The Foolishness of Craft Explored: Part 5 Hope of Product

This is the fifth of my posts looking in more depth at The Foolishness of Craft, a short story that explores the impact of global production and suggests a more local, sustainable alternative. If you haven’t read it yet, then it might be best to click here and do so, before reading on.

This is also the second of three posts exploring the topic of work within the story and we are using William Morris' three requirements of meaningful work; hope of rest, hope of product and hope of pleasure in the work itself. If you missed the first one you can read it by clicking here, otherwise it's on to hope of product...

The twin concepts that Morris gives us of hope of product and hope of pleasure in making that product are, for him, closely related; in fact we could say that it is this very closeness that is at the heart of the arts & crafts movement, and which strikes so many of us as so radical even now. Nonetheless in this article I want to try and tease them apart a bit and focus on hope of product, the idea that our daily efforts should result in something meaningful and useful, which helps meet our needs.

What did you make today I wonder? What will you make tomorrow? The answer to these questions might be quite simple; perhaps you made a loaf of bread or a chair, if you’re a baker or chairmaker. If it isn’t bread or furniture, perhaps you made something else useful, a lamp or a book, a film or a bowl. Maybe you did. But I suspect you didn’t.

On the other hand you could be a nurse or doctor and so you made someone better or comforted them. But even this is quite rare.

Instead I wonder if you did what most people do? Make money; not for yourself, but for the person or persons who employ you.

We all know that someone who works in a high street clothing store doesn’t make clothes, instead their job is to sell clothes or, to be more precise, to encourage you to buy clothes from their shop, rather than the one next door. Think about it next time you go into a clothing shop; what does the assistant actually do, other than encourage you to buy, ensure the clothes are on the rack for you to buy and then take your money?

The same is true for Hugo in our story of course. He doesn’t make mobile phones, he may pretend to advise customers based on their needs, but actually his job is to persuade the public that they should buy from his shop rather than the other three down the street and that you should spend as much as you can. His product is profit for a group of people he is unlikely to ever meet.

What a market economy does (even in its most basic form) is replace the link between what you need and what you then produce. So if I needed a bowl, in a non-market, non-exchange society, I have to make one. And of course for most of human history this is how life worked, but slowly over time (long before capitalism) people started to specialise in making certain things, like bowls, and it maybe that they would make them for certain part of the day/week/year and then exchange the bowl for food or other essentials. However, I think it is fair to say that it was a very, very long time before this transformed into a situation where people only made bowls and never made things or grew food to meet their own needs, which of course is where we find ourselves now.

Another crucial difference is that the bowl maker has need of his bowls – nothing leaves his hands that he could not use or own for his own use. Compare this with the current situation where so many workers are producing goods they could never afford to own or have no use of.

 And so we move onto a capitalist system, where the average worker has two products; whatever it is they do or make and the products that they buy to meet their own needs, with the money they are given for their work. This ever increasing disconnect between the two – the genuine needs you have and the tasks you perform on a daily basis – was a concern to Morris and should be a concern for us now.

Morris, in a wonderfully Victorian passage, describes the situation Hugo find’s himself in:

‘…living as they do on wages from those whom they support, [they] cannot get for their use the goods which men naturally desire, but must put up with miserable makeshifts for them…’

Even if we follow this thinking of a market economy and call the product of Hugo’s labour the money he earns with which to buy a jumper, that is only enough to buy one of poor quality. The jumper is entirely constructed from cheap materials (e.g. cotton) and hence quickly becomes misshapen and worn. The stitching is perhaps weak and done in such haste that it did not catch all along the seams. Because it is mass produced it is made to ‘fit’ as many sizes as possible and so hangs a little on him. But the alternative, a properly fitting jumper, of good quality, made over time from excellent materials would be unaffordable to Hugo. And this is exactly the point Morris is making. He continues:

‘…[they] must put up with miserable makeshifts for them, with course food that does not nourish, with rotten rainment [clothing] which does not shelter, with wretched houses which may well make a town-dweller in civilization look back with regret to the tent of nomad tribe, or the cave of the pre-historic savage.’

The language has changed, but sadly the situation Morris describes has not. Our Bangladeshi worker will almost certainly live in substandard housing, that may well make a tent look plush. She may well be clothed in, at best, her traditional clothing made in a sweatshop in her own country or at worse second-hand clothing the west no longer wants, and yet each day she walks to make jumpers she could never afford. Her actual product (the jumper) is poor and her rewards so meagre that her own living (her product) is pitiful.

Her housing is not made from scrap because it is effective at keeping out the weather and elements, it is because it is cheap. It is cheap housing, because that is all she can afford. It is not unheard of for those in developing countries to have to raise a mortgage to afford a few sheets of corrugated iron to use as a roof.

As ever Morris describes it best:

‘But it is a waste of time to try and express in words due contempt of the productions of the much praised cheapness of our epoch. It must be enough to say that this cheapness is necessary to the system of exploiting on which modern manufacture rests. In other words, our society includes a great mass of slaves, who must be fed, clothed, housed and amused as slaves, and that their daily necessity compels them to make slave-wares whose use is the perpetuation of their slavery.’

How often have you bought something, only for it to break, not work or just be horrible to use, or been constrained by money to buy something you know will not last? True quality is such a rare thing in our societies that it is almost impossible to find, and, when we can, the market system makes the time and care it requires unaffordable. This is one of the key problems that craftspeople face; how can their product, which often takes so many hours to produce, ever be affordable to the general population? And so instead we are presented with cheaper imitations to help us make believe that our lives are richer than they are. Some of this we can counter ourselves; buy less and buy quality, make it yourself so that you don’t have to pay for the time it takes and buy second-hand – where quality doesn’t often reflect the price. And we should do these things, but let us be clear that this is tinkering at the edges, our current system cannot allow us all to reverse this system of cheap manufacturing it relies on.

Planned obsolescence has become a much more widely understood term since Annie Leonard’s excellent ‘Story of Stuff’ (if you haven’t watched it do), but it’s true that in a consumer society, that works by citizens buying new products constantly, the idea of something of quality, that lasts, is against the very principle of the system. And so in short, things have to brake, have to be cheaply made, so that you buy new ones. This is also the reason for constant innovation, as it brings new products to the market – replacing those before. Considered refinement of quality and reliability is much lower down the pecking order than “new!”.

Let us come back to our story and just review where we are. Our Bangladeshi woman’s hope of product is extremely poor, whether we are talking about the poorly made jumper she could not afford, and which she has no emotional attachment to or the meagre shelter, food and clothing she can afford with the money she makes from working at the factory.

Hugo, of course, doesn’t actually make anything, his product is simply profit for his ultimate employers; his ultimate personal product is the jumper that will last one year, which he has no input into the making of and which he has very little emotional attachment to.

And what of Mary? Well her product is very different to the others, because she is able to meet her own needs, through her own effort and skills. The end product is one of excellent quality, fitted to her size and shape, of her own design and suited to her needs. Because of this she has an emotional tie and investment in it, which enriches her experience of owning and wearing it.

Morris isn’t saying (and neither am I) that each of us should be capable of making everything and meeting our every need. In fact Morris berates the fact that he has to learn so many crafts, a situation he blames on the way society is constructed. And this leads us nicely into the next blog post, hope of pleasure in the work itself, because we need to reconnect our work with the needs we are trying to meet and create a society where people can develop their skills to create beautiful products, of real quality, for their communities own needs.

The Foolishness of Craft Explored: Part 1 Needs

 I have been really touched by the response to my last blog post, which was a fictional account of two people’s approach to obtaining a new jumper. It contrasted the impact on the environment, communities and individuals of buying one from a high street chain and making one from local, sustainable materials. If you haven’t read it yet, then it might be best to click here and do so, before reading on. 

Because of this interest I thought I would write a series of blog posts exploring some of the themes that came out of the short story and go deeper into the issues, motives and also solutions that it touched on. I would love this to be a conversation and I do not pretend to have all the answers or even to fully understand all of the questions, but I hope that these offerings will be a springboard for your own reflections. 

Needs 

…imagine it is September here in England; the short nights and slight chill let us know that winter is on its way. Two people decide that they are going to need a new jumper to see them through the winter and keep them warm. 

We all have needs. Your needs maybe different to mine and mine in turn will be different to an older lady or a very young boy, but nonetheless there exists a set of physical and emotional requirements that each living person has. Some of these are what we might call base needs; shelter, food, air and water, the fulfillment of which is essential to life itself, others are what makes that life worth living and include love, intimacy, community, creativity, achievement and a sense of self worth.

In the story Hugo and Mary both need a jumper to fulfill a very basic need, that of warmth. Without sufficient layers in the colder months of the year we would get cold, which leads to discomfort, illness and, in extreme cases, even death. And so we can say that both Hugo and Mary have a very legitimate need.

To fulfill this need almost any jumper would do, so long as it provided some insulation, that would be enough. However, this creates a great problem for clothing retailers; if every jumper essentially does the same job in keeping you warm, why should someone buy your jumper and not the shop next doors? Even if we include an element of design into the mix, there are only so many takes on a classic woolen jumper and if we were to go and buy a man’s navy blue jumper from every clothing shop on the high street and line them all up, I dare say they would look pretty similar (or for a more modern way of doing this, try putting 'Navy Blue Jumper' into Google image search).

A further problem for a consumer economy is that actually our needs are pretty simple and fairly basic, requiring only a limited number of purchases. Yes, we need clothes. But how many? What would a basic wardrobe, which could comfortably see you through the seasons in your country, look like? You need shelter, but again what could you actually live in? How small a house would it be practical and comfortable to inhabit on a day-to-day basis? Finally food. What would it cost if we ate using fresh local fruit and vegetables, supplemented with small amounts of meat. Whether or not you wish to live like this is not the point, instead we could live in such a simple way and of course a great percentage of the world’s population does, without any choice.

Many of the higher needs we have; love, intimacy, community, creativity, a feeling of self worth, need not cost anything at all and can be achieved without any (or a least a minimal) consumer consumption.

And so capitalism is left with a real problem; here is a system that is built on the consumption of goods and yet the people do not actually need all that much to live, and that which we do need could almost be obtained from anywhere, with one shop often being no better than another. The response from companies is multi-faceted and we’ll explore more of them through the blog posts, but for our purposes here, looking at needs, we can focus on three: 


1)    Their first approach is to expand, through marketing and increasing cultural perception, what constitutes our basic, essential needs. Let’s take the example of food; clearly this is an essential need, but is it essential to be able to freeze food at home so that we can eat it out of season or eat frozen ready meals? Most people would consider a freezer an essential item in the home – I certainly don’t know of one without one, including my own. And yet this is a very modern, western, perception. How long have we had freezers in homes? 60 years? Our Grandparents lived without one and how many households throughout the world still do? And yet I even feel uncomfortable writing this, as though it is some sort of heresy.  But it’s true – freezers are not a need, they may fulfill many pleasant wants (ice-cream, easy meals etc.), but by perceiving them as a need we distort the reality and this can stop us from engaging with the impacts they cause in their manufacture and use, simply because we believe life to be impossible without them.

2)    The second deliberate distortion is using much higher needs to sell us basic needs, so that we confuse the two and cannot see that there is another way of meeting the base need. We touched on this before, with the navy blue jumper. If all navy blue jumpers are pretty much of a muchness, how can a shop get you to buy their jumper? The answer is by appealing to your sense of self or at least who you would wish to be. Fill a shop, magazine, advert with images of beautiful people, all having impossible levels of fun in gorgeous locations; then get them to look down the camera and ask, are you one of us? Finally offer the chance to join this exclusive club for the price of a jumper, the logo on the breast pocket proudly proclaiming your membership – yes, you can think as you walk home, I am one of you. The need for a jumper (for warmth) is almost forgotten; much greater is the need to be accepted, to belong, to feel your own self worth.

None of this is to say that we don’t have a genuine need to feel accepted or to belong to a community or a sense of our own worth; these are vital. But using consumption to meet them is like eating sweets when you are hungry, it’s a lovely burst of sugar that makes you feel as right as rain for about 5 minutes, before you suddenly realize you are hungry again. 

3)    Finally they create needs that we didn’t even know we had. The example of this that makes me laugh the most are those home-wares catalogues. Who knew that we needed a separate machine to make popcorn, waffles, rice, poached eggs, steam veg, open tins (or wine bottles), chop herbs etc. In the story Hugo gently mocks his customers for their phone, so that they realise just how much they need to upgrade and get all the latest features.

All this is an attempt to cloud our perception of what our needs really are, to muddy the waters so that we judge not on the reality, but on a perceived perception of what our needs are. Hugh and Mary need a jumper to keep warm. They should feel comfortable in it and it should look nice on them. By being able to pare it back to this, both of them can make decisions based on this reality, rather than marketing hype or social norm.

I don’t want to touch here on the nature of work, as I want to leave that for another post, but it is interesting to note that Mary, in making her jumper, is actually meeting her own needs for creativity and self-esteem, through it’s creation. It is not that she is only meeting her needs through the ownership of the jumper, but in the actual process of making it. This is a very different to approach to Hugo, for whom only the acquisition and ownership is meeting his needs.  The sad fact is that in this manufactured confusion of needs, many of our genuine needs actually get forgotten or remain unmet; the need for creativity, for a feeling of being able to look after oneself, accomplishment, of being able to live without negatively impacting on others.

It’s not going to be possible to make everything that modern capitalism makes available to us in affluent countries, to do so would take many more lives than we have. We have to accept that a homemade life is going to be one where we do have less and we need to find a sense of contentment with that. We need to start with a careful consideration of what our real needs are, away from the marking hype of the high street, glossy magazines and TV adverts. If all this sounds a little stark, back to the dark ages living, then I apologise because it needn’t be – actually there are great riches to be had from meeting our simple needs in an original and creative way.

The whole story about Hugo and Mary is really about two different ways of meeting a genuine need. A small snap shot of two people making decisions. Because ultimately much of our lives are taken up with meeting our needs and morality is the choices we take in doing so. Much depends on the consideration we are able to give to others in the process, but also the patience and courage to break from the accepted norm.

The Foolishness of Craft

Craftwork makes no practical or economic sense. Whatever it is that a craftsperson is making could be made quicker by the use of machines, modern materials and (in a western context) cheaper by using labour from abroad. Therefore we should not be surprised that the modern view of craft is that it is a romantic attempt to return to a 19^th century world we have long left behind and which few of us would actually like to return to.

Let’s take an example and imagine it is September here in England; the short nights and slight chill let us know that winter is on its way. Two people decide that they are going to need a new jumper to see them through the winter and keep them warm. The first, let’s call him Hugo, works in mobile telephone sales and earns £15 per hour. He has seen a nice high fashion jumper from a shop called High Street Fashion Co, with the logo staring large on the front breast. The jumper will cost him £80 and so it will take just over 5 hours work to be able to afford it.

Mary on the other hand is an experienced hand spinner and knitter, able to knit herself a jumper. It will take her 12 hours to spin the wool and around 15 hours to knit the jumper. It is a simple woollen jumper, similar to Hugo’s, but with no logo.

On the face of it is it any wonder we reject craft and embrace the modern consumer dream? Both of them get a jumper, but one has to work for 5 hours, whilst the other has to work for 27 hours. Hugo could earn enough to buy 5 jumpers in the time that Mary has made just one. Surely we should get down on our knees every day and thank our lucky stars that modernity has dragged us out of the dark ages and such drudgery?

But if we dig a little deeper for a moment and examine each stage of making Hugo and Mary’s jumpers the picture is much less simplistic.

Mary’s jumper is made from local undyed organic wool, it has travelled from a field in the village (via the sheerer who worked at the farm) and has been washed in nothing more than soap and water.

The materials that Hugo’s jumper is made of are a little more complex and the main material is cotton (60%), which was grown in Kazakhstan, where the water needed for cotton production has caused the Aral Sea to shrink to 15% of its original size. This means that the local farmer no longer has any water to irrigate his food crops. The cotton wasn’t grown organically and so was sprayed with Aldicarb a pesticide so powerful that one drop absorbed into the skin can kill an adult. Nonetheless this it was applied by a man using the most basic of equipment and safety protection, because of the low price being paid for the cotton; sadly he eventually fell ill from the exposure to it and could no longer work, leaving his family in poverty. Despite government efforts some of the cotton was picked by children, paid pitifully low rates of pay.

30% of the jumper is Nylon, which is a petrochemical substance that creates nitrous oxide in its production, a greenhouse gas around 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It was produced in China.

Finally, like Mary’s, the jumper was also made of wool (10%), but this was produced in Australia from sheep kept in huge herds, with minimum welfare standards. At the same time as the wool was removed the shearer performed ‘mulesing’ on the sheep, which is where the part of the rear of the animal is removed with sheers and without anaesthetic, to prevent flystrike (which could be prevented if better welfare conditions prevailed). The wool was then washed using harsh chemicals which had to be disposed of.

All these materials were then transported from around the world to Bangladesh for spinning together, dying and turning into Hugo’s jumper. The factory does not remove the dye from the vast amounts of water it takes to colour the yarn, so the river they pour their waste into turns the colour of whatever they are dyeing that day. Not so obvious is the heavy metals that are also in the mix, that pollute the watercourse.

So now both Hugo and Mary have got their materials for their jumper and it’s time to start work on making it. Mary, as we know, is an experienced knitter and freed up from the beginners’ desire to ‘see what it looks like when it’s finished’, she relaxes and actually enjoys the process itself. The spinning is done on a treadle powered spinning wheel that is portable and fits in its own rucksack, so that she can take it almost anywhere she wishes. Likewise of course her knitting, which simply folds up and tucks into her bag. She spends some of the time she is spinning and knitting listening to the radio or watching TV, particularly in the evening; two or three times she takes it to her local knitting group and chats to others. But most of all Mary enjoys being in the quiet (perhaps in the garden) and just focusing on what she it doing. The repetitive action of knitting in particular has been shown to have meditative effects similar to meditation and leads to Mary having lower blood pressure and heart rates.

Although Mary has made numerous jumpers before, she is particularly pleased with the way it is turning out. The time and care that she invests in it turn into a form of love for both the process and the finished item.

Of course Hugo isn’t actually going to make his jumper; his is outsourcing that to a girl in Bangladesh that he’ll never meet. But he does need to work for it. It would be true to say that when he was a boy he didn’t dream of working in a mobile phone shop, but as his Dad had told him when he left school, this is the real world and you have to do what you can to make ends meet, getting your head down to some serious work. So that’s what he had done. For the first few months it was actually quite fun, the thrill of the each sale gave him a buzz that lasted (usually) until the next. But slowly this had faded off of a bit, plus two more mobile phone shops had opened in the town, meaning that sales had dropped and heavy pressure was applied to his boss, which in turn came down on him. Every missed sale had to be explained and justified. His main strategy was to ask what phone they had currently and then, no matter how old or new it was, to gently mock it and its age and recommend that they are missing out on the latest features and to gently suggest how impressed others would be if they had x, y or z phone. To be honest each day now had become rather a combination of boredom and stress.

High Street Fashion Co would rather we didn’t know too much about who or how Hugo’s jumper was actually made and will not reveal details of the working conditions in any of the factories they use or the steps they take to ensure that their standards of factory conditions are maintained, stating that these are company secrets. However, from undercover reports and statements from those who have worked previously in these factories we can build up a clear picture.

It will come as no surprise to learn that it was a young woman who made the jumper. But how young? Well, despite companies promising for years to stamp child labour, there are enough regular reports of it happening to assume that the average wardrobe contains a number of garments made by them. Invariably when it gets uncovered producers react shocked and promise to, yet again, stamp it out. The problem is child labour is cheap and people like High Street Fashion Co want cheap clothing.

In actual fact, although young, the woman who made Hugo’s jumper wasn’t a child, and indeed has a young family of her own. She is paid for 8 hours work a day, but must make a certain number of jumpers in that 8 hours before she will get paid. Almost always she has to work an extra hour or two, unpaid, to make the target. Because of the low wages she will then have to start work doing paid overtime, to help pay the families bills. This means that everyday she will start work at 8am and will not leave until between 8pm and 10pm, before walking home for just under an hour and starting her domestic chores. On ten occasions in the last month she had been informed by her boss that she would have to do a night shift that evening, working until anytime between midnight and 3am. No food or drink will be provided and because of the risks of walking home at that time she instead chose to sleep at the factory. Her wage is £32 a month, whilst it costs £74 a month to run a basic household.

No jumper made at 2 in the morning, when you haven’t eaten for hours, your boss is shouting at you because you are going slower and all you can think about are your children at home, is made with love. It’s just another bloody jumper between you and being able to sleep on the factory floor.

When it is made the jumper is packed with up a thousand identical ones and shipped from Bangladesh to England. From there it is taken almost past Hugo’s house on its journey to a central distribution hub in the North of England, sorted into a delivery for Hugo’s local High Street Fashion Co store and then driven back down the country to a smart looking store that could easily be confused for a nightclub entrance.

Hugo had had a pretty rough day at work; you never sell many mobiles on a damp Tuesday afternoon in September and so he’d sat bored at the counter looking out through the window. He wasn’t allowed to read, in case it put off customers and he had played all the games on all the phones. Time passed so slowly. His boss was grumpy and had shut himself away in the office after a phone call from the area manager. There was only one thing Hugo could think of and that was that tonight he was going to get that new jumper from High Street Fashion Co and frankly that would make everything all right. Actually better than alright.

Mary sat in her garden and put down her needle, she had just finished sewing together the panels of the jumper. It needed now to be pressed, but it was complete. She held it up and assessed it. It wasn’t 100% perfect, to her experienced eye she could see one or two stitches that were a touch looser than others, but no-one else would notice. Yes, she was pleased with it; content.

The winter came and both jumpers kept their owners warm over the colder nights. Then one day in early spring a strange thing happened to both jumpers, on the same day. Hugo was running a little late for work and rushed through the store in the hope that his boss would not notice. He caught his jumper on a sharp edge of a display rack and pulled one of the threads of his jumper. He cursed, but actually forgot about it for the rest of the day. It wasn’t until later that evening as he was undressing that he remembered it. He looked at the jumper; it hadn’t washed well as the colour had faded in the first few washes and because it was cotton it had also misshapen quite a bit. Oh, well he thought, I have wanted to get that new one anyway, it only cost £80 and I got a winters use from it. He threw the jumper into the bin and it joined the 900,000 tonnes of clothing waste that gets thrown out every year in Britain. Its final resting place was in a landfill site; the cotton and wool disintegrated into the soil, but the nylon stayed just where it was for at least a 1,000 years.

On that same day Mary was walking through her garden when she too caught her jumper, this time on a rose bush. She too cursed, but wasn’t about to forget damaging a jumper she had spent so long working on. She went inside and repaired it using some of the same yarn she had knitted it from. The repair was invisible and as strong as the original knitting. Despite regular use Mary’s jumper lasted for almost 10 years, before finally one day she decided that it had really seen better days. She placed it on her compost heap where it rotted down into an excellent soil conditioner, which she eventually spread on her rhubarb.

Viewed in this way craft becomes a modest, but achievable and practical response to a whole host of global issues and problems. It allows us to provide for our needs without doing so at the expense of others on the planet. The act of making becomes a gift not only to our own creativity and emotional wellbeing, but also a gift of love towards the rest of humanity. I care for you, even though I have never met you, so I am not going to ask you to work in such conditions so that I can have a jumper to wear. I’ll make it myself.

Not another abandoned blog...!

Click here to read Simon Fairlie's article

Please don’t think this yet another abandoned blog... it’s not. But life has been so busy of recent, that I don’t seem to have found the time to post up or indeed do anything of much note that is post worthy. However, life is getting back to normal a little and in the next few weeks I hope to post up some pages on making bookbinding equipment (a lying press and bone folders) as well as some more weaving and actual book binding.

For now I am working on an article that looks in more depth at one aspect of Simon Fairlie’s much quoted piece Can Britain Feed Itself? If you haven’t read it and sustainability and resilience in food production are of interest please do follow the link, it is an excellent read.

Download Thinking Allowed with
Grayson Perry & Richard Sennett
broadcast 6th Feb 2008

One other thing that comes with much recommendation is an edition of the Radio 4 programme, Thinking allowed with Richard Sennett & Greyson Perry, discussing craft and what it means to be a crafts person. The conversation is fascinating, liberating and sobering almost equal measure. There are too many points to bring out here, and anyway you might as well listen to the show and get it first hand, but the crucial point for me was the need to accept flux and incompleteness as essential elements within the creative process. Grayson (who is a most surprisingly erudite and thoughtful person) says that a tightness to be right can constipate and kill the creative process, but that in accepting that we will not always be right we have embrace difficulty and struggle.

Later he almost sums up the whole programme when says:

‘People are put off struggle, with a low boredom threshold; we’re addicted to adrenalin and drama. Everything is black and white with no middle ground and we have the attention span of a gnat. The idea of working at something for 10,000 hours for 8 or 10 years scares people, but it’s brilliant if you do.’

For me they get a little muddled when they talk about machines, berating Ruskin for being blind to their effectiveness and then going on to criticise computer designed buildings for their lack of material awareness and Victorian pottery for its lack of life. But this doesn’t not distract from the excellent show and has inspired me to read Richard Sennett’s book The Craftsman. The radio show can be listened to by clicking play below or downloaded by using the link under the Thinking Allowed image.

So please bear with me dear reader, much more is to come for we have only just begun!