WHY ROBOTS WON'T KILL CRAFTSMANSHIP

May 22, 2019

IT WAS LONDON CRAFT WEEK THIS MONTH (8~12.May) AND IT’S ENTIRELY UNDERSTANDABLE IF YOU WEREN’T AWARE OF THAT.

That sounds unkind, and I should applaud LCW that they are doing an expert job of promoting various forms of craft. However few attending craft week will admit that ‘craft’ remains wildly uncool. I’ve been unfortunate enough to be labelled a ‘craftsmen’ in the past and I can assure you it’s not an exciting, empowering or sexy feeling…. it’s more akin to that scenario at school when you learnt that someone you secretly love thinks you’re just ‘nice’…. it’s a terrible, terrible disappointment.

Lockwood Umbrellas workbench

Perhaps that’s because crafts are always dying and that is depressing. These dying crafts may be just unfortunate casualties of a more efficient innovation, or might just be too stubborn to move with the times. Either way people can’t help themselves from drawing a connection between the blameless craftsman and the dying task that he/she are doing and consider him/her slightly foolish or anachronistic for carrying on with it. At best the craftsman comes off considered a romantic, but will never be lauded to the same popular extent as a silicone valley tech innovator or popular artist.

And to be honest, I rather agree with this opinion : Some crafts are just anachronistic and silly and it’s this very uncoolness and unsexiness that -in a perverse way- is what’s so lovely and attractive about the whole thing. But sadly these dying crafts seldom garner enough love to save them, as many have been steamrolled out of existence since humans first picked up tools.

“At best a craftsman is considered a romantic, but will never be lauded to the same extent as a silicone valley tech innovator or popular artist. ”

E. Gucewicz dressed up as a “craftsman” for a shoot for Popeye Magazine, 2017

It’s still sad to see them go. One example that really touched me was a interview with an elderly Italian cooking pot maker. He was a real master at what he did, one man in his workshop making the most beautiful copper cooking pots. The really moving thing was at the end of the interview he confessed that his greatest wish in life wasn’t for money or health : he wished for an apprentice- simply someone who would commit to spending enough time with him so he could pass his valuable information on. Despite his efforts to employ an assistant, he remained alone and remote at his work, unwanted by even the unemployed. What makes it especially sad is that- to him- it seemed no one was interested in the work he had chosen to spend his life doing. It’s a similar tale playing across rust belts and empty high streets in various pockets all over the globe. We’ve all seen down-at-heel former industrial heartlands rusting away in a soggy depression, where now many of those once shiny industrial jobs are long forgotten like a filthy penny.

Attempts to prevent change fail. Reactionaries like the luddites in the face of mechanised industry ended in failure and a humiliating choice between financial ruin or a submission to what was then a shiny new industrial craft job. As Tim Harford puts it “"economists -ever ever-ready to adopt a bit of jargon- even speak of the ‘Luddite fallacy that has beset industrial progression". And with the relatively recent interest in ‘authenticity’ in products brought in by apparently well-meaning hipsters, has resulted in many companies massively over-emphasising the ‘craft elements’ of their product or service to the point of outright lying to their customers.

“Despite his efforts to employ an assistant, he remained alone and remote at his work, unwanted by even the unemployed.”

Punks destroying a Electric-Hire-Scooter. They’re luddites, smashing the modern so you can keep your ways. Punk’s not dead. Perversity is important in an increasingly globalised shiny industrial world. [source instagram @noeloquence]

A frustrating element is that it’s never truly surprising when a particular industry has started slipping into irrelevance. A wildly obvious example are all those skilled tasks currently related to manufacture of the internal combustion engine - some are going to decline and fizzle out for good and I just hope someone is recording them.

But the good news is there are new crafts being born all the time….and this is where I get to talk about robotics =)

The word ‘Robot’ has long existed in Slavic languages meaning ‘forced labourer’. It entered Western language via early science fiction plays and we’ve not shaken off the prejudices associated with meaningless drudgery.

Factories have had humans and robots sharing work since 1961, when general motors installed the first ‘UNIMATE’ - a one armed tank-like robot used for tasks like welding. But until recently they were separated from human workers- apparently partly to stop humans coming to any harm being near a large moving robot and partly to stop humans confusing the robots.

But all those diesel engine makers are now facing a more urgent choice : adapt or die. And many are adapting already by finally shifting manufacture to parts for the electric cars industry. A temptation however may be to disregard the car engine as an example of an industry that already relies heavily upon robots and automation- not craftsmen - but the truth is this isn’t a million miles from the roots of what craftsmanship is…

A trite example is to point out that if you’ve tried to operate or write programming for multi jointed/multi axis robotic arm you'll know that it’s really not immediately easy. It requires considerable care and practice. You also may know that not all coding is the same, even if outcomes produce the same result, some coders or technicians will be far more efficient and elegant than others.

An example from my experience is from when I started prototyping and making eyewear : I used a Laser cutting workshop in London that was run by a Chinese family. One of the family (Chris) managed operation of the laser cutters as an evening job while he was studying during the day. We were cutting spruce sheet for samples of sunglasses shapes, we got talking and it became apparent that he could tell which country the spruce sheet was grown just from the sound and smell of it burning under the laser (apparently Finnish spruce was nicest - in case you were wondering). This demonstrates a high level of understanding and skill that we don’t usually associate with someone who operates a machine by pushing buttons.

If this tale sounds far-fetched there are other cases, one example from former grand master chess champion Garry Kasparov gives in his book ‘How Life Imitates Chess’- When trying out chess computer games that were being developed in the 1990’s he could successfully identify the source nation in which that particular chess playing computer algorithm was developed. He did this because he recognised the strategic style of it chess played and which countries those players were usually taught - it was a dead giveaway of what he called “national imprint”.

Despite the fact Chris was operating a robot laser arm, or that the chess game coders were creating strategies for what seemed to them the most logical moves, in both cases there is a combination of multi-sensory information with personal expression or experience written in, and its all so apparent that it can be identified using normal human senses. And that is perhaps what ultimately the essence of any ‘craft’ achieves.

Horn buttons cut with a lazer and then finished by hand with a file. Lazer cutting horn takes skill as lighter coloured horn burns at different rates to darker coloured horn. Also the distance of the laser from the material, speed and power all are contributing factors that are laboriously worked out on a trial and error basis.

Many people will be still unwilling to admit 3D modellers, laser cutting technicians or animators should be welcomed into the great guild hall of ‘craftsmen’. Perhaps this is because we only see the utility derived from these tasks, and don’t understand their operative process. But if we bother to learn we’ll find out it can be as skilled and elegant as a Savile row tailor. We need to submit to the fact that these new skills are the crafts of our age, and also acknowledge they're being born at increasingly fast rate, because craft is utterly linked with human technological progress which continues to explode exponentially in ‘Moore’s law’ like fashion. Bare in mind that Sales of industrial robots are growing at around 13% a year...(at the time of writing) Which means the robot birth rate is almost doubling almost every 5 yrs, and along with it will be the craftsmen of the future that i speak of. It’s just difficult to fully appreciate all these crafts as they wizz by and do their bit before being replaced.

But since the development big data storage and ubiquitous camera phones and other cheap recording equipment we find ourselves blessed with a method to record these dying craft industries. It maybe a burden but it’s our duty to history to record them. But when we do so, I urge you not to label these recordings as depressing or nostalgic things, but as something we simply cherish and honour - and also please let the makers know it, because those seemingly silly out of date copper pot makers need to know - and even be praised - for having contributed an essential little gear that’s maybe now coming to a rest inside the marvellous machine that is humanity.

“Sales of industrial robots are growing at around 13% a year... Which means the robot birth rate is almost doubling almost every 5 yrs.”

— Tim Harford in "Fifty things that made the modern economy"

images from the laser cutting workshop. 2014.

(Shot on Olympus Pen-EE 35mm)

Thanks for reading! And if you have any further thoughts on this and to discuss more - or wish to challenge any of my opinions - I will be delighted to discuss more!

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[ ARCHIVE FEATURE ] E.Gucewicz eyewear

March 30, 2019

I STARTED MY OWN EYEWEAR BRAND IN 2012. Gucewicz eyewear showcased sunglasses and spectacles made from exotic materials like camel bone, cocobolo or real mammoth tusk (yes Mammoth tusk, it’s pink and blue and was dredged up from the North sea by Dutch fishermen- it was quite a complicated process so that warrant’s it’s own post later!). The main ‘exotic’ material I used in every Gucewicz eyewear ‘collection’ was real buffalo or ox horn.

Why horn? - The answer is I had it when no one else did.

I first came across this ancient material while working a 3 year stint beneath the leaking pavements of New Oxford street, London, inside the underground workshop of James Smith and Sons’ umbrella makers. We used horn to make the ferrules (ie. umbrella ends) for the more luxurious umbrellas that we were making on the premises. There I saw, held and rummaged through filthy boxes of this apparently lovely and unique - since material caked in dust. From experimenting with offcuts and a bit of research I learned that real-horn was a kind of primitive thermosetting plastic : you heat it up and inside the microscopic strands of keratin proteins inside the horn melt just enough to make the whole material go all floppy and flexible. Then, when the whole piece cools in a new position, the strands inside are fixed in whatever that new shape is. I already knew that most non-metal rimmed glasses from before world war 2 were made from real horn this way, but by the early 2010’s virtually no-on was producing eyewear from real horn at all. After a little asking around of potential customers, I found people were as interested in this material as I was, but no one was making it.

Well, almost no one was making it.

A year or two before I was looking for a live/work space with an artist friend C.Billingham - we wanted a workspace long enough to set up a screen printing business for our wallpaper company we were starting at the time (more about this another time). The space we found was in Hackney wick, an eyewear factory that had survived two wars of German bombing campaigns over East London. It was called Algha Works they had a spare floor to let that fitted within our shoestring budget, so we were going to crash there too. They didn’t let us stay.

“There I saw, held and rummaged through filthy boxes of a this apparently lovely and unique material caked in dust”

“By the time Algha finally produced the samples, I didn’t need them anymore”

Recalling this place I drafted some to-scale drawings of an unoriginal 50’s wayfarer type design and got two blocks of real horn through the Smith’s work account. It was gunsmithing horn - usually used for extending the butt of a shotgun butts : it was very dense, black and rather boring, but The elder statesmen had debuted with another boring pair of horn glasses at the time, so I thought: this’ll be easy, I’ll just undercut Elder Statemen’s exorbitant price tag, make these glasses at Algha and I’ll make a fortune selling glasses for rich people. I thought it’s be easy (simplistic youth that i was).

I took the 26 bus all the way to Algha works. Dropped the designs off where they gathered dust for over a year before they looked at sampling.

6 months into waiting I go so impatient I decided to try making the glasses myself. No idea what i was doing I used a laser cutter at a firm near Bethnal Green that made architectural models and didn’t mind the smell (burnt horn smells like burnt hair). It took of lot of messy attempts, ordering parts through ebay and ‘borrowing’ tools from Smith’s or Algha and eventually got the first pairs made on my bedroom desk. They were all awful, but by my 15th pair or so it was getting there. By the time Algha finally produced the samples, I didn’t need them anymore.

I went on to make pairs of glasses that were some of the most terrible and some of the best things that I’ll ever make. I cannot fully endorse the idea enough : that if you want to be a create anything you start by making something, not just finding a factory who’ll do it for you. It was in those frustrating weeks worth of hours spent in absolute silence because I was as bored of the radio as I was of sandpapering horn plates down, that you get your best eureka moments and most inspiring and original ideas- in a way, it shaped my life for the following years.

“I used a laser cutter at a firm near Bethnal Green that made architectural models and didn’t mind the smell”

I stopped this eponymous sunglasses brand back in 2015 to focus my time and energy on Lockwood Umbrellas, a project I started in 2014). I’ve learned a lot more about quality and what makes a good pair of glasses since then, and I will be relaunching a new Gucewicz eyewear range in the future- but like that feeling you get when your spending hours of your life sanding a single horn plate down - I’m happy to not force a launch until I feel it’s ready.

That really tell’s you only a tiny bit about what it’s like to hand made eyewear. Next post I’ll be talking a bit about branding building and sales, using another archive project as an example. please subscribe for the next post.

Finally, for more information about Gucewicz brand YOU CAN WATCH THIS INSTASTORY HERE or if you have any questions about making eyewear for yourself or your company, or where I sourced the materials or just want a pair of glasses, just comment below or contact me here.

Thanks for reading! And if you are interested in following my next stage- please subscribe!

Welcome to E.Gucewicz design (BLOG)

March 24, 2019

Welcome to the blog and new page for E.Gucewicz design. Edward Gucewicz started this design studio in 2019 after spending over a decade working as a freelance fashion and eyewear designer, starting entrepreneurial design projects. This is our new blog where we talk about projects past and present, and shared stores and lessons about how to turn your designs into a business.