Exploring the no mans land between folk craft and digital fabrication
Why?
Mass production and folk craft is on opposite sides of the spectrum of production today. The western consumer is often detached from the production when the majority of the products we use are produced in a faraway country with minimal insight into the production chain. The only power we have as consumers is to buy or not to buy. The separation makes us emotionally detached from the products and makes it more likely for us to throw things in the bin and consume in an exponentially increasing rate. Folk craft was the way to survive before the industrial era. Farmers took what they could get from there land to make what they needed to survive. Learning by tradition and making created durable and personalized objects. Objects that often lived on for generations because of their quality, function and sentimental values.
What if we could make these two opposites meet and become a hybrid? A digital craft that speaks the language of both the past and the future. We are there already, we just need to refine and apply these new systems of production. The human touch will still be there. A clear connection to the body translated trough binary code to the machine that leaves its traces and adds its characteristic marks.
I began my exploration in the wood workshop. Inspired by the folk craftsman Jörgen Jögge Sundqvist. His philosophies about folk craft felt easy to relate to and I started carving in wood with "Making is thinking" as my mantra. Sometimes you just have to make and feel to understand where you are heading.
The tactile qualities that handmade objects inhabit are hard to explain in words. For me, handmade objects possess qualities that a mechanically or industrially produced object often lack. Is it the sentimental value (the notion of the knowledge required and the effort made to get it) that makes you hold on to something? I don´t know. One thing I know is that fine carpentry furniture and customized architectural details have a higher economical value today then the mass-produced or prefabricated. This creates an economic equality and gentrifies design. Gentrified design is not just a political issue but also a global environmental issue that needs to be solved now, not later.
Modern production technology is fast and 3D modelling opens opportunity for higher complexity. What happens when matter transformed by the hand becomes ones and zeroes in the binary code? What happens when the code returns to matter? Is the touch of the hand still there? The uneducated expression in the folk craft is beautiful and permissive. The computer-generated form removes, adds and corrects. Where is the value? Perfection or imperfection? This twisting and turning mind game is easy to get lost in.
Where is the soul if not in the memory imprinted by the human hand and mind.
Thoughts
At first I was stuck in the notion of getting the translation exact. As soon as I started to let go of my initial ide of just copying and give my self the freedom to distort and experiment with my scanned objects I found it easier to move forward again. By distorting the scanned objects in scale I translated the original form to new functions. I started to see the glitches in the production as qualities instead of flaws.
I translate my handmade, weird little objects into spatial elements with tactile/haptic qualities. The form created by my hands is still there but fragmented through digital filters and reassembled with new qualities and functions.
Digital scanning makes it possible to use objects that we are attached to and translate them into new hybrid objects or spatial elements. Some of the haptic information is lost in the process while new interesting features appears.
I start with a haptic sensory investigation of my stock material to find its inner logic and embedded qualities. The choice of tools reflects the material properties. I shape the stock the way its properties allows me to but still let my personal expression shine trough. When the haptic qualities please my brain, I stop. I scan the object. In the digital 3D-model I get the freedom of scaling, reshaping and exploring. I can find the glitches and choose if I want to leave them, exaggerate them or fix them.
This project matches the sensitivity to detail of handcrafting techniques with the efficiency and geometric accuracy of digital fabrication. It's part of a personal quest to bridge the distance between the user and the industry. An experiment in creating a design technique that allows the consumer to transform, adapt or multiply objects that they have strong emotional bonds to. A tactile design translation that creates “cyborg” objects with both the inner logic of the handcrafted and mathematical algorithmic logic of the computer. The memory of the hand create the bond. The digital footprint creates tension.
My intensions are not to remove or neglect the folk craft by manufacturing with digital technics. Quite the opposite, I want to implement the meditative, healing qualities of handcrafts, its permissive philosophy and knowledge into the world of industrial production. It could be a way to slow down consumption and make design more democratic at the same time. What if we could get more common understanding of the power and value of craft while decreasing the impact on our habitat in the same process? Wouldn’t that be great?