Culture of Craft: Failure and the pedagogy of craft

In “Culture of Craft,” Quinn Cook ’29 documents the culture of craft, those who practice it and what we might learn from them. 

A few weeks ago, my roommate walked into our room to see me shoeless, in hodgepodge pajamas, with my hair messily drawn up and my mattress out of its frame. I was, of course, leatherworking. I wore socks and pajamas so as not to scratch the leather and a ponytail to keep my hair out of my knife’s path. The bed frame was a poorly thought-out but functional worktable with a cutting mat on top. 

Having not practiced my craft for the entirety of fall quarter, I couldn’t help but bring some of my tools (and a 25-square-foot hide) to campus after winter break. I threw caution to the wind, cleared my schedule and finally began work on a pattern I had been designing digitally for months.

I quickly found out, however, that just a few months of disuse left me rather rusty. Simple as it sounds, cutting a straight line required a level of focus I hadn’t needed before, and stitching at the right tension proved almost impossible over long seams. Skills that had once been unconscious were now nearly defunct. 

Given that the first installment of this column pontificated about the importance of creating with care and applying skill to products of the utmost quality, I was admittedly a bit ashamed at my apparent hypocrisy. How could I espouse my definition of “craft” if I couldn’t do it myself?

Perhaps what my initial definition emphasized, which my self-evaluation lacked, was a focus on the process of crafting. To quote a particularly incisive scholar (me), “Craft is really about craftsmanship in the process of making.” Inherent to this process-theory of craft, then, is the possibility that it might all go wrong.

A craftsman operates always in the twilight zone, hovering just above ruin; they may produce beautiful work, but the slip of a hand, or the collapse of a workbench (as I have experienced myself) could irreparably mar their piece. Craft, as design scholar David Pye once wrote, is “the workmanship of risk.” 

Mass production, by contrast, is what Pye calls “the workmanship of certainty,” whereby the risk of craftsmanship is contained by the use of machinery. In exchange for uniform specifications, we sacrifice the judgement and creativity of the creator. Care and experimentation, once central to making, are fettered by mechanical iteration. 

This is not to say that craft cannot, or should not, be uniform and exact; I take great pride from seeing hundreds of perfectly straight stitches, standing like soldiers brought to attention. Nor is it to suggest that operating heavy machinery or working a repetitive task is always artless and crude — there is craftsmanship to be found on the factory line, too. 

Rather, I submit that “craft gone wrong” is, in some roundabout way, craft gone right. It reminds the crafter of their agency in the process, that to have a role in creation is to have one in failure, too. Without the constant breath of attention, one’s craft will wrinkle and deflate. 

In this way, craft is similar to taking a class — the possibility of performing poorly is sometimes what makes it meaningful. Unlike craft, however, class grades are determined by outcomes, not by effort. This means that we students are drawn to and sometimes rewarded for a workmanship of certainty: the mechanical reproduction of material, avoidance of challenge and feigned mastery. 

The idea that craft is more time-consuming and therefore better than machine production is a value-laden one, rose-tinted by the nostalgia of a bygone society. Still, there is utility in emphasizing the difficulty of craft methods. Pedagogies of craftsmanship obligate — and thus normalize — failure. This necessity strengthens a tolerance for frustration and habituates hard work, rather than rewarding shortcuts that undermine the process of learning.

Outcome-oriented learning offers no response when a math major asks why they have Creative Expression requirements, or when a bored high schooler wonders why they are learning calculus when they “will never use it in real life.” The process-oriented (or craft) pedagogy responds as Antonio Gramsci does in his “Prison Notebooks”: “To discover a truth oneself … is to create — even if the truth is an old one.”

Unearthing the laws of calculus, learning Kant’s categorical imperative or mastering sfumato techniques are not fruitful activities because they are novel contributions to the world, but because participating in them builds the muscle of education. 

To harness that power, we must lean into frustration rather than away from it. It is hackneyed to say that we learn through failure, but it is ultimately what reminds us that we are agents in the process of creation. Craft, as a workmanship of risk, requires us to focus our intention, not only our product.

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