Why does craft matter

This is the larger context of the problem. Perhaps craft matters only for certain things. It might matter for your salad bowl or your wooden sailboat, or a fine and rare dwelling or an experimental installation described by the hand of a singular architect.

But is it true that it matters only for rare, singular, special objects? For him, craft encompassed every Apple product that rolled off an assembly line. The design and the feel of the object mattered because of how it plugged into the subjectivity of the end-user downstream. So, in a sense, the user defines craft as much as maker or process.

Craft must be determined by the outcome as much as the subjectivity of process that determined it. Outcomes are subjective, too. So can craft reside in the end work regardless of process? Can a pre-determined pathway or tooling guided by software still result in craft?

Or is it merely the appearance of craft? It depends on how the tools are being used. The digital craftsman can also have different sequences on different days. Is this why craft is valued, because of the implied connection to a maker? This may derive from a longing within our assembly-line culture for original works, or near original works. Do we seek out craft or the belief in craft because of its very loss on a mass scale? And to counteract this emptiness, this loss, we valorize those instances of the hand-made or near hand-made.

So is the urgency to invoke the notion of craft in the digital age expressive of nostalgia for a more connected relationship between maker and user? It may be, but there is nothing inherently wrong with seeking closer human connections in the context of making things.

At the start of London Craft Week earlier this month, Country Life hosted a discussion that explored the current revival of interest in craft. Held at Chelsea Barracks, the speakers were Ben Pentreath and Ben Johnson, who have both been involved in the design of different aspects of the former barracks. Mr Pentreath ascribed the revival to a growing recognition that we are able to form a real and distinctive connection with objects made by hand.

In many senses, this new twist in the story of British architecture and interior design is evolution, more than revolution. Even with the industrialisation of furniture-making, craft was never completely subsumed. Instead, it manifested itself in other ways, particularly in the restoration of period buildings and furniture.

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