Labor as Aesthetic: The Maker Movement Contextualized Through Its Relation to Craft, Art, and Industrialization

In the world of western design, functionalism has a long and rich history. While many would like to credit the emphasis we hold today on honesty, utility, and simplicity in design to Dieter Rams, those exact frameworks have been around since the late 1700s—when a sect of Quakers living in colonial New York collectively decided that ornament was sin (Andrews, 1937). The idea that the function of an object must take precedence to its form may seem like a simple ethos, but reinterpretations of this same ideal have contributed to countless movements in design and the applied arts. One of the more recent movements in this long lineage is the Maker movement. A little bit punk, a little bit crafts, and a little bit hacking, Making takes artisan practices and applies them more broadly to the DIY production of modern tools and goods. By centering around learning-through-doing, trans-digital tooling, and transparency in both production processes and consumer outputs, the maker movement has grown notably in recent years, and cultivated a strong and productive community—both online and physically. While the Maker movement would largely fit under the ethos of functionalism, it manifests itself in a different manner than any previous functionalist movements; especially in regards to its labor ethic. First, I think it is important to discuss how functionalism manifests itself within the current design discourse. I split it into two separate categories: Soft Functionalism, and Hard Functionalism.

The Soft Functionalist ideal is well illustrated through the ideas developed during the Arts and Crafts movement. Originating in the late 1800s, the Arts and Crafts movement was a response to industrial labor and the advent of machine-produced goods. Welsh Architect Owen Jones was one of the early proponents of this movement, and his ideas surrounding the use of ornament informs much of the discourse within the Arts and Crafts community. Jones’ aesthetic asserted that ornament was to come secondary to the object being produced, and that when ornament was being used, it must be indicative of its form and purpose (Pevsner, 2011). While many within the movement decried the use of machinery at all, others such as William Morris believed that the primary issue was not regarding tools, but the division of labor. This tool-agnostic mentality is one that is shared by the Shakers, who despite their moral opposition to ornament, relied on and innovated in the production of power tools. Morris (1884) describes the core dilemma as such: “the workman must once more be master of his material, tools, and time: only I must explain that I do not mean that we should turn back to the system of the middle ages, but that the workman should own these things that is the means of labour collectively, and should regulate labour in their own interests”. This centering of craftsmanship and the importance of ownership in one’s work defines much of the output we see from the arts and crafts movement today—and it heavily influenced later functionalist movements and styles. More than anyone else in the movement, Morris outlined just how important it is to include labor in discussions of design and craft. An avid Socialist, Morris’ ideology surrounding the individual ownership of one's labor helped to shape how we define craft in an industrial or post-industrial world. Since Hard Functionalism, unlike Soft Functionalism, is only capable of existing within the context of industrialized production, its approach to labor is notably different. While Morris’ distaste for the distribution of labor played heavily into the aesthetic sensibilities of the Arts and Crafts movement, this same distribution of labor is what defines the Hard Functionalist ideology. The contemporary expressions of this start in interwar Germany, through the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement. In response to the supposed frivolity of Expressionism, especially in the face of postwar devastation, artists made a return to formalism in technique, “rejecting the tendencies toward exoticism and impassioned subjectivity that had characterized Expressionism”  (LACMA, 2015). Slowly, sentimentalism was replaced by sobriety and austerity as a goalpost. In the world of architecture and design, this “machine aesthetic” was seen as the ultimate expression to these ends. Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg described this shift in an essay written towards the end of his life. “Materialism as a way of life and art took handicraft as its direct psychological expression. The new spiritual artistic sensibility of the twentieth century has not only felt the beauty of the machine, but has also taken cognisance of its unlimited expressive possibilities for the arts...Under the supremacy of materialism, handicraft reduced men to the level of machines; the proper tendency for the machine (in the sense of cultural development) is as the unique medium of the very opposite, social liberation. ” (Banham, 1983)

The primary feature that lets the Maker Community stand separately from these categories (outside of its relative youth) is its unique relationship between individual identity and community outcomes. Soft Functionalism prioritizes the individual identity of the craftsperson over a collective goal. Even in the relatively progressive ideology surrounding craft, hierarchy is present. The idea of Master and Apprentice is key to the structure and training of craftspeople. The end goal of a craftsperson within this structure is not necessarily to contribute to a larger community, it is to best express themselves through the work they produce. In contrast, Hard Functionalism prioritizes collective goals over the individual identity of those producing goods. Individual identity makes achieving collective goals more difficult, and in the industrial era, especially given the constraints of distributed labor, no one person gets to leave an imprint on the work being produced. However, by the mid-1950s, the lines between these functionalist ideals were blurred, as the consumer boom and postwar manufacturing capabilities of the U.S. made the production of craft goods less and less lucrative. Simultaneously, the craft and artisan aesthetic ideals of Soft Functionalism were appropriated to justify luxury prices on goods, and the Hard Functionalist aesthetic was reinterpreted to portray a facade of austerity on behalf of corporations and the wealthy. Just as the Arts and Crafts movement grew in response to industrialization and New Objectivity grew in response to craft, to me Maker Functionalism was born out of a cultural need to process a society that has deprioritized goods in favor of a service-based economy. 

To dive a little bit deeper, let’s discuss what the shared ideals of the maker movement are. First, it has the one shared trait that all facets of functionalism has: a form inferred from an object’s function. Second, accessible materials play a huge role in both the aesthetic and process of Making. Third, polish is an optional trait—jagged edges are okay here. Fourth, the idea that all contributors’ handiwork is visible in the output, even at the expense of a “cohesive” appearance. Fifth, Open Source—the idea that an item can be used, changed, accessed, and shared freely by anyone who wants it. Sixth, and arguably the most important, the Maker movement is predicated on the idea that technology can be Craft too; Craft is an ideology, not a fixed set of tools and mediums. While it may seem like an over-simplified explanation, Sociologist and Senior Advisor to the U.N. on Climate Change and Cities Richard Sennett believes that at its core, Craft is simply a representation of the “basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake”. Like Morris, his belief is that Craft extends beyond medium or tools—it represents a very specific type of relationship between a person, their labor, and the objects that they produce.

While hard and soft functionalism can be relatively easily distilled down to their hierarchy between individual and collective, the maker community’s labor and community structures defy traditional categorization. By avoiding centralized goals, the maker community manages to break from rigid hierarchical structures. Designer and Hacktivist Otto Von Busch argues that “Makers and Hackers self-organize their free and creative time, resist supervision and share their work with others to let their software code be ‘beautiful’ and explorative, just like their relation to work.” In the words of Sennett, learning to work well gives people the ability to govern themselves well, as it provides to them the tools to become good citizens. While I would argue this idea falls apart on a greater societal scale, it is an incredibly valuable insight into community membership. While Von Busch claims that makers are less “purpose or problem-driven” than traditional designers would be, this freedom from structure opens up the idea of what kind of problems makers are able and willing to approach, as well as how their roles within the community are established. To better conceptualize this, we have to understand the Maker movement’s earliest predecessor—the Open Source Software movement. In his 1998 essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, Eric S. Raymond, Software Developer and Open Source Software Advocate, describes the growth of Linux, arguably one of the largest undertakings of an open source project in history. In this essay, he describes two frameworks for Open source projects: the titular “Cathedral” and “Bazaar”. In the Cathedral, while code is available with each software release, code developed in between releases is restricted to an exclusive group. In the Bazaar however, every step of the process is broadcasted to (and open to contribution from) the public. Like with Linux, within the maker community, there is no “quiet, reverent cathedral-building”. It’s structure is defined by its “great babbling bazaar of dueling agendas and approaches” (Raymond, 1998).

As the nature of our workforce changes, as does the practice of craft. However, this is not a one-directional exchange. Craft has always been a driver of commerce throughout society. While Craft and Technological growth have remained hand-in-hand through most of history, industrialization has weakened the connections between them. The role of craft as practicum and craft as community is crucial to maintaining that connection. While Maker culture has deeply shaped the communities surrounding craft, it has also built standards about how to effectively integrate craft and technology. 

We are seeing both the aesthetics and processes born of the maker community make themselves into the mainstream world of industrial manufacturing, and the Maker movement so far has had the resilience to hold up to these changes—Now more than ever, we need that type of organizational resilience. Labor is an issue that has been at the forefront of late, because our relationship with it has changed so much in such a short period of time. Worker misclassification is becoming more and more pervasive—which has changed the way we look at employment, especially given the growing presence of the Gig Economy. David Weil, Wage and Hour Administrator in President Obama’s Department of Labor wrote, in an essay for Harvard Business Review that when workers are misclassified as independent contractors, and yet have little control over their work, their losses can be devastating. It can leave workers on the hook for replacing assets, short them on wages, and put them in a position of legal culpability for the actions of their employers. On top of this, the consolidation of businesses and shift towards services has made the path of a traditional craftsperson harder and harder to reach. “One major way craftsworkers have been presented as becoming subject to the proletarianization process is by becoming unable to pursue the traditional end point of apprenticeship and journeywork, the ability to themselves become self-employed” (Kristofferson, 2007). In the words of Ben Roberts (2011), professor of Computational Culture at the University of Sussex, “the emphasis on the empowerment of individuals ignores the possibility that decentralization consists in radical new forms of sociality and collectivity”. The Maker movement, and its corresponding labor ethic, while not a be-all-end-all, can give us insights into how across disciplines, we can create functionalist systems that are built for the world that we live in today.