Reading for week 1: David Pye

[Steve]

First week...

I hope everyone had a chance to take a look at Pye’s book on
workmanship. Some useful definitions, some very thoughtful
observations.

About David Pye

A bit about Pye, from
http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/learning/learndex.php?theme_id=cscu1&theme_record_id=cscu1pye&mtri=cscu1furn

Pye studied at the Architectural Association (AA) and spent three
years working as an architect, latterly specialising in wooden
buildings. He served in the Royal Navy during the war and taught
briefly at the AA. His main career was in teaching and he spent 26
years at the Royal College of Art (1948-1974), where for the last ten
years he was Professor of Furniture Design. At the same time, he
designed furniture for industrial production, made wooden bowls and
boxes, and wrote books. The most of important of these was The Nature
and Art of Workmanship (1968) which has had a long-lasting influence
on the crafts.

David Pye's unusual fluted bowls and boxes were carved (not turned) on
a lathe or 'fluting engine', which he had invented in 1949/50. He
exhibited and sold his work continuously from 1949 to the early 1980s
and in 1984-5 the Crafts Council arranged a touring retrospective
exhibition. He was awarded the OBE in1985.

Some images of his work are there, too.

Pye’s first book, The Nature of Design

Peter Kantor of the University of Advancing Technology sums up his
first book, The Nature of Design (Reinhold Books Corporation: New
York, 1969) this way, at http://www.daaq.net/folio/bibliography/b_pye.html:

This book is an excellent little essay on design. It is a compact 100
pages of easy to read prose that clearly delineates design form the
perspective of a designer who is very open about the myths and
fallacies that form the basis of many ideas about design. David Pye
sees design as an inescapable element of the human condition. He also
sees it as a point of connection between art and science, between
craft and technology. The main thread of his book centers around the
idea of form follows function, which he redefines to function as a
limiting factor in form. The place where fallacies and myths about
design arise are in the issue of function, which he points out, is not
objective, nor a property of the thing designed. Rather it is a
function of interaction with the thing designed. He defines function
as "what someone has provisionally decided that a device may
reasonably be expected to do at present" [p. 10].

David Pye sums of most of the book in three question towards the
beginning [p. 8]:

* How do you determine what the thing you are going to design "has
to do," what "activity is proper to it," what "it is for," what "its
purpose" is?

* Having done so, does the information you have gained govern the
design and determine its form, or does it merely guide it, restricting
the choice of form and setting limits within which it can be varied at
will?
* What does "purely functional" mean?

David Pye proposes that we build things to effect change. Everything
occurs within a system of changes and structures, and is not divisible
from the system which it operates in. Most designed objects are, in
his opinion, purely palliative, and very few object truly enable new
activities and behaviors. We can walk instead of taking the car, but
we cannot fly instead of taking a plane. He also points out that
design is limited by economy, not technique. Technique far outstrips
affordability. Because of this, all design is a trade off, and, to
that extent, a failure. Where that failure is allowed to enter in is
an arbitrary result of the process of designing. He points out that
much of design proceeds under the assumption that tool can bring us
happiness, but, in his opinion, tools can only avoid unhappiness. In
thinking that tools can equate to happiness, the tools are seen as
separating cause and effect, which are inseparable. This belief is
held because design in conceived at a certain level of isolation from
outside factors which does not or cannot exist in the world.
Some salient quotes:
... whenever humans design and make useful things they invariably
expend a good deal of unnecessary and avoidable work on it which
contributes nothing to its usefulness. [p.9]
... all useful devices have got to do useless things which no one
wants them to do. [p. 10]

After putting design in its place, Pye took on craft, or workmanship.
That’s the topic of our discussion, which seems appropriate: we call
ourselves makers.

The Voicethread Experiment

Making is about action, and so I thought it would be useful to try to
organize our discussion around images of objects and video of makers.
(And on Pye’s book, as well – I’ve chosen a few paragraphs that seem
especially evocative, from http://mike.teczno.com/notes/books/nature-and-art-of-workmanship.html.)
I’ve set up a group on Voicethread that you can get to by going to
http://voicethread.com/groups/subscribe/6639/c2aa5a057/ . Note that
you can comment on particular moments in the video by moving the
pointer at the bottom, and by starting and stopping it – quite a
clever system once you get the hang of it. I’ve pulled a group of
images into a Voicethread called “Readings, Week 1: David Pye.”

Feel free to add more images and video. I think it’s set so that
anyone can add new voicethreads and link to the group. You can add
comments without logging in, but to edit the voicethread, or create
your own, use the “Sign in or register” button on the lower left of
the page. If you add new voicethreads, share them with “humanist
makers” group. And I think you can add images into my voicethread, the
“Readings, Week 1.” If any of this doesn’t seem to work, leave a note
here and I’ll try to fix it.
A few things that aren’t obvious from the Voicethread instructions. A
Voicethread has a number of images/videos in it – the one I’ve set up
has 7, I think. Whenyou start it up, it will go through them
automatically, or you can jump using the arrows. Videos play first
comments then the whole video – you can jump ahead using the controls
at the bottom of the screen.

On videos – you can upload your own videos easily, in many formats.
You can upload videos from the Internet Archive by simply giving
Voicethread the url. To give it videos from Youtube, you need to
download them first using something like keepvid.com (download them
as .flv files). Images from the internet: just give it the url.

This is my first attempt to use voicethreads (and of course, I’ve
spent more time playing with the software than working on the
book...) , but I thought: what better group to try it out with? I’m
curious to know if anyone else has used it.

Enjoy!

Steve