A mention here on technology is also needed. It was notable in the interviews
that the respondents felt ambivalent about technology, possibly as a result of
their age and lack of exposure to new technologies both as design tools and
around which design is creating new products. In contrast, presentations at
recent conferences have highlighted an exciting and mature approach to
technologies by craft researchers. The makers interviewed were concerned
about a loss of original expression, and a loss of the metaphorically valuable
explorative element in mass production processes, while more experienced
makers were able to demonstrate technology’s affordance of new ranges of
expression. With this knowledge, the ‘‘something in the putting the hammer to
the metal’’ may be equally present in the control of the centrifugal casting
process, in the rapid prototyping of a complex form, and so on, in an appropriation
of the novel process towards the artists’ own ends (Kyttanen 2005).
While Helen Rees wrote in 1997 that ‘‘even the most ardent champions of
craft would agree that manufacturing is not necessarily a dehumanising process’’
(Dormer 1997), what the jewellers’ concerns did find resonance with was
Pye’s analysis of ‘diversity’, that is, the levels of effective range of the formal
elements within a design: ‘‘every little incident of form and surface and every
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departure from regularity however minute will begin to tell as a formal element
at some particular range’’ (Pye 1968; O’Toole 1994).