Old hat: Craft versus design?

Jonathan Bean and Daniela Rosner share their views about the relationship between craft and design. The designer is imagined as the sole authority of action, mediating the work of engineers, social scientists, politicians, consumers, and a whole range of unimagined other persons. This vision of design's future retains the modernist formulation of what design is involving a mechanism through which efficiency, order, and progress are achieved. A central element of these and other visions of the future is that craft is done for common users, such as kitchen tells what and how to cook, eliminating the creativity and pleasure of cooking from the beginning. Object printers create flawless prototypes, eliminating messily glued-together chipboard and toothpicks. Experts also state that craft becomes a habit of displaying collection of vinyl records shelved alongside an iPod and digital files without considering the skill involved in making such records.