Marcus Sly - Furniture Making and Design

I've been getting a bit fed up recently with coming across advertisements for so-called "handmade" furniture which is blatantly mass produced in factories.  It's got me thinking a bit about what we mean by the term "handmade" - or if it has any meaning at all.  I guess there are romantic associations around it - one perhaps imagines an old timber workshop from which emanates good, honest, workman-like sounds of hewing, sawing and hammering.  Maybe one thinks of the steely eyed, no-nonsense old craftsperson, who knows how things should be done and will have no truck with compromise. 

Of course the romantic vision is quite different to the modern factory churning out identical copies of "handmade" furniture from an industrial unit which reverberates to the roar of computer controlled machinery twenty four hours a day, while giving off a powerful smell of solvents from the spray booths.  Now I'm not going to deny that although a lot of the work in such factories is accomplished by unskilled labour there are also jobs which require a great deal of knowledge and skill - knowledge and skill which I don't have.  But to me it still seems dishonest to call the product of such factories "handmade".  To me this term implies that the cutting and shaping and finishing of the work is accomplished by a human hand.  Even if that hand takes assistance from a power tool, the tool should be guided by a person. 

I feel it is wrong to characterise something as handmade when such a great proportion of the work is accomplished almost automatically.  The machine is set up once and then reproduces perfect results to order.  This is the difference between what David Pye calls the "workmanship of certainty" and the "workmanship of risk".  In the workmanship of certainty, it is very hard for the operator to spoil the work.  The machine takes care of it.  In the workmanship of risk, at any moment it is possible for the craftsperson to spoil the result because they, rather than a machine, are in total control of the tools.

Our culture is based on the "workmanship of certainty".  Industrial production meets many of our needs efficiently, and in a way that can't be matched by hand methods.  However there is still a practical - and spiritual - need for handmade things.   To me it's  a shame when industrial furniture producers attempt to hoodwink people into believing they are getting something handmade.  They're not, and there may be a danger that we're loosing a sense of how fundamental the difference in feel and quality between a quality handmade product and a mass-produced one is.