Craftwork as Problem Solving

Ethnographic Studies of Design and Making

Trevor H.J. Marchand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134802296
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume brings together a cross-disciplinary group of anthropologists, researchers of craft, and designer-makers to enumerate and explore the diversity and complexity of problem-solving tactics and strategies employed by craftspeople, together with the key social, cultural, and environmental factors that give rise to particular ways of problem solving. Presenting rich, textured ethnographic studies of craftspeople at work around the world, Craftwork as Problem Solving examines the intelligent practices involved in solving a variety of problems and the ways in which these are perceived and evaluated both by makers and creators themselves, and by the societies in which they work. With attention to local factors such as training regimes and formal education, access to tools, socialisation and cultural understanding, budgetary constraints and market demands, changing technologies and materials, and political and economic regimes, this book sheds fresh light on the multifarious forms of intelligence involved in design and making, inventing and manufacturing, and cultivating and producing. As such, it will appeal to scholars of anthropology, sociology, and cultural geography, as well as to craftspeople with interests in creativity, skilful practice, perception and ethnography.

PART I
Practical Problem Solving in Craft

Chapter 1
The Prototype: Problem Work in the Relationship between Designer, Artist, and Gaffer in Glassblowing

Erin O’Connor and Suzanne Peck¹

Introduction to the ‘Hotshop’

Sarkis had been commissioned by Jasmine to produce glass prototypes of her designs for a home-accessory line. While Sarkis ‘gaffed’ (i.e. shaped the glass, while directing his assistant), Jasmine sat perched behind his workbench, watching and offering suggestions - but she was on his turf now. And, like most people who visit the ‘hotshop’ (i.e. glass-blowing studio) for their first time, Jasmine was captivated by the heat and luminosity of the furnace, the glory hole, and the undulating molten glass fires; by the intermingling scents of sweat and smoke, and by the rhythmic and skilful choreography of the craft. She observed intently as Sarkis moved back and forth between the glory hole to reheat the glass and his workbench to tool the ‘Pit Bull piggy bank’ - Jasmine’s design interpretation of the classic coin bank.

Sarkis first blew a cylinder. His assistant then brought more hot glass from the furnace which Sarkis dolloped onto the vessel and began sculpting into the mouth, nostrils, eyes, and ears of a Pit Bull dog. Jasmine interjected that she wanted the dog’s snout to be longer and its jaws opened as though it were barking. Sarkis said that he would need to try that the next time, since a longer snout would involve elongating the cylinder prior to sculpting. He finished up the spiked collar on the pit bull he was making. After several days of prototyping, neither Jasmine nor Sarkis was satisfied with the object. Sarkis was a highly proficient glassblower, but he admitted that evoking the Pit Bull’s ‘bark’ was a challenge, and even the well-rendered features of the dog were difficult to discern in clear glass. The prototype failed and the design was dropped.

Studio Glass and Prototyping

Sarkis belonged to a community of glassblowers who prototype in the so-called ‘studio glass’ tradition. Studio glass today tends to defy its original tenet of rejecting technique in favour of expression, and instead uses traditional technique and teamwork to explore the material and pursue expression.² The contemporary world of studio glass is populated by not only artists, but also production gaffers (i.e. glassblowers, who head the production team), designers, and hobbyists, and it is organised around academic and non-academic training, curricula, conferences, popular media, art and craft markets, galleries, and museums.

It is not unusual for studio glassblowers to take on multiple roles in order to earn a living. Thus, while many are artists and designers who prototype and produce their own work, they may also accept contracts as gaffers to do that work for others. In some cases, gaffing is carried out in a traditional factory setting in which a designer passes designs onto the gaffer for execution. In other cases, the entire process is a collaborative one between designer and gaffer, each who has varying degrees of input. There are also instances of contemporary fine artists contracting glassblowers to prototype their artwork, which is typically a ‘one-off’ object, rather than something to be reproduced in batch or mass production. Across these ways of working, glassblowers are presented with different kinds of problems that need solving through their craft knowledge and practice.

Drawing upon ethnographic research and interviews with studio glassblowers, this chapter explores the practice of prototyping across different contexts of production in order to better understand how tacit forms of knowledge are used to interpret, negotiate, and execute designs.³ Prototypes are produced as a precursor for a production line or limited-run of goods, or sometimes for one-off objects. Prototyping is a complex process involving interaction between the maker’s tacit knowledge, his imagination, and the material world. The objective is to resolve design problems through a practical, hands-on process of trial and error. While prototyping in glass, the gaffer’s problem-solving activities involve both inductive and deductive methods. When presented with the opportunity to contribute input to a design, the gaffer draws inductively from her existing working knowledge of the material and her body-in-practice to shape the prototype. This is the ‘bricolage work of improvisation’. When asked to execute rather than create (or co-create) a design, a gaffer may rely exclusively on measurements and drawings, and employ a deductive working style. Inductive and deductive methods are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Both approaches to problem solving employ ‘embodied bricolage’, but an inductive approach holds greater opportunity for discovering new problems.

Technique in Production Prototyping

Finn was a graphic design major in college in the mid-1990s. He took glassblowing as an elective, and got hooked. After finishing college, Finn worked on contract for professional studio-glass artists. Once he was married with children, however, he decided that he needed a more secure income, but was uncertain about how to earn a living in the art world. He therefore took a job at the Sedgewick glass factory in a New England town making traditional English-style stemware and other tableware designs.

At Sedgewick, the division of labour for prototyping followed traditional factory conventions: designs were made ‘upstairs’ and then sent ‘down’ to the factory floor for production. On the floor, labour was organised into teams. Though smaller in scale, the organisational structure of the factory shared similarities with the division of labour in the early-American proto-industrial ‘shop system’ that served to increase specialisation and lay the groundwork for the automation of the American glass industry in the late nineteenth century (Scoville, 1948: 22; Labino, 1968: 117). Finn’s job at Sedgewick was to assist in a team of two or three men that worked alongside ten other teams.

Finn told us that the first things he learned as a team member were ‘taking measurements from drawings and [how to] use callipers’. Callipers function like a three-dimensional ruler - imagine hinged tweezers that open around an object – and they are one of the many tools used to achieve consistency in prototyping. The glassblower measures the drawn object by using different callipers. One calliper may be set to height, a second to the width of the vessel’s ‘mouth’, and another to the width of the vessel’s central body.

In glassblowing, vessels are ‘blown out’ using a hollow pipe onto which an orb of molten glass has been gathered from a furnace. As the orb is blown, it expands to create a vessel. By using breath, heat, and handtools, the vessel can be widened or constricted in a bilaterally symmetrical fashion along its central axis. Callipers guide the work of shaping and assist in achieving precision in reproduction. In the case of the Sedgewick glass factory, gaffers used callipers for matching the glass prototype to the exact specifications of the designer.

Although the stemware was simpler to make than the designs of the studio artists whom Finn assisted, he was nevertheless challenged by the precision demanded by the factory work: ‘I realized that there was a discipline involved if you wanted to [master] a certain technique. The cups had to be a certain way. When you have to make something to specific parameters, you become skilled at it’. The challenge demanded that Finn make his skill technically precise and that he efficiently coordinate his movements with those of his team members. Finn’s activities were structured by predetermined goals that were set prior to production. According to David Pye’s classification, Finn’s work could be categorised as a ‘workmanship of certainty’ (1968: 4). For Pye, certainty characterises workmanship when there is no element of risk; that is, when the outcome is certain.

Not all glassblowing factories produce prototypes in a top-down, hierarchical manner. According to glassblowing lore, Carlo Scarpa (1906-78), who was a designer at the esteemed Venini glass house on the island of Murano, ‘descended’ to the factory floor to watch, learn, and collaborate with the glass maestros in order to produce new designs.⁴ In the case of Scarpa at Venini, the practices of both the designer and the makers were informed by their engagement with, and a deep understanding of, the material. By contrast, the stark division between designer and maker at Sedgewick precluded a design-making symbiosis. Finn’s material knowledge therefore was not used to inform the design of the things he made. Instead, he directed it toward executing predetermined forms that were not necessarily attuned to the material from which they were made.

Learning to fulfil a pre-set goal improved Finn’s technique. The kind of prototyping he was hired to do establishes distinct parameters for both physical action (namely, precise coordination with the team) and material translation (namely, an exact rendering of the proposed design) insofar as it calibrates bodily practice toward efficiency. But, he explained, it also made it more difficult to realize his own ideas when blowing glass: on the factory floor, ‘You’re solving a problem rather than creating your own’. According to Michael Polanyi’s thinking, Finn’s method of prototyping was tied to his difficulty in generating a problem. In prototyping by execution, Finn was required to work backwards from the design to the glass. Finn utilised a ‘procedure’ that is ‘reversible in the sense that it could be traced back stepwise to its beginning and repeated at will any number of times’ (Polanyi 1962: 123). For Polanyi, this method is not a ‘means of achieving discovery’. Discoveries are made by overcoming a gap in logic - a leap that is necessarily ‘irreversible’ (Polanyi 1962: 123).

As a material, the ever-changing state of molten glass presents endless possibilities for ‘discovery’. But at the Sedgewick factory, the method of prototyping from a pre-determined design supported not the discovery of new problems, but rather the instrumental division of labour in the shop system. If Finn would have intervened by proposing or exploring how the objects he was prototyping might be alternatively rendered, then the shop system would have broken down. In this context, the unexpected is not pursued as a potential discovery, but rather it is perceived as a mistake, and is corrected.

Body and Imagination in Prototype Production

Allen was first drawn to the craft by a master glassblower who came to his college as a visiting artist more than a decade ago: ‘That was the only time in my life I can say that I’ve been totally blown away. I’d never seen anything like that. I got so excited. I signed up for a class the following semester’. Allen was dedicated to mastering the craft skills, which included extensive training in traditional Venetian techniques. By the time he graduated from college, Allen was deemed by his seniors to be among the most technically promising of his generation.

Allen gaffed for Clayton, co-owner and head designer of Alcove, one of New York’s leading boutique-design houses. Starting as an assistant, he rose through the hierarchy of the hotshop team. After more than a decade of blowing glass, he became the head of product development, which, he explained, ‘is really the head of prototyping’. In contrast to Finn’s experience at Sedgewick where design decisions were made separately from production, at Alcove, Allen would meet with Clayton before physically prototyping in the hotshop in order to discuss the feasibility, scale, colour, and thickness of a design, as well as the overall idea that the object was meant to convey, and how glass might best work as a conduit for that idea. The design idea was thus collaboratively achieved. On the day of prototyping a new design, Allen would ask Clayton to be present in the hotshop:

I request that. I will not make prototypes without the designer there. I just won’t do it. It’s a prerequisite if somebody hires me. It’s nearly impossible for the first time to take somebody’s drawing and get what they want without them being there. [The hotshop is] not dangerous ... I want you right here; you’re not going to get burnt; nothing is going to happen to you. But you need to be comfortable with me and I need to be comfortable with you, so you can open up and give me what’s in your head, so I can best translate that in this material. I want an open dialogue.

A designer may be able to imagine a glass object with computer software, or while at their drafting table, but imagining the process ‘hot’ - in other words, in terms of the formative properties of the molten material - is an entirely different matter. In the context of the hotshop, Allen could familiarise the designer with the craft, his skill set, and the formative properties of glass: ‘What we do is extremely difficult. It’s time sensitive. It takes a lot of physical strength and effort to do’.

A former task that Allen found especially stimulating was the re-purposing of a design for the production of hurricane lamps. Clayton believed that prototyping the new iteration would simply involve inverting the design. Allen described the new concept as contemporary, modern and angular. Nevertheless, he began prototyping the piece in a way that felt comfortable to him:

So, I completely went 180 degrees opposite of [Clayton’s aesthetic] and made something that I thought would look good and that I was comfortable making ...

I made it pretty sensual. Instead of a square, really hard-angled stem, I made a ball, a nice sphere and a really delicate connection between the foot and the stem ... I think it had to do a lot with my comfort level. For my first time making this, I just needed to be in my zone. It’s like shaping something out of a lump of clay: you have to whittle it away and get the details.

Figure 1.1 Allen’s sketch of the original design (left) and of the object repurposed as a hurricane lamp (right).

Allen’s first iteration might have seemed wrong. He knowingly veered ‘180 degrees in the opposite direction’ from what he and Clayton had discussed. The resulting hurricane lamp was informed by his training in the Venetian tradition, which Allen, like John Ruskin more than a century earlier, favoured for its rounded profile (2009: 168, 395). But by first prototyping a rounded Venetian hurricane lamp, Allen initiated a search for the modern, angular hurricane lamp that was grounded in his existing practical knowledge.

As Allen worked on the first prototype, Clayton confirmed that its scale and size were fine, but he noted that its overall shape was not right. He pushed Allen to achieve the angular form, but he did so with knowledge about the limitations and possibilities of both the medium and Allen’s capabilities. Allen had anticipated this rejection, but he knew that Clayton would be able to read his Venetian iteration as a step toward the modern hurricane lamp. This dynamic, in which designer and gaffer engage the formative rather than the formal properties of glass, approaches an inductive way of prototyping, as described earlier. A drawing may catalyse the prototyping project, but the actual work of prototyping begins with the gaffer’s body - from his or he...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction Craftwork as Problem Solving
• PART I PRACTICAL PROBLEM SOLVING IN CRAFT
• PART II  SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND PHILOSOPHICAL DIMENSIONS IN THE PROBLEMS OF CRAFTWORK
• Afterword
• Index