A Matter of Distinction
Craft is connected to Story by Ritual. An introduction: This is where innovation fails: Undertaking Craft without respect for mystery one presumes to know what cannot be known. In this we falsify the power of doing. Our doing does not come from Being. This imposition blocks us from connecting with what-is. Story is …
The trouble with talking about Craft is that everyone thinks they already know what it is. Let’s take a deep breath and set all those assumptions aside. Easier said than done. To begin, here’s some of what Craft is not: Backward Anachronistic, and therefore not a viable way to proceed.
We are encouraged by the cheerleaders of consumer culture to see technology as a seamless whole that embraces everything we do and that is on a hockey-stick rate of accelerated change that will eventually meet every need and fulfill every desire. In this conception of our history and development from bowed Ape-Man to buff Super-Man …
Continue reading “Notes on the Relationship of Technology to Craft”
A Technique can be written down and replicated from directions, a Craft cannot. Unless we can learn to appreciate the difference we continue to do damage to ourselves and destroying our world.
Craft, like Art, has been in exile for a long time, put in a ghetto where it’s been held at the mercy of wealth. In a way I suppose we should be grateful, they might have disappeared entirely without patronage; but on the other hand, if it hadn’t been for the creation of poverty and …
A pillar of a vital culture is an active interplay between the forms people use and the meanings they contain. A definite point on the road of collapse has been passed when these distinctions are lost. This happens in both directions. People lose track of what things mean to them and those who make things …
The reflex to innovate, the reductio ad absurdum of the logic of making changes, is thrashing us. As with anything worth talking about it’s hard to get across just how deep the trouble goes. How far it has spread.
Let’s get one thing clear. Wind Turbines are not an alternative, appropriate technology. They are the last gasp of all the arrogance behind business-as-usual. They take the violence hidden in the mine, the oil well, behind power plant walls; and set it defiantly against the sky. They present the form of whirling knife blades, or …
Continue reading “From Windmills to Wind Turbines, and Back to Windmills”
This is what I recently wrote to a distant friend who asked me about ways to deal with the question of housing in face of the changes looming ahead. I’m posting this here because it highlights the points at which the entire exercise of design as a way to envision and plan for human needs …
Continue reading “Researcher Builds Machine that Daydreams…”
What does this have to do with Design? Anyone who’s stuck with my idiosyncrasies this far must have some sense of why I include this here. If design is the practice of drawing distinctions so that physical interventions can be made in this world, then there is nothing more fundamental than mapping-out a place from where these distinctions can be made. As we lose the luxury of irresponsibility about what we call forth, it is imperative that we spend significant effort looking deeply at the wellsprings for future action. For me, that takes me back again and again to the threads and currents surrounding the Dark Mountain Project and the people who make up this loose constellation of thinkers, writers, doers and makers.
Fine Lines 