{ Saturday, June 25, 2005 }
Cory, at the Reboot conference in Copenhagen, records the crafter's manifesto written by Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, a Finnish crafter that "reads like a blueprint for the Enlightenment crossed with an entrepreneur's prayer."
1. People get satisfaction for being able to create/craft things because they can see themselves in the objects they make. This is not possible in purchased products.
2. The things that people have made themselves have magic powers. They have hidden meanings that other people can’t see.
3. The things people make they usually want to keep and update. Crafting is not against consumption. It is against throwing things away.
4. People seek recognition for the things they have made. Primarily it comes from their friends and family. This manifests as an economy of gifts.
5. People who believe they are producing genuinely cool things seek broader exposure for their products. This creates opportunities for alternative publishing channels.
6. Work inspires work. Seeing what other people have made generates new ideas and designs.
I see the rise of crafting, DIY (and their mouthpieces in magazines such as Readymade and Make) -- and, in the digital realm, people publishing their photos and blogs, as the expression of a powerful, almost demiurgic need to create one's own world. The need for uniqueness and singularity becomes really pressing in a world of endless reproduction, sameness, mediocrity and crap.
As I was saying to Andy the other day, the marketplace used to be a human place, where people exchanged the goods they'd grown or made, and each exchange was an exchange between people. Now there are supermarkets and Walmart, and I had a conversation with a clerk at Borders who said that they were going to replace him with a system whereby your goods were tallied by an RFID reader as you walked out the door. There's something different about knowing the people who make your clothes and grow your food, and I think that this will be an enormous force going forward. Distribution mechanisms have become that much easier with online payments and online marketplaces, and I'm excited to start expanding the list of places I shop for things from "real people" -- from just my little local boutiques, Elsewares and Threadless.
LINK | 12:51 PM | TB