{"id":128,"date":"2003-12-26T14:26:17","date_gmt":"2003-12-26T18:26:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoreti.ca\/?p=128"},"modified":"2003-12-26T14:26:17","modified_gmt":"2003-12-26T18:26:17","slug":"abstracting-craft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=128","title":{"rendered":"Abstracting Craft"},"content":{"rendered":"

Malcolm McCullough<\/a> is the author of Abstracting Craft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) a great book on craft in the digital age.<\/p>\n

ï¿Š
\n
\nWhat is craft and how does it relate to art on the one hand and industrial design on the other.<\/p>\n

“skill is the learned ability to do a useful process well.” (p. 3)<\/p>\n

Some elements of craft:
\n– a preconcieved end (it is utilitarian)
\n– it is made by “hand” with continuous human interaction
\n– works of craft are made out of a medium
\n– craft skill comes from play – continuous repeated interaction with a medium like wood or clay
\n– there is an intelligence that comes from\/with\/in hand work that cannot be defined abstractly
\n– it is often hard to survey a craft while practicing it – while working with your hands it is hard to talk about it<\/p>\n

McCullough has a great short history of craft in the introduction. He follows it up with a set of definitions (section 4 of chapter 1) that are excellent.<\/p>\n

If technology is a reliable and repeatable process craft is in the sense of skill is one that takes continuous human intervention to achieve its goal. A technology does not take the human intervention. Of course, there are now crafts built on technologies so that a wood worker uses technologies that remove some aspects of the work from human intervention. A potter can use a computer controlled kiln to bake the pots without intervening, but there is still skill in pottery.<\/p>\n

To what extent are play and craft connected. The computer game player experiences the continuous interaction and hand-eye coordination similar to a crafts person. Are games and design the craft of the digital age?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Malcolm McCullough is the author of Abstracting Craft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) a great book on craft in the digital age. ï¿Š<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}