User:Roos Peltenburg/Chapter 2 Philosophies of craft

This chapter mainly focusses on the offline, non-digital world of people making things.

The term craft might be associated with traditional rather twee items, or a newer, cool approach to making things yourself, as seen in the recent rise of knitting, 'craft guerila' fairs, DIY culture and other trendy craft activities.

John Ruskin had critique and interesting ideas about art and society and the dehumanized model of industial production. For Ruskin the thought and craft of making, the mental and the physical, are united in the same process.

William Morris. Republished Ruskin's 'The Nature of Gothic' in a book. He wrote in the preface: In future days this chapter will be considered as one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century.

Tony Pinkney: From this standpoint, then, the Kelmscott Press books, however expensive and restricted in social circulation in their own day, are not evidences of medievalist nostalgia and political withdrawal, but are rather time-travellers from some far future we can barely imagine, showing how lovingly artefacts might be crafted in the socialist world that is to come.

As Clive Wilmer puts it, Morris is reminding us of the possibility of alternatives: 'To dream of the impossible and disregard reality is to question the inevitability of excisting circumstances.