Page 197 - Constructing Craft

Peter McCleary, an American lecturer in architecture, pointed out, technology is

more than machinery in the physical sense. It is both thinking about and making of
objects.

Technology is the discourse between societies and their natural
environments in the production of the built environment.
Technology is not only the resulting products and processes but
also includes the framework of thinking generated by this
dialectical relationship between man and nature, i.e. technology
is both the doing and the thinking about the doing ‒ the action
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and the reflection-in-action.

Because all craftspeople employed technology, as described by McCleary, in one
form or another, and all thought about how they would achieve their craft goals –

again employing technology according to McCleary – then all were located within
the parameters of the technological system of their time. Many craftspeople

accepted the dominant paradigm that craft was, if not anti-machine, then at least
wary of modern technology. But technology in its fullest sense was being

misunderstood by craftspeople and few read ideas about how it might be a force for

good or how it might be managed. As we have seen previously, the potter Harry
Davis did think about issues such as these and in the words of the American

sociologist and historian of technology and science, Lewis Mumford, who did not
believe that the impact of technology was necessarily detrimental to art (and craft),

he found guidance to his thinking. Davis set out to convince craftspeople that their
thinking was flawed.

Lewis Mumford

Before we examine Davis’ attempts to instruct craftspeople on the correct use of

technology we must consider Mumford’s ideas and the influence he had on Davis.

Mumford used the term ‘“the machine” … as a shorthand reference to the entire
technological complex’ which referred to a range of different aspects of technology

such as the knowledge, skills and arts derived from industry and included various
forms of tools, instruments and apparatus as well as the types of machines most

people associated with modern industry. Mumford was fond of the term ‘technics’ by
which he meant human activity which controls and directs the forces of nature for its

own purposes. For Mumford art was an integral aspect of technics.

Constructing Craft