition will be the British Council’s commission of new work from seven young British designers in response to this outline: animator Danny Brown, film-makers Neutral, product designers Peter Traag, Doshi Levien, Committee and WOKMedia, and textile designer Alison Willoughby. Above all, the exhibition is intended to create a platform for a series of interactive events designed to give visitors to the exhibition the energy and desire to make things.
My World's tour schedule is as follows:
Lisbon, Portugal - September 2005
Contemporary Arts Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania - January 20th to February 10th 2006.
Norskform in Oslo, Norway - March 16th to May 10th 2006
Design Museum in London, UK - June 10th to September 10th 2006
Biennial of Industrial Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia - October 1st to November 1st 2006
Design Museum in Tallin, Estonia - February - March 2007
Please note that this is not the finalised tour and other venues are currently being confirmed for 2006-7.
More detailed information on the designers included in My World can be found on our My World Designers page
For more information on My World, contact Sorrel Hershberg.
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