The Maker Movement a Century Before the Maker Movement
Cities across America and the world are now home to makerspaces of all kinds and catering to all sorts of endeavors, from textiles to paper, to furniture, electronics and hardware, and even automotive mechanics.
As with most any movement of its kind, these places and the desire to be a part of them and partake in the activities they encourage are steeped in a guiding set of principles that for many of the movement’s leaders are nothing short of politically and economically revolutionary (think phrases like “the third industrial revolution” and guiding documents referred to as “manifestos”).
The funny thing is, and this shouldn’t be seen as detracting from the ambitions of the current makers, we’ve been here before, and in a very big and significant way. A fascinating movement called Arts and Crafts, originating in the UK and spreading throughout Europe and very profoundly in the US, was a force to be reckoned with in the decorative arts, textiles, furniture, architecture, and various other fields from the mid 19th century to the early 20th centuries.
That movement established a heritage of not only truly unique objects but a philosophy and approach to making and design that lingered on. And in the maker movement, The Arts and Crafts movement has seen a revival with new dimensions that the original advocates a century ago could have never imagined.
Arts and crafts would leave a deeply indelible mark not just on design, but craft and our relationship with our stuff. Nonetheless, ultimately its ambitions fell victim to the pressures of the market in much the same way that the market is pushing the designers of today in directions they don’t wish to go.
Echoes of Another Era
Since the very beginning of the industrial revolution, social reformers, designers, and many others have grappled with our relationship with machines and the products that they produce. The Arts and Crafts Movement was lock, stock and barrel an outgrowth of the 19th century version of this discontent and unease.
John Ruskin, a social reformer, provided a great deal of the intellectual basis of the movement, while its superstar was without question William Morris, a designer and manufacturer of textiles and wallpapers (the company he founded is still around, and you should definitely follow it on Instagram). The movement they were to create included a mish-mash of Brits of both genders concerned on its surface with gaudy ornamentation on furniture and poor quality, but most of all with the impact of industrialization on society and the values of their fellow subjects.
Morris and his crowd emphasized utility in design as a part of their revolution. This could be achieved, they argued, only with a closer connection between the designer of an object (the intellectual act) and a manufacturer of an object or provider of materials (the manual act), and ideally that would be the same person
An Arts and Crafts adherent in Boston later declared that the mission of the movement would be achieved “when the philosopher goes to work and the working man becomes a philosopher”. As long as relationship of the person operating the machine was equitable and fair, then there was nothing limiting, strictly speaking, the use of it.
That part still resonates today: what is the nature of work, or craft, or a trade. The arts and crafts adherents rejected a class of people working as automatons at machines and the lives that the system would resign them to, and called for a reemergence of traditional skills and “handicraft”, where no division of labor existed. Or as Morris put it, “without dignified, creative human occupation people become disconnected from life”.
And therein lies the rub. The Arts and Crafts movement was deeply inspired by the Romantic poets and a vision of Britain that was fundamentally medieval. The movement saw a resurgence in guilds, long discarded as a drag on the economy, but given new life as organizations made up of people of many different trades and all committed to the philosophy of Arts and Crafts.
Morris believed that rather than creating mindless cogs in the machine of commerce, we should create a society where everyone has access to beauty and art in all parts of their life. And as an extension of that, everyone should have nice furniture.
As you may have predicted, these ideals didn’t stand the test of time. Craftsmanship came at the expense of mass market pricing (sound familiar?). The only way that people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder would have access to the beautiful design of their region’s leading designers would be as mass produced knock-offs. I don’t want to disparage mass production per se, but it seems to always come hand in hand with the rejection of the principles of fair and meaningful work that Morris and the other Arts and Crafts promoters sought to ensure.
Arts and Crafts indeed became the dominant style in the U.S. (especially in the Midwest and border region with Canada) and Britain for decades, but largely among the upper middle class and higher. Mary Dennet, an American progressive voice and participant in Arts and Crafts debates, said it best: “The employed craftsman can almost never use in his own home things similar to those he works on every day.”
Given that many young and independent furniture designers stock their homes with IKEA, unable to afford even that which they produce, the pain point in Arts and Crafts and the general underlying philosophy was identified over a century ago.
Indeed, then (and frequently now), craft became an escape for the affluent, those with the means for a shed out back for woodworking or the cash to pay for a monthly membership to a makerspace. This is not to say that these activities are not essential, for the many white collar workers stuck in front of a computer who find joy on the weekends working with their hands. Could they, in a way, be a new working class as the economy includes fewer and fewer manufacturing jobs?
In terms of the labor market, it seems that we’ve arrived at precisely the future that Morris and his ilk feared: scant economic recourse for the trade or craftsman, buttressed on one side by unskilled labor whose activities are defined by his machine, and on the other by the individual with the means to make it his hobby.
This brings up an interesting question: design continues to move away from top-down design that we now understand to be very risky, and more toward human-centeredness. However, does that human-centeredness focus too much on the humans consuming and interacting with an item while ignoring the humans that produce it? Can we really call something “human-centered”, like a piece of well designed tech that meets the needs of a user perfectly, when the people producing it threaten mass suicide to protest their working conditions?
Tell us about an experience you’ve had with a piece of furniture, or any object, in which its level of craft inspired you. Do you know of any furniture designers or brands that embody the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement? Reach out to me at adam.h@spofforddesign.com to keep the conversation going.
