From gesture to language, the new manufacturing masters.

From local crafts to heavy industry to distributed manufacturing, we may travel from mastered gestures to line of commands to language systems.

With Taylor and Ford, it was the start of craftsmen being hired as workers. By then, it appeared more efficient to dissociate the thinking part from the making part, distinguish commanding managers from operating workers in order to scientifically improve production capacities. Most of the refined gestures craftsmen had to learn and master now may be performed by machines, at a higher frequency or on a larger scale.

Lately, with the rise of the so called ‘creative class’, you may have read articles about neo-craftsmen. Freelancers and entrepreneurs owning their tool of production (a MacBook Pro and an iPhone most of the time) do free themselves from going to the factory, and outline what some would name a ‘cottage industry’. Doing so, freed from operating the machine they shall recover their creative craftsman skills.

But actually, their art rarely requires gestures but rather languages. Instead of praticing for years how to shape ceramic by hand, better learn a bit of parametric design, machine commands, and let your 3Dprinter do the moves. Take as a hint all the online courses or local schools dedicated to learn how to code. Rare — or even non-existing — are the lessons teaching gestures ; the only one might be about dancing or music lessons. Would it mean that professions or crafts no longer require gestures ? I bet Matthew Crawford would not be happy about that idea.

Or would it mean that crafts gestures are nothing more than a sort of language ? Both ‘The Gesture And The Word’ in Leroi-Gourhan’s work are nothing else than the core elements of language systems. And to achieve what we dream of, we the ‘makers’, more than words and gestures we need logic and process. We need systems, a.k.a. languages that articulate concepts and manufacturing. Thus, may we envision gestures not as old crafts methods but still as part of the languages of our future production?