Antony Radford
The Perception of Craft in a Digital Age
Introduction This essay considers the nature of ‘craft’ in a digital age, and the relation of craft to the concept of responsive cohesion. It considers ‘craft’ as a verb: does the notion of ‘hand crafting’ extend to the use of stylus and keyboard? How much can automated generation be incorporated in a process of crafting? It considers ‘craft’ as a noun, with questions of perception and interpretation: when does a human invest an object or process as having a craft character? Can an object be considered ‘crafted’ if it derives wholly or partly from artificial intelligence and numeric-controlled machines? These are questions without clear answers, depending on how craft is defined and how objects and processes are perceived. From the 1970s the technologies of digital media and numeric controlled machinery have become increasingly pervasive during a transition from the ‘modern industrial’ age (beginning in the mid-19th century) to the current ‘digital age’. As a label for our times, the ‘digital age’ is an extreme simplification, but so are familiar labels such as ‘stone age’ and ‘iron age’. This essay will focus on the role of responsive cohesion in the perception of craft and craftworks in the digital age. The term ‘responsive cohesion’ was coined by philosopher Warwick Fox and is the core of his Theory of General Ethics (Fox, 2006). Responsive cohesion recurs in interrelationships between makers, tools and the objects they make, and between those crafted objects, their users and the wider world. I shall use the term in the following sections, and then comment on its place in ethics in relation to the place and role of craft in the contemporary world. Definitions of craft typically refer to skills in planning and making, and things that are produced with or require such skills. Although craft has been used to label a distinct phase in the history of industrial production (Victor & Boynton, 1998), this definition transfers seamlessly from handiwork to industrial production to digital media and numeric-controlled machines. Skill is certainly needed in digital design and production (Bruton & Radford, 2012). The perception of craft is more complex and contested. Despite the broad scope of ‘skill in planning and making’, we tend to think of traditional craft: a skilled craftsperson working with their hands in a workshop or studio making useful things following time-honoured processes that are imbedded in local culture (Boden, 2000). The craftsperson 102
