the feeling of lack awaiting us all in these liquid times. Engaging in the practice of
empowerment through skills can make us more “useful”, contributing with some-
thing that matters to others and ourselves. Craftsmanship, according to Sennett,
means to have a desire to do things well for their own sake. This approach to how
we set out to do things in the world raises skills and can empower us against the
”spectre of uselessness”. This is done primarily in two steps. The first step is to
make craft an ideal, and a quality for understanding our world – for everyone. The
second is to form a deeper understanding and a pride in the craft skills, in crafts-
manship.
We start with the first step. With the help of sociologist Sharon Zukin, Sennett ar-
gues about the need for skill and craftsmanship. This does not aim for a situation
where we all have to farm our food ourselves or hunt for our dinner. It is an under-
standing of our world through craft and quality, not only for production, but also
for a more insightful consumption. The present day ”consumer lacks the produc-
tion knowledge that earlier generations commanded.” (Zukin 2004: 185) To be
more insightful consumers we need to have more knowledge, specifically craft
knowledge. With this Zuking means
a sensory appreciation of a product’s qualities, a modest understanding of different
production techniques, and the imagination to construct a product’s ’back story’ – a
social narrative of the cultural tradition from which the product comes. (Zukin 2004:
185)As Sennett proposes, this is a change in our everyday perception of the world. In
this first step consumers will have to train to get the eyes of craftsmen, since ”the
modern consumer needs to think like a craftsman without being able to do what a
craftsman does.” (Sennett 2006: 143)
The second step concerns the development of a real and deep ability in craft, and
craftsmanship. For this we will need to spend more time exploring our craft and
our tools at hand, but we also need to open up our surrounding, to break up our
everyday objects, to make them more transparent for engagement and better un-
derstand their workings.
In labor, the good craftsman is more than a mechanical technician. He or she wants to
understand why a piece of wood or computer code doesn’t work; the problem becomes
engaging and thereby generates objective attachment. This ideal comes to life in a
traditional craft like making musical instruments; equally in a more modern setting
like a scientific laboratory. [...] But in consumption it’s hard to think like a craftsman,
as Zukin advoctes. You buy because something is user-friendly, which usually means
the user don’t have to bother about how the thing, whether a computer or a car, works.
(Sennett 2006: 170)We make ourselves tools for reaching larger action spaces, for applying our desire
to change the world onto the world though our work. These tools strike back, and
also pacify us, quite like what I discussed above about ”interpassivity”. We need to
keep this in mind as we apply tools to advance our action spaces. This requires
another kind of thinking for designers, but also for us as consumers and as citizens.
As Steven Heller argues in the book Citizen Designer; to be a responsible designer
requires more than talent, it requires also good citizenship (Heller 2003). For Hel-
ler the key issue is to ask questions, and to work with the answers in order to create
responsible decisions.