Lueckenhausen, H, Craft and Design - Function and Meaning.
Enhancing the Quality of Crafts - Seminar in conjunction with the 19th WCC Asia Pacific Assembly, Kyoto, Japan, October 1995

In Australia, as in most developed economies, traditional crafts and modern industrial production have in recent times been considered to be entirely separate. Craft practice is often seen as being the ancestor of industrial production, where what was once done by hand is now done by machines and by great industries. Our Western tradition, which has only in recent times begun to be more influenced by the traditions of the Asian and Pacific cultures in our region of the world, separates art from craft and both of them from design. The word design is usually understood to fit more comfortably with industry, manufacture and modern technologies than it does with traditional and/or creative pursuits such as art and craft. Some people in Australia believe, as do some others in the Western world, that craft is old fashioned and sentimental. These people believe that the only real way forward is for goods to be produced on a large scale by rapidly developing technology.

To believe this one must ignore some very important facts and questions.

1 If crafts are no longer important in developed countries why do they continue to exist and to flourish?
Why do crafts people still exist?
Why do crafts people continue to make things?
Why do people still want crafted goods?
Why do people still demand and buy crafts?

2 What is the relationship between function and ceremony?
What type of man made objects have every day practical use but also symbolic, religious and cultural use?
In what range of ways are objects that speak of the culture from which they spring, made?

3 What is the relationship between function and material?
How do human beings best understand existing materials and develop new materials?
How do craft skills and traditions effect our understanding of how we can best exploit and preserve the materials we have?

4 What is the relationship between human beings and the objects they fashion? What is the relationship between human beings and their tools?
How do we develop the skills that are most suitable to the way we live and the opportunities (and the limitations) that we are given?

5 In an increasingly internationalized world, where export and import, trade and raising foreign exchange are important to every country, developed and developing, how do we share, trade and exchange with other cultures?

I would suggest that one key word that applies to all these questions is DESIGN.

An American friend once told me of an experience she had in the days when she was a jeweler presenting her work at a craft fair. An 'older' couple had been moving slowly along the aisle, the wife in particular showing appreciation of everything she saw. My friend heard her ask her husband something to the effect of "look at all this fantastic work, how on earth do they manage to do all of this?" "It's easy", the husband explained, "they don't work".

Many of you might find this a very strange comment. What it shows is that in the Western world it is possible for some people to consider that making art and/or making craft is not real work - it is only a hobby or entertainment done by people who have plenty of spare time because they don’t do REAL work.

Today, Australian craftspeople show by the way they can work within a contemporary, industrial and often urban context, that there are many ways of understanding modern crafts. This has involved exploring the links (and differences) between craft and art and involves looking for links between craft and design at the fringes of an industrial culture.
For a start we need to look at a number of implications of the terminology we use, not only that used by practitioners (the makers of objects), but also for the other sectors of what I will argue is appropriately called the crafts industry - the writers, marketers, and the private and government agents.

Crafts Industry
Many of the concerns and operating methods of contemporary craftspeople are reflected in the pragmatic nature of the work of Craft Australia (previously the Crafts Council of Australia). In my time much of the language and culture of the crafts 'movement' has evolved into that of a fledgling 'industry'. Some of the issues deemed to be current by my associates and myself, not only at Craft Australia but also at the Visual Arts Crafts Board and in the wider crafts community were incorporated into the Craft 2000 conference held in Perth in 1992 and the Second National Crafts Conference, Making Culture, Crafts, Communication and Commerce, held in Melbourne in 1995. Looking at crafts practice in Australia as a small industry matches (in one sense) the way it is seen in many Asian and developing societies. In a developed economy such as that of Australia, the industry is taken to also mean writers, critics and publishers, curators and gallery directors, arts administrators, crafts shop owners, agents and dealers, educators and trainers etc. In fact crafts practice in my country has a big stake in the educated middle classes. A whole network of people make their living from - and make a professional contribution to - the crafts industry.

Material
Material brings with it a rich and mixed history and mythology of association that often taps into ancient archetypes.
Timber, a material of which I use a good deal, elicits an immediate, often emotional and sometimes almost spiritual response.
People who mean to be kind often ignore what I have designed and made and say, "isn't the wood lovely?"
Similar responses can be expected for metal and precious stones and to a lesser degree to stone, all of which are consistently associated with both ancient and contemporary mythologies about human beings and their relationship to the environment.

Recent developments in crafts practice and crafts education in Australia show an increasing interest in the use of contemporary materials along with traditional natural materials and this has lessened the distance between industrial designers and craftspeople. Interestingly some noted examples of innovative product design and material usage is coming from the crafts sector.

Skill
Skill, paradoxically can be admired and undervalued at the same time. When not dealing with other makers, who are a breed unto themselves, I find people are impressed with quality but don't have too many concerns about how that quality was achieved. The method is frequently outside their frame of reference in any case.

For example a friend of mine who is a metal worker/blacksmith makes repousse wind veins the price of which often shocks people until they are reassured that they contain real gold. In fact the gold leaf is worth about $20, yet people are more willing to credit that material value than they are the skills and experience that took twenty years to develop.
This has implications for both the maker and the consumer.

The question is, have technology and mass production [i.e. the ready availability of an ever increasing array of sophisticated, complex, exciting and above all affordable products] robbed process of its mystique? Appreciation of traditionally crafted objects has been connected to the high level of skill required to make them. The connection between the hand and
the object is part of the value we place on craft. However in the modern international marketplace appreciation of, and importantly willingness to pay for, labour intensive processes is lessening. Good design - that is, efficient planning and manufacture of fashionable items, where appropriate, through new and evolving technology, need to be blended with traditional crafts practices.

Designer / Maker
Some Australian craftspeople use the term designer/maker to describe themselves and the nature of their practice.
In my own case I adopted the title at almost the precise moment that I, as a designer, decided to make one of my designs. So simple really, designer / maker - what could be more direct?

Design
Buchanan and Margolin, two American Design academics and writers maintain that:

Design is the conception and planning of the artificial, that broad domain of human made products which includes: material objects, visual and verbal communications, organized activities and services, and complex systems and environments for living, working, playing, and learning.

To begin with, we have the primal wonder of the act of creating. Few aspects of human work are as wonderful as the coming about of the newly created, the newly invented, and the newly designed. The history of men's and women's celebration of the sheer magical existence of the previously unimagined and the evolution of curiosity into a quest for understanding is in part the history of our material culture.

Design can be understood to be a form of management; it carries undertones of organization - the establishment and maintenance of order. It is still an evolving discipline with a relatively recent (mostly twentieth century) language, which has developed from the history of the liberal and the fine arts. As with craft, the word means many things to many people, from individual to individual, from country to country, and from region to region. Design can be grafted to so many disciplines; it is often understood to be part of the practical application of other disciplines. 'Thus we have…', as Buchanan states '…the odd, recurring situation in which design is alternately regarded as "applied" natural science, "applied" social science, or "applied" fine art.'

In one sense, design is a problem solving method, which may like learning and living, having and raising children be a natural ability common to all human beings. Organizing a shelf, a meal or an appointment may all be aspects of design.
In another sense, it is an ‘industrial’ counter culture, with a 'look' and like most counter cultures it can insist on its own language, behaviour, dress and at times, its own inflexible aesthetic. That is one of the problems with design in the crafts. We need to be clear what we mean when we say we want more innovation in design, when we say we want more design in crafts.

I would argue that it is impossible to make something, which has not been designed. An object made by human beings has to have been designed by someone at some time. All craftwork has been designed. So what do marketing and promotions people who work in Government and private crafts and small industries development corporations, departments and ministries mean when they say crafts producers need more design?

1 They may mean - the product should have a modern (perhaps an industrial) look.
2 They may mean - the product should be plainer, with less decoration.
3 They may mean - the object should be more fashionable. To be fashionable may mean to change regularly to keep up with changing fashions. How does that fit with maintaining traditions?
4 They may mean - the object should have consumer appeal in another culture. For many developing countries, that means market appeal in a developed country - the opportunity for export.

I am reminded of the title to an exhibition of graphic design in Germany.
Design ist Kunst die sich Nuetzlich macht - Design is art that makes itself useful. Apart from the disquieting suggestion that in the widest sense, there should be any art, which does otherwise, this is a neat turn of phrase.

For the purposes of this seminar, we need to concern ourselves with how design becomes part of the practical application of the crafts.

The challenge for those of us in Australia, is to link the various aspects of mainstream design and contemporary industrial manufacture with the whole continuum of creative professions so as to be able to walk that fine line between existing in an international context, and maintaining some of our uniqueness. This is something that is important to all countries. Almost without exception, wherever I travel in the world, people have the same concerns. How can we maintain a unique national identity while at the same time finding our place in the world? Many postcolonial societies are trying to rediscover their unique cultural icons. New cultures, or newly combined cultures such as that of Australia are trying to identify themselves by developing cultural icons. In all cases, craft objects are amongst those icons.

We need to understand the implications for our material culture of the future pertinence of the verb craft, in the sense of making work, of utilizing skill - of doing. We need to understand the implications of the verb design in the sense of planning, managing, organizing and inventing.

Function
In one sense this is the easiest aspect of designing objects. Whether they hold liquid, whether they are comfortable to sit on, whether the textiles keep us comfortable - these aspects are relatively easy to measure and were invented (designed) in domestic consumer goods hundreds and even thousands of years ago.

Use function: This what we usually mean by function - whether or not a utilitarian object does the job for which it is meant.

Economic function: Very often what we mean by design and function in a modern consumer economy is for those traditional attributes to be refigured within new and changing fashion, so that they become increasingly desirable and can be traded.

Social function: It also means that new objects have to mean something to us, they have to tell a story about who we are and who we want to be. Objects become part of how we want to act out our lives and help us to live with others.

Spiritual function: The objects we design and craft sometimes fulfill spiritual needs that cannot be defined and measured as easily as whether a pottery bowl holds water.

Innovative design therefore, is not a simple process. It is not something that a person from one culture can easily teach a person from a different culture. It certainly is not a fixed quality. We can all share our market research, we can learn skills from each other, we can buy things from each other, and we can import and export raw materials. Successful design however means asking and answering some of the questions I have discussed in this paper. It means knowing who wants the object, why they want it, who they want to share it with and in what context they are likely to use it. It means knowing what the fashion is, what styles are popular (or at least what style is coming up next). It becomes increasingly difficult to balance changing contemporary market demands with enduring qualities and tradition. Difficult - but not impossible. That is both the promise and the challenge of modern craft.