ABSTRACT
The term craft is derived from the Middle English craeft, meaning strength and skill. Craft can also be associated with the professional affiliation of a guild or trade association. Indeed, it first came into widespread use in conjunction with the advent of guilds – selfprotective medieval associations or private clubs of artisans with formally cultivated talents rooted in innate and rare abilities. Craft creates intimate relations between problem solving and problem finding, technique and expression, play and work. (Sennett, 2008) It brings to mind material, matter, repetition, talent, time, pride and dedication. Craft comes burdened with accusations of nostalgia, luddite tendencies and perhaps even a regressive attachment to the past and the pre-industrial. In the mid 17th century Denis Diderot spent the better part of twenty years identifying and documenting crafts. The result: The Encyclopedia, or Dictionary of Arts and Crafts, exhaustively recorded how practical things are accomplished and proposed ways to improve them. In The Encyclopedia Diderot, places manual pursuits on equal footing with mental labors, asserting that the craftsman’s labors were icons of the Enlightenment. He also scorned hereditary members of the elite who did no work and so in Diderot’s opinion contributed nothing to society. His definition of craft is as follows:
“CRAFT. This name is given to any profession that requires the use of the hands, and is limited to a certain number of mechanical operations to produce the same piece of work, made over and over again. I do not know why people have a low opinion of what this world implies; for we
on the all the necessary things Denis Diderot, The Encyclopedia 1747-1765.
