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Old 08-25-2019, 05:41 PM
charles Tauber charles Tauber is offline
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Neither term, handmade or handcrafted, have any real meaning anymore: they mean whatever anyone wants them to mean.

The obvious intention is to invoke sentiments that something was made the way things used to be made and that the way they used to be made was of a high quality. As anyone who has attended a Christmas craft sale with works by less skilled amateurs knows, being "handmade" is not a guarantee of quality of design or workmanship.

As others have pointed out, very, very few things are made anymore without the aid of some sort of machinery or automation.

What might be a more relevant is the distinction drawn by David Pye (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Pye_(furniture)), the workmanship of risk versus the workmanship of certainty.

Quote:
The expression “Old World Craftsmanship" is supposed to evoke images of meticulous, snowy-haired old craftsmen making unbelievably fine furniture in little workshops set up among the toadstools and gnarled roots of the Black Forest. lt - makes some people go warm all over just to think of all these good-hearted Geppetos working away on masterpieces over there in the Old World, but basically, the phrase is a brain-less banality that trivializes the idea of fine workmanship. It doesn‘t teach us how to distinguish between fine and mediocre workmanship, it just pours syrup over everything. It was the great contribution of the late British writer and craftsman David Pye to have constructed a Clear and unsentimental definition of workmanship that helps us understand how to judge its qualities. His definition is based not on whether a thing happens to be made by machine or made by hand (a distinction which he thought was pointless and futile) but instead on the chance [of screwing up the work] that exists
https://www.coursehero.com/file/1404...nship-of-risk/
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