User:Nsilver/Notes making is connecting

Notes Making is Connecting

Introduction

• Making is connecting because you have to connect things together (materials, ideas, or both) to make something new; • Making is connecting because acts of creativity usually involve, at some point, a social dimension and connect us with other people; • And making is connecting because through makingthings and sharing them in the world, we increase our engagement and connection with our social and physical environments.

Craft is a process that takes time, there is rarely a specific endgoal in sight. It is the process of discovery and having ideas through the process of making. It is about shaping the material to convey a message.

Sit back and be told vs. Making and doing.

Web 1.0 is your own space. (read) Web 2.0 is everyone their space like this Wiki. (read/write and thus connecting)

What is creativity?

• Change in a symbolic domain, creating new things.
• Requires an audience and a field of work.
• Creativity is an aspect of human beings even if it isn't recognised by one of the points mentioned above.

The meaning of making I: Philosophies of craft

• Art, craft and design are not to be separated.
• 20th century started to separate the craft from the ideas.
• Creating objects and creating ideas are equal and should not be thought of separately.
• The process of crafting is the process of shaping ideas.
• Working with your hand as a central part of the process of thinking and making
• 'Problem solving and problem finding'
• A pleasure in making even without knowing the end goal
• Mimetic art

John Ruskin and William Morris

• Ruskin was a artist and a social thinker, He was conservative but not religious, he did not appreciate the industrialisation and the self-interest based economy.
• 'THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE' John Ruskin
• Ruskin on Creativity and Imperfection
• Admiring the 'savagery' and 'rudeness' by embracing them as human imperfections.
• Don't be a slave to perfection.
• Embracing imperfection as human nature.
• The 'tool' and the master.
• Labour division: A capitalist efficient economic machine that suppresses creativity and promotes productivity power but not individual growth or invention.
• Marx and Ruskin both in there on ways claim that repetitive work kills a creative spirit
• Adam smith father of the free market
• William Morris Rides In
• individualistic 'making things'
• Morris believes hope gives worth and continuity to human endeavour
• Morris saw the industrial age as something that could harm the environment and sustainability, he saw that nature and man needed to life in harmony to survive.
• for Morris sharing art and education is core in society
• to quote him in a lecture from 1877: 'I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.'
• Useful Work overs hope to the maker
• Morris defines wealth similar to Ruskin, but includes the sharing part. A 100 years before the World Wide Web.
• Art separated from the craft but Morris says: 'The best artist was a workman still, the humblest workman was an artist.’
• The web makes it possible the share without the boundaries between craft and art. Online there are niches but there are no forced labels.
• According to Morris the only healthy way of making art is: ‘an art which is to be made by the people and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user’
• A diverse community of individualistic voices

The meaning of making II: Craft today

• DIY culture
• Three parts of craft: 'I will describe them as decorative art, the vernacular, and the politics of work.' Paul Greenhalgh ???
• the arts and craft movement
• the movement was active before the first world war sparked in England moved to America
• 'humankind would be liberated through communal creativity.' Paul Greenhalgh
• Web 2.0 gives way for this liberation
• Paul Greenhalgh says craft was synonymous with power.
• dehumanising industrial gives no room for individualism and high quality craft is too expensive for the average Joe
• so DIY started to rise
• Gustav Stickley, a furniture maker, craftsman, and architect, based in New York, started the first DIY magazine The craftsman an open source magazine which subsequently undermined his own furniture business
• open source today: sharing your resources so others can use it and improve it