It ain’t broke; merely punctured

The phrase that's stuck in my mind since our debate on design education in September is Sam Hecht’s deceptively simple observation that students seem to have lost the ability to understand why things are the way they are. For Sam, understanding the fact that every (man-made) thing is a product, and every product is part of a system, is pretty much the whole of design. The reason, he said, that Min Kyu Choi was able to design a sensational folding 3-point plug, is that he understood the ‘whole system’ of plugs, including of course, their use by humans. Industrial Facility manage regularly to transform this plain-sounding philosophy into things of a simplicity that is wondrous.

The phrase that's stuck in my mind since our debate on design education in September is Sam Hecht’s deceptively simple observation that students seem to have lost the ability to understand why things are the way they are. For Sam, understanding the fact that every (man-made) thing is a product, and every product is part of a system, is pretty much the whole of design. The reason, he said, that Min Kyu Choi was able to design a sensational folding 3-point plug, is that he understood the ‘whole system’ of plugs, including of course, their use by humans. Industrial Facility manage regularly to transform this plain-sounding philosophy into things of a simplicity that is wondrous.

Here’s the transcript of the whole event. The workshop that I’ve been developing with Pascal Anson and Yan-ki Lee for eight people with spinal cord injuries has some of Hecht’s plain speaking style: a whole day devoted to taking things apart into their elements and layers and rigorously analysing why they’re the way they are. Because it’s not about taste, argues Pascal, but about logic; and not enough people know that about design.  

In the wake of the Comprehensive Spending Review, with engineering, infrastructure, transport and STEM elevated as the privileged beneficiaries of public largesse in hard times, we need designers like Hecht and Anson badly; the ones who can articulate the logic of design to give it parity with the logic of science, but without making design sound deadly mechanistic. Without them how will we sustain a broad and complete understanding of design when engineering has higher status than language?

The question of why things are the way they are doesn’t only elude design students. Consider this anecdote that Jonathan Glancey told me a year ago: two ten-year-old boys walk into a bike shop pushing a bicycle. When asked by the proprietor how he can help, one of the boys replies, “Wheel’s broke”. While it is immediately obvious to Glancey and the proprietor that the bike has a flat tyre, the rudimentary mechanics and locomotion principles of a bicycle are so foreign to these boys that they have no vocabulary for the simple problem they face.

In The Case for Working with your Hands, Matthew Crawford describes how unfashionable manual skills like making and drawing have become in an education system that aims to supply the cutting-edge institutions of capitalism with “pliable generalists unfettered by any single set of skills”. His opinions have been formed by taking motorcycles apart to understand why they are the way they are. Crawford’s argument for “the cognitive richness of skilled trades” (a lot more accessible than Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, certainly in the early chapters) has sharpened the debate about craft today.

And about time too. I complained back in March that the craft polemic seemed to be all about basketry and weaving, when I wanted it to stretch from writing and playing an instrument right through to "heating engineers and plumbers and signwriters". Even Minister of State for Further Education etc. John Hayes cited Crawford when he came here on Tuesday to give his talk The craft so long to lerne: Skills and their Place in Modern Britain. Alongside repeated invocations of the Mastercraftsman (a bit hard to picture in his contemporary incarnation) and a calling for "a new Arts & Crafts movement" (which also makes me squint), he did include a litany of butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers and every other artisan. He blew it for me, though, when he conceded in the Q & A that, yes, of course ‘crafts’ extend to the creative industries, IT and healthcare. "Let's all enjoy the concept of craft", he said.

I don’t necessarily disagree - anything can be done well or badly -  but I no longer know what this expansive definition means we should do. Except apprenticeships: that much is clear.