David Pye — The Nature and Art of Workmanship

“In practice the designer hopes the workmanship will be good, but the workman decides whether it shall be good or not. On the workman’s decision depends a great part of the quality of our environment”

— David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship

David Pye was a professor of Furniture Design at the Royal College of Art and in this book, he proposed his best known concept — the workmanship of risk. Pye defines the workmanship of risk as “workmanship using any kind of technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgment, dexterity, and care which the maker exercises as he works” (20). He compares this against the workmanship of certainty, which can always be found in mass production; the quality of the product is always predetermined before anything is actually made. Pye discusses the pros and cons of each type of workmanship and also points out that he is not arguing that the workmanship is always or necessarily valuable. His concern is the following:

“The danger is not that the workmanship of risk will die out altogether but rather that, from want of theory, and lack of standards, its possibilities will be neglected and infer forms of it will be taken for granted and accepted” (7).

Pye starts out his book defining the difference between the design and the workmanship. Design is what can be conveyed in words and drawings, but the workmanship cannot do that. Simply put, design is the idea and workmanship is what creates the product. Pye acknowledges the role of the machine and how automation is a process of creation that minimizes risk, which is ideal for situations that need accuracy and cost savings. He points out that extreme cases of the workmanship of risk is working with a non-electric hand tool and not utilizing any sorts of jigs or guides (12).

In Chapter 4, Pye discusses the quality of workmanship and considers the quality to be on a sliding scale diagram, from good to bad workmanship. Good workmanship carries out or improves upon the intended design and bad workmanship fails to do that by being farther removed from the design intent. Pye argues that goodness or badness is dependent on two different criteria — soundness and comeliness (13). Soundness is the ability to “transmit and resist forces as the designer intended” without any hidden flaws or weaknesses (13). Comeliness is the ability to “give or add to the aesthetic expression which the designer intended” (13). The Intended Design is considered the ideally perfect design that the designer has in his mind’s eye — it is essentially an unattainable embodiment of his intention.

The workperson is the designer’s interpreter and agency that provides the tools, jigs, prototypes and other material basis for production. During this interpretation, it is impossible to completely describe all aspects of a design as it would be impractical to spend so much designer effort creating such a detailed specification as well as too much workman time consuming and adhering to the specification (26). Because of the workmanship of risk, Pye draws a parallel to the natural order reflected in the work of man. Just as no two leaves of a tree are precisely alike yet every tree conforms to a recognizable pattern of a species, workmanship results in creations that adhere to an overall specification but also have a degree of variability in them.

Pye also goes into the durability of a product — durability of a made thing depends on workmanship where the workmanship of risk is used, but depends on design almost entirely in the workmanship of certainty because nearly everything that affects durability should have been predetermined and specified by the designer (42). He states that, “any good workman feels a responsibility for the durability of what he makes and feels bound at the very least to make the unseen parts of that job as soon as those which are visible” (44).

To wrap up, Pye discusses the aesthetic importance of workmanship and its future. Good workmanship depends on the combination of the following things:

· Highly regulated workmanship that yields a thing done in style

· Free workmanship that allows the workman to be spontaneous but avoids unstudied improvisation

· Diversity that extends the aesthetic experience beyond the specification down to the smallest scale that the eye can distinguish

The workmanship of risk can be applied to two different purposes — preparatory and productive. The preparatory stage includes making the jigs, tools, and other devices in order to make the workmanship of certainty possible. The productive stage turns out products for sale. Both these stages can slide in between the workmanship of risk and certainty and often, when an artifact is created, it moves in and out of the two types of workmanships.