By Gabrielle Kennedy / 09-02-2012

The Me Craft / You Industry (Imaging a Tailor-made Industrial landscape) symposium was held late last month at the Zuiderzeee Museum.  A fantastic array of designers, academics, and thinkers delivered their own thoughts on craft and its contributions to a current and future design economy.

Practically every speaker agreed that craft is an integral and dynamic contribution to the Dutch economy, but what remains unclear is how craft can help shape a different type of creative economy in the future.

Economist Pieter Tordoir thinks that in a globalized world we can’t move backwards.

Henk Oosterling strongly disagreed and is adamant that a return to a more craft-based economy will benefit all.  His point was less about an actual return, and more about a move towards an economy that places value on skill-based labour.

Craft creates 900 000 jobs in Holland, Oosterling estimated.  His views were spiced up with a dramatic film that beautifully communicated what a world devoid of crafts might look like.

“By craft I do not mean wicker basket makers at the local fairs,” he reminded the audience, “but a productive and cooperative network with real ambitions.  It is about valuing skilled manual labour, which has earned a bad reputation in this information economy.”

Using historical, philosophical and political examples, Oosterling concluded that a lack of craft can be interpreted as a lack of engagement.  

The overriding theme that peppered most of the speaker’s thoughts was that a world which devalues craft runs the risk of becoming unthinking and therefore less creative.  It’s a world that can be made fun of, but it is also a world that could potentially become dangerous.

“I think design simply reflects what we know,” said British designer Kieren Jones in an interview after the symposium.  “Craft allows us to develop.  Also, because craft is not so bogged down in industrial interests, it can respond more quickly to cultural and regional needs.”

Jurgen Bey, who together with Rianne Makkink, curated the “INDUSTRIOUS| artefacts, the evolution of crafts” exhibition currently running in the Zuiderzee Museum, spoke passionately about the local Enkhuizen region, which underwent a massive transformation in the 1930s as the sea was turned into farmland during a land reclamation project.  

People (quite literally) went from being fisherman to farmers and with that new tools and skills were needed.  “The goal was always to develop new fields and with that, new skills and new artefacts were needed to achieve them,” he said.

Bey also talked about the narrative of design and how people hankered for products that told stories that they could relate to.  “Form follows fiction,” was how he expressed it.  That position relates neatly back to Oosterling’s views that a more craft based economy is also a more creative one.

Smári McCarthy added that there seems to be three different perspectives on the issue.  “There are those who think industry is great," he said.  "Those who think craft is great, and those who think maybe we need something different."

By need he means what is needed to create a more sustainable, social and creative world populated by happy people.

“The problem is that with industrialization, craft became little more than hobbyism and that meant it was economically unproductive,” McCarthy said.  “Now we have Fab Labs, hacker spaces and peer to peer industrial spaces, but what we really need is a Napster moment in manufacturing.”

According to McCarthy this moment will come and will be a type of craft production albeit with industrial level output.  It won’t have the same economies of scale we have now and it will quickly be attacked by massive corporate interests.

“Can you imagine the day when Ikea has to deal with what Universal Studios is dealing with today?” McCarthy posited.  “The public will inevitable be targeted.”

Studio Glithero and Kieren Jones were two of the most interesting designers speaking about their ideas and projects at the symposium.

Sarah van Gameren of Studio Glithero told the audience that as a designer she has almost no interest in the end product.  “We are more interested in the moment of transformation,” she explained.

She went on to say that people living in developed countries need no more stuff and that her work is really only trying to find out what role designers can play in a new type of non-consumerist world.

Kieren Jones’ “Chicken Project” came about after he gave piles of old design magazines to a neighbour who needed them for her teaching courses.  The pair got talking and she mentioned how much she would like to raise chickens in her backyard but didn’t know how to build a pen.

Jones said he’d build her a pen in exchange for six eggs per week.  He did and the egg supply continued until the day the hen died.

The neighbour delivered the dead hen to Jones who decided to continue using her remains for various projects.  He made a chicken curry then tanned the skin to make a leather jacket. He erected a tiny Chinese kiln and ground the bones down into powder, which he used to make a porcelain eggcup.

“I really believe in what Jurgen Bey said about form following fiction,” said Jones.  “You start with a dream and it might seem unrealistic at first, but it does manage to create a type of fictional possibility.  I mean why can’t we have a more socially conscious economy? Why couldn’t we personally know the person who made our egg cup?”

Jones’ chicken bone eggcups are valued at 1200 pounds.

“Of course nobody will pay that for a regular tea cup,” Jones continued, “but if everyone in the entire production process from excavator to factory worker was paid a fair wage in the current production model, things would cost closer to this amount than the few pounds you find them for in Ikea today.”

His point is that the current manufacturing model makes no sense socially and it is the social cost of this system that needs to drive change.

“I do not want to come across as airy fairy, but the only way to move forward and deal with the gross inequalities that currently exist is to develop an economy with a social conscience,” he said.

“We are not even close to this, but I can not see a future economy that relies on cheap labour located on the other side of the world working for much longer.”




INDUSTRIOUS | artefacts at the Zuiderzee Museum runs till February 12.

Images: main - “The Chicken Project” by Kieren Jones. Henk Oosterling and Jurgen Bey with Rianne Makkink at the Me Craft / You Industry symposium by Lizzy Kalisvaart.

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