ing (big D) design to the politically
weighty STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and math [ 2, 3].
The designer is imagined as the
sole orchestrator of action, mediating the work of engineers, social
scientists, politicians, consumers,
and a whole host of unimagined
others. This vision of design’s
future retains the modernist formulation of what design is: a mechanism through which efficiency,
order, and progress (whatever that
means) are achieved.
A central element of these and
other visions of the future is that
craft is done for us: Kitchens tell
us what and how to cook, eliminating the creativity and pleasure of
cooking from scratch with what’s
on hand; object printers create
flawless prototypes, eliminating messily glued-together chipboard and toothpicks. In this new
world, craft becomes fetish—the
proudly displayed collection of
vinyl records shelved alongside an
iPod and digital files [ 1]. What is
forgotten in this view is the skill
of making. Those records may
have been “only” purchased, but
the collection itself took months
of scouring flea markets and the
three remaining music shops in
town, and now sit atop a set of
purpose-built shelves, the construction of which was the reason for
enrolling in a woodworking class.
Materials Matter
This is intended not as yet another
elegy to the beauty or value of
handiwork, but rather as a call to
consider design as the crafting of
connections rooted in the material world. To put it simply: Craft is
not only the province of the potter
working at a wheel. The design of a
mobile phone or a building is anything but disembodied, impersonal,
or generic. Design requires working
January + February 2012
