Brain Vomit #37 Handmade
Are we becoming useless? I recently saw a video of a carbon bike being made and they were showing all the parts where a person was working on it and calling it handmade. However, when It came to drill the holes for cable stops it was placed in a jig connected to a CNC router. The person making that bike is a human being doing the job of a machine. There is no craftsmanship needed or passion for the work. It is just a person following a very strict set of rules to produce a commodity as consistent as possible. No changes in the system if that person were to be fired and replaced with another low skill worker. Separate the project into a bunch of small tasks easy enough to be performed successfully by nearly anyone. This is how most systems work from making hamburgers to building bridges. Obviously different levels of education and hierarchy will be necessary to have a system work as efficiently as it can as the system gets bigger. The bigger the system the more a single person's voice is muted by the noise. It’s hard to make change when you are a small cog inside a big machine. When the worker is treated as a cog in the machine the thing they are losing is Human touch, It’s not really hand made anymore even though people made it. Doesn’t matter if the thing is made in Asia, the United States or Germany. Company morals, values, wages, conditions are a completely different conversation and they don’t apply to this post.
If the worker is just there to collect a paycheck and follow a rule book. Turn their brain off for a few hours a day and do his job. The vast majority of people working like this will do the least amount of work they can get away with. Sure, the thing will get the “MADE IN __” Sticker because that’s where it was made. If this is handmade craftsman like myself have to use a different term. Human made. Sure I have machines that help me do my work and a “system” to do things. But it is ultimately up to me to dictate where each piece will go, the functionality of each part I designed, and make a reality the vision in my head.
Holding independent craftsmen to the same standards as the big factories is not only unfair but delusional. Most craftsmen have to do the most with what they have and use their ingenuity to solve new problems. A multimillion dollar factory has to follow the map, the recipe to create to produce the same thing consistently thousands of times. That’s not art, it’s just a product. A factory with machines and systems is designed to make perfect products, anything less is unacceptable. A craftsman makes Art and the small flaws you find are characters of it’s human touch. Art that can perform as well as a perfect product.