The rise of the ‘maker movement’, coupled with the recognition that manufacturing can provide a much-needed boost to our economy, has put the crafts sector back in the spotlight. Only an outdated vocabulary holds it back from playing its part in social and economic progress

By Sir Christopher Frayling FRSA

In the boom times of the early 2000s, the public talk was all of design and the creative industries; now it is as much of craft and productive industry. Speakers at party conferences discuss the importance of making things, which may or may not be a way of making money. Government ministers extol the “joy of technical accomplishment” and the “beauty of craft skills” in schools, and stress the need for a new, updated arts and crafts movement to re-energise British inventiveness. Perhaps, they imply, where a fully rounded education is concerned, the three Rs of ‘reading, writing, ’rithmetic’ should morph into ‘reading, wroughting, ’rithmetic’, or literacy, making things and numeracy. Policy buffs talk about the ‘parity of esteem’ between intellectual and practical pursuits, ways of reviving guilds and apprenticeships, and whether ‘making’ properly belongs in higher or further education, or both. The V&A and the Crafts Council have together mounted an exhibition called Power of Making: The Importance of Being Skilled. It focuses on the contemporary relevance of the crafts – once they have shed their nostalgic and traditional associations – and the potential for a second industrial revolution.

In the US, meanwhile, the ‘maker movement’ is gathering momentum, especially where industrial crafts are concerned. We are seeing a plethora of new institutions such as tinker schools, tech-shop environments, incubators for making prototypes and rapid-prototyping centres. In some ways, these resemble Walter Gropius’s famous aspiration in the mid-1920s to reposition the crafts as “research work for industrial production, speculative experiments in laboratory-workshops where the preparatory work of evolving and perfecting new type-forms will be done”.

Professor Matthew Crawford, an American philosopher who runs a motorcycle repair shop that specialises in old European and Japanese models, argues in his book The Case for Working With Your Hands (2010) that more people should get their hands dirty by making and fixing things. His work is, in part, a response to the current economic climate, and it has made a surprising splash with political analysts and economists in the UK. Are people less likely to throw things away in these recessional days? Has the knowledge economy rhetoric been overdone? Have we been too reliant on financial services? What about the things you can’t get on the internet? A task such as hammering a nail or driving a screw has to be performed in person; it cannot simply be flown over from China or supplied down the wire.

Other leading thinkers have been challenging the sustainability of our jobs culture. Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009) explores the question of when a job feels meaningful. Sociologist Richard Sennett’s book The Craftsman (2008) uses historical, sociological and philosophical evidence to argue that our desire to do a job well for its own sake distinguishes us from other life forms.

So, craftsmanship is definitely in the ether at the moment, as an idea ripe to be reclaimed and re-evaluated, and one that should shed its longstanding tendency to speak its name with embarrassment. When Karl Marx wrote about “the handicrafts” in his analyses of capitalism, he seemed almost to use the same tone as he did when writing about “rural idiocy”. While supporters of the arts and crafts movement have tended to idealise pre-industrial work and disdain industrial manufacture, mainstream criticism has, until recently, taken the opposite view. Indeed, in the 1980s, it became fashionable for design commentators to dismiss William Morris as a champagne socialist with muesli in his beard.

Now, however, we are realising that manufacturing is crucial to our exports. No one talks any more about the balance of payments, but, if they did, manufacturing would certainly leap to centre stage. It can be about small and medium-sized companies as well as large ones, many of which, in any case, no longer belong to us. Whereas the financial services sector has, according to the Work Foundation, remained more or less static since the early 1990s in terms of employment, the manufacturing sector can actually create jobs.

There are significant counter-currents to this positive trend, of course. Design and Technology in schools, having shed the ‘C’ word long ago and having made great efforts to shed the ‘chippy’ image ever since, is now to be optional after the age of 14 rather than core, damaging its status and, perhaps, credibility as a result. Much of its teaching has, according to John Miller in his recent RSA Design and Society paper, become formulaic, rigid and screen based. The Russell Group has publicly stated that the ‘making’ subjects are not considered challenging enough to be treated as credible prerequisites for entry into leading universities. The Browne Review of higher education has compounded this by omitting to list design and the crafts as priority subjects where the economy and society are concerned. “Too many crafts,” one minister has recently argued, “have been given an academic veneer … [which has] done academic study no favours.” It may be better, he suggested, to think of the crafts as vocational, out of place within more cerebral environments.

Defying definition

There is another problem: the word ‘crafts’ itself, with all the historical baggage attached to it. In public debates, the arts have become culture, taste has become excellence and there has been a big shift from talking about producers to talking about consumers, but the crafts have remained the crafts. In the specialised worlds of the makers – and within higher education – a Polonius-like array of prefixes and synonyms has emerged: artist-craftspeople, design-makers, applied artists, designer-craftspeople. This is a sure sign that the root word is now causing embarrassment and is no longer doing its job.

The commonsense folk definition of the word ‘craft’ seems clear enough. Derived from the old English word craeft, meaning strength or skill, it denotes an activity that involves skill in making things by hand. But on closer inspection, the word becomes more difficult to pin down: so short, yet stretched in recent years almost to breaking point.

Manufacturers like to promote their wares with the language of craft – ‘hand-made’, ‘hand-finished’, ‘made by our craftsmen’, ‘uniquely for you’ – to reassure anxious customers. The word usually calls to mind the values of the past and the good old pre-digital days. Yet at the same time, manuals of business management and public administration have been hijacking the language of the Modernist avant-garde to show how forward thinking they have become. They bandy around terms such as ‘fit for purpose’, ‘making the form follow the function’ and ‘out of the box’, not to mention any number of palettes, sculptings, broad-brushes, frames of reference, patinas, cutting edges, templates, tools, toolboxes and cuttings of one’s cost according to one’s cloth.

It all depends on where you are coming from. To a sociologist, the word ‘craft’ is associated with skilled manual labour or the aristocracy of labour. To an economist, it refers to a stage in economic development that preceded capitalism. To an anthropologist, it links with the idea of the maker as user, with animal laborans, homo faber and homo ludens, or the ‘deep play’ of everyday life. To a countryman, it calls to mind traditional rural pursuits. To a literary historian, it describes the anti-establishment stance of the Romantics. To a trade unionist, it is about a community of skilled people defending the way they perform their occupations, usually in industry. To a laboratory scientist, it means using equipment for scientific pursuits. It is a contemporary version of Galileo’s dialogue between Galileo the astronomer and Galileo the builder of the telescope.

In Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, the culture of craft – and of anti-modernism – was strongly associated with the political right; in Britain during the 1880s and 1890s – through the writings of William Morris, Walter Crane and disciples – it was associated with the political left. There was a similar repertoire of arguments, but with radically opposed conclusions. In Germany, the crafts culture became a popular movement, centred on disaffected artisanal businesses; in Britain, it was mainly confined to the artistic realm and was much better tempered.

To an art critic, there is a distinction between an art (as in intellectual or conceptual) and a craft (as in manual). This is a debased version of age-old debates about the social recognition of the artist that go back to the Italian renaissance, sharpened in England by royal patronage of fine artists. On this one, Turner prize-winner Grayson Perry recently delivered a showstopper. “I think the art world had more trouble coming to terms with me being a potter than with my choice of frocks,” he said. “If you call your pot ‘art’, you are being pretentious; but if you call your shark ‘art’, you are being philosophical.”

To educationalists, the word ‘craft’ is associated with learning by doing, as opposed to learning from books or from screens. To a viewer of mid-evening television, it means watching from a distance as acknowledged experts show what they can do with cookery, gardening, singing, fishing, survivalism, nature-watching, interior designing or doing up a house.

If you look up the word ‘craft’ in Brewer’s, it offers “name given to freemasonry by its members”: in other words, a mysterious form of knowledge, a black box, a usage that seems to date from 1014BC and the building of Solomon’s Temple. The word can be a verb or a noun, but the adjective ‘crafty’ and the adverb ‘craftily’, as in deceitful, have far more negative connotations.

Finally, if someone were to approach you and ask, “What do you make?” and you were to reply, “Oh, I make things and I make them as well as I can”, chances are the questioner would be gobsmacked. Because the question “What do you make?” is really about how much you earn or how big your bonus is.

At the same time, the word ‘product’ has moved on from meaning a thing assembled or manufactured to meaning a bundle of services, or anything else that a business produces. Similarly, the word ‘Design’, with a capital ‘D’, has given birth to a small ‘d’ offshoot that, in business jargon, denotes design management, organisation, strategy or planning in general. Such words have become increasingly divorced from their original association with making things, or have been replaced by looser words such as ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’.

When David Pye wrote his classic Nature and Art of Workmanship in 1968, he was already calling the word 'craft' a "thought-preventer" that contains "a flock of duck-billed platitudes". Playwright Tom Stoppard went further when, in his radio play Artist Descending a Staircase (1992), he lambasted the clichéd definitions used in the world of arts and crafts. “Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets,” he wrote. “Imagination without skill gives us modern art!”

If the crafts are to move centre stage, as some of us fervently hope they will, and if recent public statements about productive industry turn out to be more than rhetoric, there is an urgent need to find new ways of talking and thinking about such concepts. Physical acts of making are not antithetical to industrial manufacture, or to the information society; in fact, they are and will be one of the keys to their development.

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Professor Sir Christopher Frayling FRSA was, until recently, rector of the Royal College of Art and chairman of Arts Council England. Christopher Frayling’s latest book, On Craftsmanship: Towards a New Bauhaus, is published by Oberon Books.

Photography: Johanna Ward at the Peter Laytons London Glassblowing Studio and Galler

Reap and Sow: teaching resourcefulness to offenders Kate Welch FRSA and Rebecca Howard FRSA are working with other Fellows to build a social enterprise that enables prisoners and ex-offenders to design and manufacture outdoor living products. The goal is to build participants’ skills and confidence so that they can make a successful transition into employment on their release. Welch founded the Acumen group of social enterprises in 2003 and Howard runs the branding and communications company Cynergy. The pair received a £2,000 RSA Catalyst grant to kickstart the new initiative, Reap and Sow. They used the grant to create prototypes of products that it would be feasible to manufacture in a prison setting, such as a coffee table for outdoor use. Welch, Howard and the team of Fellows are piloting the project in HM Prison Durham and the Deerbolt Young Offenders Institution in County Durham. They have elicited support from Manchester College, which has recruited a horticultural instructor, and the Durham Cathedral shop, which has agreed to sell some of the stock. Welch hopes that consumers will perceive the products as belonging to an ethical brand akin to Fairtrade; she is therefore interested in working with Fellows who have experience of the ethical retail sector. Although Welch and Howard will have to contend with challenges such as prisoners’ limited skills and the need to keep costs to a minimum, they are confident that they will be able to turn the social enterprise into a profit-making business by the end of its second year. Once the production phase begins, they will pay prisoners a wage for their labour, building their sense of self-worth and giving them the confidence to apply for jobs related to design and manufacturing after they have left the prison. For more information or to support Reap and Sow, email the Fellowship team. You can read the RSA's report on prisons – RSA Transitions: A social enterprise approach to prison and rehabilitation.