John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

“…excludes the mind (the exclusive realm of Art with a capital A),
whereas design fosters rationality because it serves machines and the
marketplace.” (Jackson, 2004)
This illuminates why many contemporary craft practitioners prefer the
designation ‘designer-maker’, indicating a production that is
“…distinguished by a particular creative approach in which designing and
making activities are fully integrated and intrinsic to each other.”
(Bunnell, 1998)
White (2004) has examined the impact of digital tools on her craft practice. She
indicates that computer-aided design has created a new dialogue within her
practice. She points out that like many other craft makers her engagement with
digital technologies has been intuitive and characterises this as ‘technological
opportunism’. She claims that this has resulted in a hybrid practice of art,
design and craft. White indicates the objects she has produced are out with the
mainstream of contemporary jewellery and craft. However, she states the
process she undertakes is firmly rooted within it. She warns us that a
hybridised form of practice is in danger of becoming
“…a no-man's-land of creative self-identity - a philosophically rootless
post-modern condition of unmoored values, meanings and judgements.”
(White, 2004)
These are valuable insights that raise provocative questions about a maker’s
concerns with ‘what’ an object is in relation to ‘how’ it is made. Visual
computing and digital tools can transform former design processes into new
ways of working. The work happening across disciplines might be more clearly
seen as attempts to bring about new types of critical, cultural, and technological
objects around which affinity groups can form through a relationship to a
common class of problems and a common pursuit of solutions. Collectively,
these might represent an expanded cultural field beyond each of the traditional
disciplines.
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