'Visionary rather than practical': Craft, art and material efficiency

Abstract

Emotional responses to materials and manufactured objects have a long history but provoked vivid writing during the design reform debates of the nineteenth century and were carried forward into the twentieth century. In particular, nineteenth-century anxieties about plasticity and about composite materials are still with us. Wood continues to represent sustainability, 'truth to materials', emotional durability and an assumed reassuring contact between material, tools and maker. By contrast, the facture offered by new media, in the form of self-replicating rapid prototyping machines, appears disembodied while also offering the possibility of homesteader-making. The desirability of recycling and up-cycling is currently central to our emotional responses to materials, with the world's waste dumps becoming sites of horrified fascination and inspiration. Symbolic moves in the direction of autarchy and reverse engineering by artists and designers register doubts about sustainability and seek to uncover the hidden impact of individual materials. This survey of historic and current attitudes towards materials and making processes by makers, artists and designers sheds light on anxieties familiar to us all, concerning technological development, authentic experience, agency, a sense of selfhood and the often bruising experience of modernity itself. © 2013 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.