What is the Meaning of Craft in the Digital Age?
sycamore, steel, leather cord, rosewood, chrome powdercoat
2023
What is the Meaning of Craft in the Digital Age? takes as its starting point a dive into the history of Herman Miller, and Ray and Charles Eames, and the conditions to which Mid-Century Modernism was responding to. This table is grounded in the material curiosity and composition that I found in the fireplace room of the De Pree house designed by Charles and Ray Eames. Formally drawing from the strong horizontal and vertical relationships of the space, as well as the furniture products that once furnished it, this table seeks to direct the 21st century condition of nihilism towards the important legacy of Mid-Century Modern furniture design.
Photographs by Mark Johnston
In the late 1940s, the technologies of war were repurposed towards design. New materials and industrial processes were directed towards improving and reimagining public and private life. As an example, the technology of moulded plywood came from a new technique of building airplane bodies when metal was scarce. Ray and Charles Eames were motivated at the beginning of their joint career, first and foremost, by making this technology work for furniture design.
Not everyone embraced the beaten swords turned ploughshares. The first studio furniture makers turned to craft as a rejection of this moment of industrial advancement that fed into a new consumerism. Later, the Postmodernists of the 70’s and 80’s made work that rejected the grand regime of design. Every era holds a rejection of its narrative. Countercultures have existed at every point in the 20th and 21st centuries.
I believe that we are now in a unique period of vast rejection. The digital age has completely changed the way we consume information, communicate with one another, and understand the world. Additionally the impending climate catastrophe forces an ontological reflection about design and its possibilities. Between political instability, the crisis of public faith in government eroding, and the unending rise of rent and decrease of wages while a tiny group consolidates the vast majority of the world’s wealth, the promises of American exceptionalism and narratives of progress have collapsed. To my generation, these conditions put together are no less than apocalyptic.
For me, these issues were at the forefront of my mind when the a group of Furniture Design graduate students from RISD visited the Miller-Knoll facilities in Michigan last spring. The materials were rich. The archives were wonderful. The show pieces were excellent. But watching a floor of employees assembling components produced in other countries to make “American manufactured office chairs” was eye opening. And seeing a banner hanging above the heads of workers who spend their day cutting sheets of MDF that read, “design for the good of humankind” was deflating.
The conditions of the late 40’s and 50’s trickled into design to force questions about consumerism, making, and industrial technologies. The conditions of today force us to contend with sustainability and the digital age. But what do we do when we are overstimulated with digital media about the hopelessness of the climate crisis? What could a furniture designer hope to do when the Supreme Court bars the EPA from enforcing rules against keeping our water clean, or when billionaires emit more CO2 from their private jets in one week than the average person could possibly emit in their lifetime?
It seems to me that for an object to be manufacturable and marketable, it has to believe in its own narrative scheme. It has to say, “I have meaning that is relevant to you in the present day. And for that, I am worth making, and then making more of.” What would it look like, instead, for a designed table to cope with the loss of faith in the promises of the 20th century? What is the Meaning of Craft in the Digital Age is an object that rejects being a product.
Chromed steel tube is taken from the mid century designs of the Eames and Herman Miller, but is now assembled in a matrix that speaks to the visual language of the digital revolution.
To deal with the additional elements that steel tube furniture requires, I looked to the Herman Miller history of over using Brazilian rosewood to make luxury items. But here, I used a board of Nicaraguan rosewood that I had lying around to make what is generally the cheapest components—replacing plastic end caps and rubber feet.
Most important to this piece, the way that the tabletops are connected to the base speaks of labor hours and monotony. This is no quick fix, no screws or threaded inserts. One can look at the leather cord wrapped around the tube and stitched through the tabletop and see the hand that wrapped and threaded each loop. Assembly. Assembly. Leather cord made in India, a table manufactured in America.