Of Work and Words: Craft as a Way of Telling

Critical Analysis

One view of craft is a person manipulating a material to produce a form, where craft ability is the competence of knowing the material itself; that knowing is often claimed to be tacit or habitualized, and the interaction with the material is embodied and emergent. In this text, Ingold offers another perspective: an expert is thinking with the material and engaging in a dialogue with an environment, “thinking with things more than she is thinking about them, letting them in as an accessory to her own reflections” (11). This positions skill as an extension of the mind, and tacit competence of manipulation as flowing through the body, or “radiating outwards from its seat in the body” (11); referencing Clark, it “is not the fish that swims, but the fish-in-the-water,” where the environment (consisting of tools and materiality) is the action as much as it is a medium for interaction.

The potter-on-the-wheel as a metaphor for designing invisible things, like services and strategies, may be questionable. Environment, Person, Tools, Material, Form is too linear, too simple. Craft involves a great deal of sitting around not making things, and reflecting on the attributes of environment, person, tools, materials and form, but “craft is the art of not making things” is imprecise; Ingold offers that “that it is a churning of the mind, as it stirs up and is in turn stirred by the sounds and feelings of its milieu. The mind, then, is not so much a computational device as a vortex in the mix” (12) which speaks to this, and he attributes this to concentration: “This explains why craftspeople, absorbed into their tasks, by their own report tend to experience their own presence and movement, and the presence and movement of the persons and things with whom and with which they engage, with heightened rather than diminished intensity” (12).

Making on the way to a thing is a performance of craft. Making as a way of understanding and experiencing is autotelic, but reflective. Something happens in-between, continually. Both may be the “thinking with things,” as compared to “producing a thing.”