I recently saw the film The Future is Handmade by Maikel Kuijpers. It’s a short film yet touches on so many points regarding work life.
As Maikel says in the film,
[Craft] occupies an interesting position between tradition and innovation, thinking and doing, the local and the global. Like science and art, craft will guide future development. The methodology employed by craftspeople is that of experience. Their claim to truth is based on the fact that what they make, works.
But most people, when they consider craftsmanship or handmade items, don’t think of the future. They think of the past – old school stuff with little relevance in our technologically advanced world. Many also consider artisanship as “low level work” that’s devoid of intellect or innovation. Where are these myths coming from?
To understand why craftspeople have been pushed to the fringes of “the real economy” we must go back to the Industrial Revolution, when work was reorganized – when there was a separation of mind and body, a separation of intellect from execution.
Before the Industrial Revolution, there were masters of a particular trade and apprentices who were learning from them. Their relationship was personal, real. They also had very tangible relationships with those they were creating for. But that all changed with the Industrial Revolution, when people became consumers and workers were viewed as parts in the operational structure who were barely, if ever, acknowledged by the boss. In fact, workers in large-scale operations had absolutely no idea what their bosses even did. The relationship was contractual, not personal. And the work itself was not fulfilling for most people, as it was intellectually and creatively impoverished.
Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
More than a century later, we still operate according to the Industrial Revolution’s model of work. We rarely work with our hands, except by rote, and so we never learn to trust our hands, or any part of our bodies for that matter. Our work is mechanical rather than relational. Even in our daily home lives, nearly every task is achieved by the push of buttons. We’ve become totally dependent on data-driven services that we don’t understand and cannot trust. Even our own corporations and governments have become obscure, impersonal. There is almost nothing tangible about life anymore.
But when craftspeople work, their entire body is involved. Their senses are sharpened daily, to the point where they can detect the tiniest, most obscure shifts. Many say they could even work blindfolded, which is difficult for most of us to imagine, as today’s professions rely dominantly on sight. We concern ourselves with numbers and images, rather than the way something feels in our hands, how a material speaks back to us, how an instrument or tool sounds during use, or a hundred other slight sensations that guide artisans.
Working with our hands also stimulates the intellectual parts of our brains for a very simple reason – it’s biologically appropriate for humans to be physically active, to give our bodies and instincts a chance to guide us. Working with my hands gets my brain going, as many say. Psychology Today explains that “shutting off our brains” and doing something active, pleasurable and meditative with our hands allows us to tap into those deep, primal centers where big problems are solved and breakthroughs can occur.
What about all the creative professions, you ask?
I can speak to this a little bit coming from the design/tech industry, where the work varies a ton. Some teams, and even a few companies, come very close to the craft-like model of work, in that the relationships between user and product are thoroughly explored, and the “boss” is creatively and intellectually involved in the work. Sometimes there is even a relationship with real, tangible materials – but in my experience, this is rarity. Usually our hands are occupied with screens, devices and data that do a lot of the decision-making for us. It’s unacceptable to go on feelings, especially when there’s data to invalidate them, or a stakeholder with other ideas, and so the creative vision must be compromised over and over again. The work is still 100% contractual, and because there’s a pressure to produce around the clock, the natural ebbs and flows of creativity are not honored.
So from my perspective, I would say that even in creative professions our hands and relationships are undervalued, while money and fame are overvalued. This leads to an endless production of things, and I believe that this pressure to constantly produce is completely antithetical to the rest of life.
Craftspeople, however, are occupied with more than just making things. They’re also creating a mindset that we need for the future, for a more circular economy, for a society that can flow with, rather than attempt to control and override, the natural cycles of creativity and production.
So it’s really important that we let go these outdated definitions of knowledge and stop forcing craftspeople to the fringes of the the economy. More than ever, we’re seeing that the industrial model of work isn’t working. Not for individuals, not for families or communities, not for any of the non-human species we share the planet with.
We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge. Quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.
Tom Waits
Which leads to the question, what is knowledge then? How does one gain knowledge?
Embodied Knowledge
This idea of working not only with the hands, but with all of the senses is something that resonated with me long after seeing the film.
Mind and body working together with full sensory operatives. Embodied knowledge.
This embodied, sensory knowledge is fundamentally led by intuition and is, therefore, very difficult to learn or teach in classrooms. It’s something that must be experienced, and over time, trusted.
For a cheesemaker, it might be the highly evolved since of smell and taste that he can trust more than a thermometer or any other sort of machine feedback. For a violin maker, it might be the tools that become part of her body, like her very own fingertips, as soon as she picks them up. For the barber, it’s the feeling of every single strand of hair, every patch of scalp and skin, that is constantly communicating something.
For the basket weaver, it begins in the fields where grasses are harvested. How does one come to know which grasses are best for a particular sort of basket? How does one choose the best strands of grass? And once there’s a pile of dried grass, how does one even begin to know how to weave them together into something that is not only necessary for the functions of life, but also so beautiful that life feels worth living every time the basket is used?
Experience leads to intuition and, over time, to knowledge.
I’ve mentioned this sort of embodied knowledge in motherhood posts, which may seem strange. What does parenting have to do with work? We westerners tend to put them in separate buckets, never allowing them to overlap. Yet both are informed by the same culture, the same values and expectations. Our beliefs about parenting reflect the values deemed important in our society, and those values also characterize our professional life.
Which is why a professor being interviewed in the film comes to say, “Ultimately craftsmanship raises real questions about the structure of capitalism.”
Experiential or embodied learning is very strong in childhood – we’re all born with the capacity and hunger for this sort of knowledge – but it’s educated out of us gradually, so that by the time we enter the workforce, there are too many barriers. Our bodies never gain the knowledge and therefore never come to trust that knowledge, that intuitive sense. Then what can we rely on? Well, then we are fully dependent on societal structures. We come to trust those structures more than anything else and find it very difficult to access, much less trust, our own bodies or any sort of instinctual knowledge.
“My customers often make much more money than I do,” says a classical guitar maker. “And yet their satisfaction with the world they inhabit is often difficult to see. Individuals we reward with high pay and prestige often feel like widgets in the inscrutable, impersonal machinery of modern market economy.”
We must begin to expand our definition of knowledge and expertise to include those who make our daily lives worth living.
“When you watch artisans at work,” Kuijpers said in an interview, “in a strange way it’s very calming.”
Time after time, Kuijpers noticed a lack of stress in these studios. One reason, he concluded, is that when people are working with their hands, quality cannot be rushed, nor can it be faked. Unlike today’s professionals who are so caught up in their job titles, master artisans don’t need to say they’re the masters – it’s obvious in their work.
Masters don’t need to say they’re the masters — it’s obvious in their work.
In an era of automation, it’s phenomenal that people still dedicate their entire lives to mastering a craft at such a high level, isn’t it?
And if we continue along the track of automation until more and more people won’t have to, or won’t be able to work, then what will people do?
This is actually worth considering.
The more automated our lives become, the more being human will matter. The more mass produced our lives become, the more craftspeople and their knowledge will also matter.
This is one of several reasons why I’ve invested so much into the Wyld idea and what keeps me going, because when I’m at my “real job” all I can think about is this work. My entire body aches for it. Sitting in my ergonomic chair in my fancy office with unlimited cappuccinos from a machine, all I can think about is the nettles and fields of willow outside, those fallen birch branches I walked past on my way to the subway. Still, I yearn for a bit of time and freedom to go out into nature, learn about it, learn from it, take some bits of it back into the studio and allow myself to be guided from there.
And actually this Wyld work is what makes me even halfway decent at my job. All of my best ideas and solutions come when I break away from the office and practice what I consider to be my real work.
Without it I’m not really sure who I am.
Featured title image is by @mujostore – For 70+ years, Takada’s artisans have been handcrafting tawashi one at a time, using only the finest and carefully-selected materials harvested from trees cultivated in the Wakayama Prefecture of Japan. Each palm brush is made using windmill palm fibers (shuro) that won’t scratch your kitchenware. Shuro has been used in Japan since ancient times.
