Reclaiming craftsmanship in engineering

‘Craftsmanship’ is a term that comes with a lot of cultural baggage.

I first became interested in the idea of craft and craftsmanship when I was a teenager, and just getting into making things in my dad’s garden shed. As I read different books about making, I came to associate craft with hand tools, pottery studios, and old-fashioned wood workshops – the sort of wood-turners’ shops where someone would be bending over a lathe in quiet concentration, shavings and sawdust flying, the sound of the motor whirring, a beautiful oak bowl slowly emerging. That’s still true now, although more recently I’ve been gravitating to YouTube clips of Japanese artisans throwing pots, making intricate wooden kigumi joints, and pixelated kumiko screens.

Today, however, the term craft is used indiscriminately. Apparently almost anything can be ‘crafted’, whether it’s a wellness spa retreat, a loaf of sourdough from M&S, or a flat white from Pret. In his book on the subject in 2011, author and critic Christopher Frayling wrote wryly about other misuses of the term craft, concluding that craftsmanship is an idea ripe to be reclaimed, reevaluated and redefined. I think he’s right, and I think that craftsmanship should be reclaimed as the ethos that characterises engineers of all kinds across the world.

Craftsmanship isn’t a word commonly associated with engineering today. You’re much more likely to hear terms like quality, expertise and execution in reference to engineering work. Craftsmanship is much more likely to be mentioned when talking about objects made a long time ago, by hand, and from a limited catalogue of materials – and in some cases works of art. The word has been fudged and appropriated for its positive connotations in a world of mass-marketed products, and we’ve lost something in the process.

(Perhaps craftsmanship has also fallen by the wayside through a wish to avoid gendered language. Although this is a good idea, some terms like craftsmanship can’t easily be adapted to be ungendered without becoming hopelessly clunky, so I tend to use ‘craftsmanship’ as a gender-neutral term for work done by any and all.)

During my time studying for a creative masters degree in Innovation Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art, I was researching the language of objects for my dissertation. I came across work by author and philosopher Soetsu Yanagi, famous worldwide for his writings about craft and for founding the folk craft (mingei) movement in Japan in the 1920s. He described craft objects like this in a 1933 essay:

“Folk craft objects in this sense have two principal features. One is that they are things made for daily use. Second is that they are common, ordinary things. Conversely, they are neither expensive nor produced in small numbers.”

Quite a contrast to the content we see today. When we talk about craftspeople today, we often refer to people making one-off pieces of fancy pottery and expensive wooden furniture. These are really artisans, which is not quite the same thing.

If we look back two centuries, most everyday objects were made by hand from natural materials. Craftsmanship in those days didn’t have anything to do with whether something was made by hand, or made from a certain material, because these were the normal ways of doing things. What we call craft today was the normal method of production in the 18^th century, and all the centuries before. So why not reconsider what craftsmanship means today? What does craftsmanship look like if it’s not about the tools and materials involved, but about the bigger picture of producing and engineering the things people use?

Inspired by the modern philosopher Richard Sennett who said that ‘true craftsmanship is the act of doing a job well for its own sake’, I would argue that craftsmanship is simply recognising the fact that the way you make something matters.

At the scale of ordinary things, made for ordinary people, engineers are the primary makers of today. Engineering is the profession that drives design, production and manufacturing. As we often forget, most things that are made today have been engineered. As such, craftsmanship should be reclaimed as a way of describing and guiding the everyday work of engineers around the world. This idea of doing a job well for its own sake, and recognising that this means we are practising craftsmanship, should be something we think about and talk about on a daily basis.

This proposal isn’t very radical, because in a large part it’s already occurring. I’m simply giving a name to the ethos that I’ve observed among engineers over the last decade. Enthusiasm, dedication and a desire for excellence are all qualities I’ve seen in the people I’ve worked with, and I believe this is the common thread that draws all engineers together, whatever discipline they come from, wherever they are in the world. But culturally, we don’t call this craftsmanship, and we don’t call excellent engineers craftspeople. Too often we call them nerd, geek, overly keen, too technical, a bit weird, and intense. I know because I’ve been called these things myself, simply for loving my work and wanting to do it well.

Every engineering discipline and all common engineering practices offer the opportunity to practice, develop and recognise craftsmanship, and if we keep doing this, it will change the global engineering profession for the better. It will change the way we talk and think about engineering, how we teach new engineers and how we go about our work. It will change what we choose to work on, the way we treat our colleagues and how we manage our time. I believe it will also improve the quality of our workplaces, the professional standards we hold ourselves to and the joy and satisfaction we get from the work we do.