‘Next Stages in Automated Craft: The Integration of Rapid Manufacturing Technologies into Craft and DIY Applications’ is the title of a paper I co-wrote with Ben Hughes following his invitation to me to teach on a module of the MA Industrial Design course at Central St Martins. It was presented at the IDSA’s 2010 conference titled DIY Design: Threat or Opportunity. You can download the full paper by following the link on the right to my Papers and Presentations. This post draws quite a lot from that paper, and follows on from my previous post looking at digital craftsmanship.

Defining ‘Craft’ is no easy task, a fact demonstrated by the Crafts Council’s [pdf] listing of not one but six different interpretations. In The Persistence of Craft Paul Greenhalgh warns that “craft has changed its meaning fundamentally at least three times in the last two centuries, and it means fundamentally different things from nation to nation even in the Western world.” Given the difficulty of arriving at an agreed upon definition, it is perhaps more fruitful to examine some of the underlying characteristics of ‘Craft’. In order to understand these characteristics, and to determine whether their differences to those of ‘Design’ remain relevant to today’s practitioners, it’s necessary to look at the historical basis of the divide between the two disciplines.

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Currently showing as part of the London Design Festival, Lab Craft is a new exhibition put on by the UK Crafts Council, presenting the work of 26 designers and crafts practitioners who use “cutting edge digital technologies.”  As well as the obvious reasons for sparking my interest, this particularly caught my attention because of a paper I co-authored which was recently presented at the 2010 IDSA conference, entitled The Next Stages in Automated Craft. I will go into more detail about that paper in another post, but the Lab Craft exhibition illustrates some of the very same questions.

Babel Vessel #1 by Michael Eden

The fact that the Crafts Council have waited until 2010 before putting on a show which explores “digital adventures in contemporary craft” is itself revealing of a confusion towards technologies such as rapid manufacturing within the contemporary Crafts movement. Malcolm McCullough first raised the possibility 15 years ago when he asked in his book Abstracting Craft “What are the implications for art and craft as atoms become replaced by digital signals and the physicality of reproduction becomes a ‘virtual’ on screen experience?” Since then conferences such as Craft in the Digital Age and Challenging Craft (both held in 2004) have raised all the same questions which Lab Craft now aims to address. And for an indication that not everyone inside the Crafts Council approves of its acceptance of Lab Craft – only a few blocks away Origin, the UK Crafts Council’s “showcase of original contemporary craft”, was being marketed under the tagline “Made not Manufactured.”

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Unto This Last is a furniture studio and workshop, based on two sites in London. Its name comes from the title of a book by John Ruskin, published in 1862, in which he advocated a return to localised, craftsman/artisan workshops as an antidote to the conditions which industrialisation had imposed on much of Britain’s working class. As a fore-runner of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, Ruskin’s thoughts were influential, but the rising standard of living which mass manufacturing brought to the West meant that his pleas were ultimately seen as anachronistic. But according to Olivier Geoffrey, founder of Unto This Last, CNC machining and on-demand manufacturing open up possibilities for the craftsman in the community which may yet see Ruskin’s vision realised.

D Chair © Unto This Last

For the last month or so I have been teaching on the MA Industrial Design course at Central St Martins in London, on a project titled “manufacturing and consumption futures”. The project  is intended to encourage students to research the opportunities which new production methods allow for more personalised products, to propose and refine a system of their own, and ultimately to prototype the system itself. I hope to show some of the outcomes in a later post, but as part of the research for the project students were invited to Unto This Last’s Brick Lane workshop, to look around and to quiz Olivier about his philosophy.

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I recently received a mail from Alex Mamalyha, web community manager for i.materialise, announcing the launch of a new service from Materialise NV. i.materialise is a rapid manufacturing service aimed at designers, and the beta site gives a good idea of the way the service will work. Obviously there are many web-based rapid manufacturing services these days, and the announcement of a new one is a fairly regular occurrence which I usually just ignore. But given the extent to which Materialise have supported and encouraged designers’ use of RM technologies through their .MGX initiative, I thought this was one service that deserved further investigation.

The ‘manifesto’ of i.materialise claims the service makes “3D printing as easy as printing on paper”. Obviously such claims owe more to hyperbole than fact, but the i.materialise interface is presented in a relatively simple and obvious way. A workspace in the centre of the screen visualises the model once it is uploaded, and a number of drop-down menus to the right give the choice of materials, surface finishes etc.

To test the service, I used a model I made previously for Nina Pirhonen, a Finnish designer and creator of the PomPom character and series of books. The model was originally created in Solidworks, but in order to upload it to the i.materialise site it first needed to be converted to .stl format.

3D model of PomPom © Nina Pirhonen

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This post deals with the results and conclusion of the user trial discussed earlier. The findings of the study can be divided into two main areas: the results of the drawing exercise and the success of developing the drawings into a 3D CAD model, and the results of the two CAD modelling exercises. It’s important to stress that in both cases the objective was not to judge or analyse the quality of the design, but rather to gain subjective feedback from participants about which activities they enjoyed or disliked, and which approach resulted in the product they were most happy with.

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