CRAFT AND DIGITAL MANUFACTURE

“Craft and digital manufacture are often presented as opposites: the hand on one side, the machine on the other. In practice, the distinction is less rigid. Both involve knowledge, repetition, material understanding and judgement. What changes is the nature of the tools and the type of decisions that they privilege.

Artisanal processes carry embodied experience. They allow the maker to respond directly to resistance, temperature, weight and surface, adjusting form through constant feedback. Precision is not only a numeric value but a felt condition. Irregularities are not necessarily defects; they can be traces of process that give an object presence and authenticity.

Advanced fabrication technologies such as CNC machining, 3D printing and parametric modelling operate through different kinds of intelligence. They make it possible to work with geometries that would be unfeasible by hand, to iterate rapidly, and to achieve levels of repeatability unavailable in traditional workshops. At the same time, they impose their own constraints: tool paths, resolution, build volumes, material behaviour under digital control. The tool becomes a collaborator that influences outcome.

In design, the most interesting results arise not from choosing one side or the other, but from allowing these approaches to enter into dialogue. A digitally modelled form may still require finishing by hand; a hand-shaped prototype may later be scanned and refined parametrically; a crafted surface may sit on a digitally produced structure. Technique does not simply produce form; it informs it, shaping what is considered possible, reasonable or desirable.

In this sense, making is also a form of thinking. The choice of manufacturing method is part of the concept, not a technical afterthought. Certain forms only emerge because a process invites them. Others resist particular technologies and demand a different approach. The work moves between these territories, using both craft and digital manufacture as complementary instruments rather than opposing ideologies.

What remains constant is attention to material and to the experience of the person encountering the object. Whether shaped by hand, by code or by a combination of both, the aim is not to celebrate technology for its own sake, but to allow technique and intention to align. The result is design in which the process leaves a quiet but legible trace, and where the means of making contributes to the meaning of the object.”

– Mike Simonelli

March 2023