[ 2024-05 ]
{Originally published as part of my RISD thesis project One of One of a Kind}
Before the birth of the factory, before “making” became “manufacturing”, our objects and spaces were produced largely with simple tools and manual human labor. The work of making them was something that engaged the human body by necessity. While this came at the expense of precision and economies of scale, it also allowed — really there was no way around it — the personality of the maker to shine through. Even with the most detailed plans, no two humans would, or even could, move their chisels in exactly the same way across the stone. This is how you end up with every gargoyle on a Gothic cathedral looking different. There was room left for improvisation, for agency — for play. Contrast this with the factory worker, whose personality has been completely mediated away by the machine. Even though the manual labor can still be present, some tools simply do not allow the personhood of the individual worker to break through into the material.
Several years ago I worked in a plant that manufactured helicopters. It’s a surprisingly manual process. The fuselage is assembled by hand. Several miles of avionics wiring is cut, bundled, crimped, and threaded by a small team with fast hands. Countless sheet metal parts are bent using manual breaks. Each of these processes requires several hundred hours of bodily work, but the work results in a binary, pass/fail result: either the part is bent within tolerance or not. And the tolerance is tight — no room for play or improvisation. The reality is that the helicopter has to be made like this. It’s a quintessential industrial object. You don’t actually want the personality of the maker to show through each part, because inevitably some guy’s loose personality would end in a loose screw, and it only takes one for the thing to fly apart. It’s only through the industrial logic of monotonous work that such a machine can be made. It can only exist within an extremely tight band of tolerances.
“Never regret thy fall, O Icarus of the fearless flight, For the greatest tragedy of them all, Is never to feel the burning light.” — Oscar Wilde (probably)
In this sense, the helicopter is revealed to be at the same time a technical marvel and also extremely fragile. A single part out of place and it can fall from the sky. It’s reminiscent of Icarus, who, once he took flight from his prison window, was bounded above and below by potential demise. Fly too low, and the sea’s mist would clog his feathers; too high, and the sun melts the wax. It was his father Daedalus (notably, a master craftsman), who warned him of this dual danger of too high and too low — of complacency and hubris.
Of these two, it’s telling that Icarus fell for the latter. It seems often to be our preference, at least in ancient Greece and certainly today in the so-called “first world”, to ignore the traditional, the ancestral, our metaphorical wise father, and fly straight for the sun. This bias towards hubris is summed up nicely by Mark Zuckerberg’s famous directive: “go fast and break things”. That’s certainly what he and Icarus have done. But even as I write that I realize it’s a cheap shot. It’s so easy to criticize but so much harder to actually build something. Maybe that’s where the danger below — complacency, the proverbial ocean mist — comes in. Stasis is not a viable option in a world that always changes. Anyone who’s been in a boat as the weather takes a turn has a visceral understanding of that.
Our priority as designers should be to find ways for more people to create things that could have only come from them, that truly let their personality shine through, and therefore open the door to more person-to-person, human scale connections. It’s this priority of the personal that was the overarching theme of Ivan Illich’s book Tools for Conviviality. In it he unfurls a radical critique of urbanism and industrialization, fundamental pillars of modernity that have resulted in “not human flourishing but ‘modernized poverty’, dependency, and an out-of-control system in which the humans become worn-down mechanical parts.” His proposal is that we should develop new tools and instruments that allow the individual’s energies to remain under their immediate control, allowing them to freely express themselves with as little mediation as possible. Illich also stands in a lineage of similar thinkers that goes back to the industrial revolution — from the machine-smashing Luddites, to rural communities like the Amish, the Shakers, the Mennonites, to the political theories of the English Distributists, to the Arts & Crafts movement. Every step along the way, whenever The Machine stepped over another threshold, it always catalyzed a reaction, a bubbling up of the human concerns that were being ignored. Unfortunately, and for various reasons, each of these has been largely contained to a temporary reaction.
The driving hunch for the work of this thesis project is that the tools coming out of the information age that we’re in — AI, blockchains, digital fabrication, generative design — are affording a return to these old ideas that have often been perceived as backwards-looking. This thesis is a series of explorations in using these tools in old ways to speculate on the designer’s role in a return to the personal, the meaningful, the local, the particular.