Mission Statement and Prospectus
The Industrial Crafts Research Network is an international, interdisciplinary research network of academics, museum professionals, designers and practitioners dedicated to the study of and communication of skill and knowledge within Industrial Crafts. ICRN focuses on skilled practices specific to industrial contexts. It deploys ethnography and leverages the theoretical perspectives of embodied, enactive and distributed cognition to understand these practices in the context of tools, materials, procedures and working environments. ICRN publishes research about these understandings and applies them in developing exhibits and displays that communicate ‘know-how’ in museum and pedagogical environments, using sensor, robotic and interactive technologies.
What are ‘industrial crafts’?
By ‘industrial crafts’, we mean a wide variety of skilled and artisanal practices from the early modern period to the present day that have emerged in association with the development of industrial technologies and thus may be contrasted with both pre-industrial crafts and ‘studio’ crafts. Industrial crafts are defined by scenarios of distributed cognition among externally powered machine systems that combine varieties of information ’storage’ with varying degrees of process automation. They involve new materials, especially cast iron, and new power sources (e.g. coal fired steam) related to new processes of extraction, refinement and synthesis – mining, metallurgy, chemical engineering. Examples of environments of industrial crafts includes printing, industrial ceramics and musical instrument making, as well as all manner of skilled practices in the textile industry, to metal trades (precision machining and manufacturing) to heavy industry (boiler-making, shipbuilding and foundry-work).
Why study industrial crafts?
In the UK and Europe, and in parts of the USA, the notion of Industrial Heritage has a key place in cultural and social history, and the teaching of such. Much of this work, for obvious reasons, has focused on the history of invention, and the history of economic development, and has drawn on textual historical records, the built environment, and archeological remains. This has tended to fall into the conventional ‘history of great men’ mode that has been roundly critiqued from feminist, post colonialist and labor perspectives. What is less well examined and less celebrated is the of experience of workers, and their special skills (the exception being in ‘working museums’). Such skills, owned by workers, were seldom documented (seen as unimportant) and are inherently difficult to document (cf: Tacit knowledge, Polanyi). But without these skills, usually passed on on-the-job (sit by Nellie) the entirety of industrial production could not occur. Embodied cognition is therefore an evanescent but key component of industrial history. As deindustrialization transforms workplaces and the last surviving practitioners of many of these skills are passing, there is an urgency in capturing this knowledge, in order to create a more complete representation of the history of the period and in order to communicate the embodied qualities of such skills. ICRN proposes interdisciplinary study of skilled practices in this domain. We see this as adding a new dimension to the study of and of history of the industrial period its presentation. In doing so, it also provides understanding these matters as they have unfolded during the 20th century, which is important to understanding the present, but also will help generate insight and raise questions about more distant pasts.
ICRN focuses on the human experience of industrial crafts, with particularly their cognitive dimensions. ICRN leverages paradigms of embodied, enactive, situated and distributed cognition in its analysis of these practices. Where experts survive, ethnography is central. In other cases, we rely on literature and other ephemera (surviving objects, designs, floorplans, managerial records) and have to interpolate bodily practices. New methodologies may need to be developed. Aside from its radical interdisciplinarity, ICRN’s emphasis on embodied experience informs a range of novel theoretical, methodological and design questions.
Emergent historical process, not revolution:
Avoiding totalizing and technologically determinist historical models. Artisanal crafts were not replaced, wholesale, by automation and mass production. The transition from artisan to factory-fodder was neither instantaneous nor uniform, with significant discrepancies between industries and between geographical locations. The process evolved over 150 years of technological and social development (emergence of urban proletariat, anarchism and socialism, unions, child labor laws, planned communities and colonialism, etc.) where crafts people became skilled machine operators and new cognitive ecologies slowly formed. Artisans developed or adopted new technologies (as they do today) or were drawn into larger industrial complexes that needed their skills. In the process their skills underwent slow transformation (as was the case, for instance, with digital technologies in clerical work in the last C20th).
Cognitive history: the ‘sooty stepchild' thesis.
While we will not pretend that industrial working environments were some kind of historical Cinderella, we argue that the industrial crafts comprise an under-recognised and important historical stage in the transition from the (romanticised) artisanal crafts to the (valorised) human computer interaction.
Standarisation and Ergonomics.
The increasing theorisation of standardisation and industrial labor developed parallel to industrialisation, from Adam Smith’s pin factory to the studies of Babbage’s industrial efficiency studies, Taylorism and Fordism time and motion studies, and ergonomics. When human power is exchanged for external power derived from waterwheel or steam engine, the work of the skilled worker transitions to a new mode of monitoring, adjustment, calibration and maintenance.
Engineering as a scientific and academic discipline.
The discipline of engineering came into existence during industrialisation, and was slowly professionalised. Brunel senior brought the technique known as technical drawing with him to Britain from France, where it had been a military secret. The professionalisation of the discipline and the use of technical drawing also served to take control of design from the mostly illiterate (working class) artisans, moving design and specification from an artisanal/apprenticeship mode to a mathematised and representational practice. In the USA, the first PhD in engineering (technically, applied science and engineering) was awarded by Yale University in 1863. Union College (Schenectady NY) was the first liberal arts college to offer a civil engineering program (1845).
Analog computing.
A text, table or diagram stores abstract information, but a machine can store dynamical processes and procedures. In a simple case, setting a stop for a moving carriage permits repeatable events without constant monitoring. A mechanical drive and simple sensor (limit switch/latch/linkage) automates such a process. In this way, not only positions but temporal procedures are made almost infinitely repeatably - this is the essence of automation. A further refinement is establishing repetition with incremental change – taking up woven fabric on a roll or lowering the cutting tool on a planer. These are algorithms (programs) instantiated entirely in metal mechanisms. Operators were in some sense also programmers. The pre-history of computing is found in industrial machines, and the mechanical calculators that developed in parallel, with many commonalities (cf Babbages’ Difference Engine).
Our interdisciplinary project draws upon diverse constituencies and we recognize that different manifestations of skilled practices will demand different methodologies.
Among those manifestations are:
We are actively research methodologies and approaches, including ethnography, micro phenomenology and the potential use of technologies like eye tracking, 3D video, etc. We encourage experiments with hybrid approaches.
Ethnography and methodology.
Highly attuned skills and awarenesses are often obscured to operators themselves, and untrained observers are usually entirely oblivious to them. In previous work (Twisthands at the deadstop) group members have employed ethnographic techniques. Part of the work of ICRN is to develop methodologies that capture the knowledge we seek with veracity. This may most effectively occur in sequential reflexive knowledge gathering in specific contexts.
Epistemological and ontological challenges.
We explore and speak of embodied knowledge. As thinkers from Ryle (know-how/know-that) to Polanyi (tacit knowledge) to Pickering (performative and the representational idioms) have observed, there are deep challenges in representing such practices in the culture of the text, and in the medium of the museum exhibit. The ‘flipside’ of this problem arises in our project to build exhibits that communicated embodied knowledge more or less directly via kinesthetic/proprioceptive experience.
Industrial archeology and material culture analysis.
In the absence of trained practitioners, we must rely on inference from extant material culture, such as surviving objects, machine design, factory floor layout, first and second person reports, drawings and photographs, and business records. Of special interest is damage and wear on machines, and ‘witness marks’ – marks made by users for calibration or as aids to memory.
The importance of skilled observers.
Some participants in ICRN (including the directors) have long experience in relevant making skills. We are persuaded of the importance of this kind of experience, (and training in material analysis) in making informed observation. In this work we endorse the reconstructive practices in contemporary archeology.
Distributed cognition and ‘cognitive ecologies’.
In cognitive science over the last 30 years, increasing emphasis has been placed on the role of the body in cognition, and the role of structured physical and social contexts. These new approaches are called embodied, enactive, extended, embedded, situated and distributed, and material engagement. In some cases, they build on material, cognitive and cultural anthropology, also phenomenology, as well as contemporary neuroscience and neurophysiology. We find the concept of ‘cognitive ecologies’ (Hutchins) particularly useful as a way of understanding the development of working environments in which workers developed sophisticated new sensibilities in sympathy with the machine environments they tended and worked in.
In these new industrial contexts of varying degrees of automation and use of external power, new cognitive skills developed which extended sensing and productive capabilities of workers. The machines often function as proprioceptive cognitive prosthetics. The ‘fine-tuning’ of constant sensory awareness – to certain flappings or clickings or grindings, amid a cacophony of machine noise, is a typical dimension of such cognitive development, as are: the sensorimotor attunement to the force required to pull a lever or turn a crank; attunement to other sensory cues such as odors; and the timing and choreography of complex whole-body operations. We propose to apply these new approaches to cognition as a way of understanding these practices as the expression of whole-body intelligences.
Offloading of cognition and labor.
A key concept in distributed cognition is the notion of offloading cognition onto tools and structured environments. This allows for the streamlining of task and workflows and creates a situation in which a worker is dependent upon and immersed in a ‘network’ of non-human actants. Cognitive functions were offloaded onto closed loop mechanical systems and data and instruction storage (ie, Jacquard cards) that together comprise an industrial cognitive ecology. Industrial work environments are case examples of such structured environments, and their refinement was a characteristic of the development of the industrial work environment.
Progressive museology - the lived experience of the worker.
To the conventional culture of exhibition of objects and texts (and the celebration of owners and inventors) we propose to add presentation of the experience of those whose daily work involved machines. This demands the development of a new kind of exhibit that can communicate something of the experience of use.
Simulation learning in exhibit design.
On the basis of our research, we propose to develop sensorimotorically complex, embodied, interactive, partially ‘immersive’ or ‘augmented’ experiences that can stimulate the kind of embodied learning we are focusing on. Questions of the qualities of, and assessment of, experiences learned in simulation are central.
Symposia
Industrial Crafts Research Network - Symposium 1. Developing methodologies for documenting, understanding and communicating skilled practices of industrial environments. Sponsored jointly by UCI, UMass Amherst and Nottingham Trent University. Nov12-14 2021, online.
Publications
Twisthands at the deadstop (video)
Twisthands and Shuttlekissers. Penny and Fisher. BICCS, May 2021. Pub: Form Akademisk.
Machine-made lace, the spaces of skilled practices and the paradoxes of contemporary craft production, Fisher and Botticello, 2018.
Consulting and presentations
American Psychological Association. Aug2021. Panel. Tools, cognition and skill in artisanal, industrial and digital contexts. Penny, Whitted, Fisher, Mazalek, Noel.
ICRN Affiliated Persons
Simon Penny, professor, Art, University of California Irvine, USA (Co-director) penny@uci.edu
Tom Fisher, professor, Design, Nottingham Trent University, UK. (Co-director) tom.fisher@ntu.ac.uk
Tim Ingold, professor emeritus, Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, UK (Advisory Board member)
David Kirsh, professor, Cognitive Science, University of California San Diego, USA. (Advisory Board member)
Emily Whitted - PhD student, History, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Kirstie Blair – professor, English, Strathclyde University, UK.
Amy Woodson Boulton, Professor, History, Loyola Marymount University CA, USA,
Chris Baber, professor, Computer Science, Birmingham
Giovanna Urist, Associate Director, Foundation and Government Grants, Winterthur Museum, Delaware USA Matthew Bellhouse Moran, curator, Scottish Maritime Museum
Michael Moore. CEO, MCM Group of Companies. Marla Miller. Director of the Public History Program and Professor of History, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Graham Harwood, Goldsmiths College London.
Matsuko Yokokoji, independent artist, YoHa.
Michael Kimmel, Cognitive scientist, University of Vienna.
Iryna Kuksa, Senior Research Fellow, Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University.
ICRN Affiliated organizations, institutions and businesses
University of California Irvine, USA.
Nottingham Trent University, UK.
Public History Program, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA.
Lowell National Historic Park, Lowell, MA. USA
Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, Wilmington, DE USA
American Precision Museum, Windsor, VT USA
Framework Knitters Museum, Ruddington UK
STICK – Scottish Transport Industry Collections Knowledge Network, UK
Scottish Maritime Museum, Irvine, UK
John Smedley Ltd., Matlock, UK (pending)
Nottingham Industrial Museum, Nottingham UK
Science and Industry Museum, Manchester, UK
Advisory Board
Advisory Board members will, as appropriate:
- Initiate or participate in ICRN research and design (etc) projects
- Meet quarterly on or about the solstices and equinoxes.
- Facilitate new collaborations and other activities
- Publicise activities of ICRN in their networks
- Advise in grant writing and other fundraising
- Support activities such as meetings, conferences and publications
Affiliated organisations, institutions and businesses
Affiliated organisations, institutions and businesses will take part in and facilitate research, fundraising, networking, dissemination and exhibitions of the work of ICRN.
Mailing List
If you have further questions about the ICRN or would like to join our mailing list, please email us at IndustrialCraftsNetwork@gmail.com
Research Papers and Reports
- Understanding Industrial Craft Skills via embodied and distributed cognition
by Simon Penny and Tom Fisher
Industrial Crafts Research Network - Symposium 1. Developing methodologies for documenting, understanding and communicating skilled practices of industrial environments. Sponsored jointly by UCI, UMass Amherst and Nottingham Trent University. Nov12-14 2021, online.
Abstract
The primary goal of this paper is to attempt to understand the skills of machine tool use – specifically automated manufacturing machines of the C19th – as craft practices. These practices employed externally powered and automated tools and around them new cultures of practice emerged. We draw upon situated/embodied/enactive/extended/distributed (SEEED) approaches to cognition as a way of explicating the sensibilities of these practices, as well as history of science and technology, Anthropology, STS (Science and Technology Studies) and related fields. Based on this approach, we then apply the understandings gained through application of SEEED approaches to advance some design ideas for developing museum exhibits that provide an understanding of the know-how, the kinesthetic/proprioceptive skills and procedures - inherent in these crafts/trades. This design agenda addresses the challenge that this ‘knowing’ and ‘understanding’ presents to students of these crafts and to museums, and the benefit that might accrue to their visitors if this craft knowledge were more accessible. We take as a case study a body of work that has focused on embodied/ embedded knowledge in the textile industry – specifically in the making of machine lace. It concludes with a proposition for a multimedia approach to give museum visitors hands-on access to complex machines and techniques. The authors are both long term practitioners of crafts, both traditional and industrial (see biogs). This experience informs the research at every step.
Read more
Wait - what did I just do? (episodes in amateur autoethnography).
Restoring French Horn valves by plating and lapping
Tom's work making and restoring instruments is a source of autoethnographic data for this project. He is capturing this through video and self-reports of his reflections on the processes he undertakes. This video clip describes part of the process of restoring the rotary valves of an 80 year old French horn. The skills he deploys to do this are 'craft' skills, in that they rely on his embodied knowledge in a tactile dialogue with the materials at hand - brass, copper, nickel, abrasive lapping compound, hand tools. What makes them relevant to this project about industrial crafts is that they are also skills of the modern era. Tom’s skills are in dialogue with the process of electroplating, and he is literally in dialogue with Wayne, who uses his skills as an electroplater to deposit as near as possible the ideal amount of metal on the rotors. The matters of principle at issue in the video are complex and various – what sort of ‘mental model’ does Tom operate with to guide his actions; how does he know what to do? How does he know what he has done, and how does this guide what he does next at any point in the process? The talk over the video gives some clues to this – it indicates that there is an internal dialogue in which Tom works with the evidence of his senses; gathered by sight and touch. So the intelligence at work has an ‘inner’ dimension, but that is necessarily connected to the world of things through both reflective and unreflective, sensory, action.
Embodied Cognition and Industrial Crafts Bibliography(d2).
Download pdf
Baber, Chris, Tony Chemero, Jamie Hall. (2017) What the Jeweller’s Hand Tells the Jeweller’s Brain: Tool Use, Creativity and Embodied Cognition. Philosophy & Technology, (20171129): 1-20
Bateson, Gregory. (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. University of Chicago Press
Brown, Liane, Robert Doole, Nicole Malfait. The Role of Motor Learning in Spatial Adaptation near a Tool. PLoS ONE 6(12): e28999
Dewey, J. (1925). Experience and Nature. Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago and London. Revised edn. 1929.
Dreyfus, Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus. A Five stage model of the mental activities involved in skill acquisition. Operations Research Center, U.C Berkeley, 1980.
Felkin, W. (1867). A History of the Machine Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufacturers. Longmans, Green and Company.
xxxx., and Botticello, J., (2016). ‘Machine-made lace, the co-production of knowledge and the spaces of skilled practice’, Cultural Geographies, 25, 1: 46-69. DOI: 10.1177/1474474016680106
Goodrich, C.L. and F.A. Stanley. Accurate Tool Work. McGraw Hill 1907
Groth, C. (2017) Making sense through hands, Aalto University
Heidegger., Martin. Being and Time (1927) Albany, N.Y. State University of New York Press 2010
Holmes, Nicholas P., Daniel Sanabria, Gemma A. Calvert, Charles Spence. Tool-use: Capturing multisensory spatial attention or extending multisensory peripersonal space? Cortex. 2007 April; 43(3): 469–489.
Hutchins, Edwin. (1995) Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Hutchins, Edwin. Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things. (2006). Lambros Malafouris, and Colin Renfrew (eds) Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Hutchins, Edwin. Cognitive Ecology. Topics in Cognitive Science ,2 (2010) 705–715
Hodder, Ian. Entangled: an archaeology of the relationships between humans and things, John
Wiley, Chichester, 2012
Gibson, James. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Ingold, Timothy. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Routledge 2013.
James, William (1910) The principles of psychology, 2 vols, New York, Henry Holt and Company
Kirsh, David. and Paul Maglio. (1995) On Distinguishing Epistemic from Pragmatic Actions. Cognitive Science. 18, 513-549
Latour, Bruno, ‘The Berlin Key, or How to Do Words with Things’, in Paul Graves-Brown (ed), Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, pp 10 – 21, Routledge, London, 2000.
Leroi-Gourhan, Andre. Gesture and Speech. MIT Press 1993.
Malafouris, Lambros. (2004) “The Cognitive Basis of Material Engagement: Where Brain, Body and Culture Conflate.” DeMarrais, Elizabeth, et al., eds. Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. 53-62.
Marchand, Trevor H.J. Embodied cognition and communication: studies with British fine woodworkers. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), S100-S120
Maravita, Angelo and Atsushi Iriki. Tools for the body (schema). TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.8 No.2 February 2004 Elsevier.
Martel, Marie Lucilla Cardinali, Alice C. Roy, Alessandro Farnè. Tool-use: An open window into body representation and its plasticity. COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY, 2016, VOL. 33, NOS. 1– 2, 82–101
Merleau Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception, (1965) Routledge and Kegan Paul. 2002
Moore, Wayne. Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy. Moore Special Tool Company, Bridgeport Conn, 1970
Nimkulrat, N. (2012). Hands-on intellect: Integrating craft practice into design research. International Journal of Design, 6(3), 1-14.
Osuriak, Francois, Christoph Jarry, Didier Le Gall. Grasping the Affordances, Understanding the Reasoning: Toward a Dialectical Theory of Human Tool Use. Psychological Review 117(2):517- 40, March 2010
Penny, Simon. Making Sense: Computing, Cognition, Art and Embodiment. MIT Press. 2017.
Polanyi. Michael. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday.
Polanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge: towards a post-critical philosophy, Routledge, London, 2002 (1958/62)
Piper, A. (2016). ‘Code, recode, decode: Constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing knowledge through making’. In P. Lloyd & E. Bohemia (eds). Proceedings of DRS2016: Design+Research+Society – Future-Focused Thinking, Volume 7, pp 2959-2963 DOI: 10.21606/drs.2016.415.
Piper, A. and Townsend, K. (2015). ‘Crafting the composite garment: the role of hand weaving in digital creation’. Journal of Textile Research and Practice. 3, (1-2): 3-26.
Ryle, Gilbert. (1949) The concept of mind. University of Chicago Press.
Samuel, Raphael. (1977). ‘The workshop of the world: steam power and hand technology in
mid-Victorian Britain’. History Workshop Journal, 3.
Shapiro, Lawrence, Embodied Cognition, Routledge, Abingdon, 2011.
Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. (Trans Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove). University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Suchman, Lucille Alice. (1987) Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication, 2nd ed. (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
Vaesen Krist. The cognitive bases of human tool use. Behavioral and Brain Sciences Vol 35:4, 2012
Varela, Francisco, Evan Thompson and Eleanore Rosch. (1992) The Embodied Mind: cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press.
Vygotsky, Lev. Mind and Society. Trans - Andy Blunden and Nate Schmolze. Harvard University Press 1930.
Whitworth, Joseph. Miscellaneous Papers on Mechanical Subjects. Longmans, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, Manchester 1858
Wilson, Frank R. The Hand: how its use shapes the brain, language and human culture, Pantheon Books, New York, 1998
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Assembled by Tom Fisher and Simon Penny
Biogs
Tom Fisher
Tom Fisher is a gardener, craftsperson, musician and academic. Professor in the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University since 2007, he has worked in art schools since 1985 and made his living as a furniture designer/maker before his first university appointment. He is now developing a business custom-making French horns. His academic interests derive directly from this – prominent themes include materials in everyday consumption (the subject of his 2004 PhD from the Sociology Department at the University of York) and the acquisition of skill in material practices, informed by theories of cognition. His research has produced a book on the everyday re-use of packaging, (Designing for Re-Use, Earthscan, 2009), a recent special issue of the Journal of Design History on the meaning of materials’ surface qualities, a special issue of Critical Studies of Fashion and Beauty on fashion and materiality, a 2017 book for Gower, Design for Personalisation, and an edited collection of essays on design and ethics for Bloomsbury in 2019. He has led funded research on sustainable clothing (Defra), and industrial heritage (AHRC). His current work is focusing on embodied knowledge; the ethics of design and technologies; design, culture and innovation.
Simon Penny
Simon Penny is an artist, teacher and theorist with a longstanding focus on emerging technologies and on embodied and situated aspects of artistic practice. Penny has built interactive installations and robotic art since the mid 1980s. His longstanding concern for embodied and situated aspects of aesthetic experience, along with a critical analysis of computer culture, has led to a focus on what of he refers to as postcogntivist approaches to cognition - the focus of his book Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art and Embodiment (MIT press 2017). He was director of A Body of Knowledge: Embodied Cognition and the Arts conference UCI 2016, and An Ocean of Knowledge: Pacific Seafaring, Sustainability and Cultural Survival at UCI in 2017. As Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon (1993-2000) he developed VR and robotics projects. He then went on to found the Arts Computation Engineering (ACE) graduate program at the University of California Irvine, 2001-2012. He was Labex International Professor, University Paris8 and ENSAD in 2014. He was visiting professor in media theory, Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media masters, University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, 2006-2013. Penny is currently professor of Electronic Art and Design (Dept of Art) at University of California, Irvine, with appointments in the dept of Music and in Informatics (School of Information and Computer Science). More at simonpenny.net
Marla Miller
Marla Miller's primary research interest is U.S. women's work before industrialization. Her book The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006) won the Costume Society of America's Millia Davenport prize; Betsy Ross and the Making of America (Holt, 2010)--a scholarly biography of that much-misunderstood early American craftswoman -- was a finalist for the Cundill Prize in History, and was named to the Washington Post's "Best of 2010" list. In 2019 she completed a microhistory of women and work in 18th-century New England titled Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). A public historian and public history educator, Professor Miller teaches courses in Public History, American Material Culture, Museum and Historic Site Interpretation, and History Communication, and consults with a wide variety of museums and historic sites. The work of the ICRN resonates at the intersection of her research into United States labor history and material culture, and the contemporary documentation and interpretation of those subjects in museums and historic sites. Her National Council on Public History presidential address, “'In the Spaciousness of Uncertainty is Room to Act:' Public History’s Long Game," can be found in the August 2020 issue of The Public Historian.
Emily Whitted
Emily Whitted is a history doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst studying the intersections of skill, labor, and early American material culture. A recent graduate of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware, her MA thesis, “Made in Germantown: Production, Wear, and Repair of American Frame-Knit Stockings 1683-1830,” examines the embodied knowledge of early American frame knitters through material evidence of the machines they operated, archival documentation, and experimental archaeology. Her dissertation research focuses on textile repair in early America, and she is also pursuing a public history certificate with a concentration in museum studies.
Network Partners
STICK
STICK is the Scottish Transport & Industry Collections and Knowledge network and as a Subject Specialist Network (SSN) it aims to promote care and enjoyment of these collections. Established in 2006 as a membership body, STICK formalised the running of the network in 2010 when a constitution was introduced. More at stickssn.org
Symposium Nov 13-14 2021
Exhibiting Skill:
Understanding, documenting, and communicating
skilled practices
in historical industrial environments
Register Official Program Symposium Overview Tech notes for Presenters
Nov. 13, 2021 [Day One]
[10-10:30am EST / 3-3:30pm GMT]
The ICRN: Who We Are & What We Do
Simon Penny, Emily Whitted, Tom Fisher, Marla Miller
Simon Penny is an artist, teacher and theorist with a longstanding focus on emerging technologies and on embodied and situated aspects of artistic practice. Penny has built interactive installations and robotic art since the mid 1980s. His longstanding concern for embodied and situated aspects of aesthetic experience, along with a critical analysis of computer culture, has led to a focus on what of he refers to as postcogntivist approaches to cognition - the focus of his book Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art and Embodiment (MIT press 2017). He was director of A Body of Knowledge: Embodied Cognition and the Arts conference UCI 2016, and An Ocean of Knowledge: Pacific Seafaring, Sustainability and Cultural Survival at UCI in 2017. As Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon (1993-2000) he developed VR and robotics projects. He then went on to found the Arts Computation Engineering (ACE) graduate program at the University of California Irvine, 2001-2012. He was Labex International Professor, University Paris8 and ENSAD in 2014. He was visiting professor in media theory, Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media masters, University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, 2006-2013. Penny is currently professor of Electronic Art and Design (Dept of Art) at University of California, Irvine, with appointments in the dept of Music and in Informatics (School of Information and Computer Science).
Emily Whitted is a history doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst studying the intersections of skill, labor, and early American material culture. A recent graduate of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware, her MA thesis, “Made in Germantown: Production, Wear, and Repair of American Frame-Knit Stockings 1683-1830,” examines the embodied knowledge of early American frame knitters through material evidence of the machines they operated, archival documentation, and experimental archaeology. Her dissertation research focuses on textile repair in early America, and she is also pursuing a public history certificate with a concentration in museum studies.
Tom Fisher is a gardener, craftsperson, musician and academic. Professor in the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University since 2007, he has worked in art schools since 1985 and made his living as a furniture designer/maker before his first university appointment. He is now developing a business custom-making French horns. His academic interests derive directly from this – prominent themes include materials in everyday consumption (the subject of his 2004 PhD from the Sociology Department at the University of York) and the acquisition of skill in material practices, informed by theories of cognition. His research has produced a book on the everyday re-use of packaging, (Designing for Re-Use, Earthscan, 2009), a recent special issue of the Journal of Design History on the meaning of materials’ surface qualities, a special issue of Critical Studies of Fashion and Beauty on fashion and materiality, a 2017 book for Gower, Design for Personalisation, and an edited collection of essays on design and ethics for Bloomsbury in 2019. He has led funded research on sustainable clothing (Defra), and industrial heritage (AHRC). His current work is focusing on embodied knowledge; the ethics of design and technologies; design, culture and innovation.
Marla Miller's primary research interest is U.S. women's work before industrialization. Her book The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006) won the Costume Society of America's Millia Davenport prize; Betsy Ross and the Making of America (Holt, 2010)--a scholarly biography of that much-misunderstood early American craftswoman -- was a finalist for the Cundill Prize in History, and was named to the Washington Post's "Best of 2010" list. In 2019 she completed a microhistory of women and work in 18th-century New England titled Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). A public historian and public history educator, Professor Miller teaches courses in Public History, American Material Culture, Museum and Historic Site Interpretation, and History Communication, and consults with a wide variety of museums and historic sites. The work of the ICRN resonates at the intersection of her research into United States labor history and material culture, and the contemporary documentation and interpretation of those subjects in museums and historic sites. Her National Council on Public History presidential address, “'In the Spaciousness of Uncertainty is Room to Act:' Public History’s Long Game," can be found in the August 2020 issue of The Public Historian.
[10:30-11:45am EST/ 3:30-4:45pm GMT]
* Moderator – Tom Fisher
Preserving Skills and Knowledge in Heritage Machinery Operations
Pippi Carty-Hornsby, Science and Industry Museum in Manchester (UK)
Abstract:
Heritage machinery demonstrations provide unique opportunities for museum visitors to experience the sights, smells and sounds of Britain’s industrial past. However, with many of the operating roles staffed by an ageing population, the sector is at risk of substantial knowledge loss; the tacit skills of the operators may be lost, along with the opportunity for the public to learn from and experience the machinery. This presentation details a knowledge capture approach on the collection of textile machinery at the Science and Industry Museum, prompted by the retirement of the last operator on staff with first-hand experience of the textile industry.
Bio:
Pippi Carty-Hornsby, MEng, MA, is responsible for the training and operation of the historic machinery at Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, UK, covering the Textiles Gallery and the Power Hall. Her work involves advocating for using authentic heritage machinery stories to explore the relevancy of industrial history in our everyday lives both locally and globally through live interpretation with schools and the public, as well as in permanent exhibitions including the redevelopment of the flagship Power Hall gallery. She has particular interest in the hands-on intersection of industrial machinery and craft, through the narratives of skills, making and wellbeing.
Have Knowledge Will Travel: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Precision Metalworking Amongst the Corn, Potato, and Tobacco Fields of Hatfield, Massachusetts
Robert Forrant, University of Massachusetts Lowell (US)
Abstract:
The precision machinery builder Porter Machine Works offers an unusual story, having survived some ninety years, with a reach around the world, from the small Connecticut River Valley farming community of Hatfield, Massachusetts (population 3200). Its history emerges from a trove of company records that survived and ended up in the loving care of the Hatfield Historical Society. The records organized into twenty-one boxes, Forrant consumed the firm's history in the summer of 2017, learning that manufacturers of everything from bicycles to automobiles to papermaking machinery owned a Hatfield-built lathe. How this came about tells us a great deal about how firms throughout the river valley recruited and cultivated workers—as well as how archival evidence, alongside hands-on practice, preserves information about the role of industrial skill in an agricultural economy. An associated challenge is the interpretation of this important story in the agricultural and library spaces that house the HHS today.
Bio:
Robert Forrant has been on the history faculty at the University of Massachusetts Lowell since 1994. Prior to 1994, he worked nearly fifteen years as a machinist and union business agent in Springfield, MA. Co-author with Christoph Strobel of Ethnicity in Lowell an immigration history of that city and The Big Move: Immigrant Voices From a Mill City, he’s published extensively on the history of precision machining and machinery building in the Connecticut River Valley. Forthcoming is: Where are the Workers: Interpreting Labor and Working-Class History at Museums and Historic Sites, with Mary Anne Trasciatti, University of Illinois Press.
Makers and Creators in a Historic Textile Mill
Cathy Randall, Lowell National Historic Park (US)
Abstract:
Automated spinning and weaving are central to the origin/story of modern industrialization, technology transfer, and practical improvements to technology in the modern period. Lowell National Historical Park and its Boott Cotton Mills Museum preserve and interpret those stories and the material culture of the industrial revolution in Lowell. A key immersive experience for museum visitors is the recreated ca. 1920 weave room, equipped with 90 operable Draper looms. Lowell NHP weaver Cathy Randall will provide a filmed segment about knowledge transfer among machine operators and between machine operators and museum visitors on the shop floor of Lowell, and field questions and comments about the opportunities and challenges of sustaining high quality interpretation through training in light of staffing turnover.
Bio:
Cathy Randall has worked in the Boott Cotton Mill weave room at Lowell National Historical Park for more than 20 years, weaving, training weavers, and interpreting textile production in a museum setting. She has over 39 years of textile experience, including work at the American Textile History Museum, Cramer Fabrics, and Lowell.
Capturing Skills at a Micro-Scale
Michael Kimmel, University of Vienna (AUT)
Abstract:
This contribution discusses ways to do a micro-genetic analysis of skilled engagements. With the right tools researchers can capitalize on what experts know, including implicit and embodied facets. Kimmel’s preferred tool is Explication interviewing. It proposes highly specific techniques for creating a mindfulness-based dialogue with expert informants, a “cognitive midwifery” approach in which the interviewer facilitates recall. It allows us to inspect “thin slices” of a person’s sensorimotor experience, decisions, as well as responses to the ecology step-by-step. Starting from these micro-moments the researcher can then work his or her way up to the causalities of a larger event. Complementarily, Cognitive Task Analysis methods are briefly introduced: the Critical Decision Method, the Knowledge Audit, and Concept Maps. Here, the charting and visualizing of interview-based data receives greater attention, partly at the expense of process sensitivity. Kimmel will discuss the pros and cons of different methodologies relative to different research aims.
Bio:
Michael Kimmel is a researcher at the University of Vienna, with a focus on embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended cognitive science. His range of topics includes interaction and joint improvisation, co-creation, embodied decision making, skill theory and movement expertise, as well as expertise for complexity regulation. In addition to some biomechanic work, he has developed micro-genetic interview tools for reconstructing tacit and embodied knowledge (empirical phenomenology, stimulated recall, experimental workshops). Application fields include various forms of improvisational partner dance, martial arts, somatic therapy, and partner acrobatics. Until 2013 he also worked on metaphor, imagery, socio-cultural embodiment, and narrative within a cognitive linguistics context, the field in which he took his PhD in 2002.
[11:45am-12:15pm EST / 4:45-5:15pm GMT]
The Challenge of Communicating Artisanal Knowledge
David Kirsh, University of California San Diego (US)
Abstract:
David Kirsh asks “what is involved in developing a theory of human artisanal practices, a theory that recognizes tacit knowledge as the central element?” “This knowledge,” he asserts, “has a decidedly first-person orientation. It is body oriented. Some of it is based on sensory motor knowledge of how to act in a nuanced way. Some of it is less motor and more cognitive, concerning what to attend to, how to see and sensemake in a professional way.” Kirsh will discuss “why this theory is not reducible to an exportable algorithm,” and explain why the “seductive image of downloading a skill in the film The Matrix is a fantasy, unless we pre-adapt the program to the motor and cognitive details of the recipient, and that will be enormously hard.” He also contends that “a theory must include an account of context: the tools and the workshop where mastery is executed.” In this talk, Kirsh will “ sketch what such a theory must include: a) the action repertoire as modified by tool use and skill, b) an account of the relevant cognitive abilities of the stereotypical master practitioner, c) the situation awareness of a master at work, d) a theory of the work environment, including the nature of e) joint activity and shared social space.”
Bio:
David Kirsh is Professor and past department chair of Cognitive Science at UCSD. He received a D. Phil. (Oxford), did post-doctoral work at MIT (AI Lab), and held research and Visiting Professor positions at MIT, Stanford Univ., and Univ College, London. He has written on situated and embodied cognition, how environments can be shaped to simplify/extend cognition, and how space, external representations, our bodies and even manipulable objects become interactive tools for thought. He runs the Interactive Cognition Lab at UCSD. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL, he is Adjunct Prof at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London, and President of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture.
[12:45-2pm EST / 5:45-7pm GMT]
* Moderator – Simon Penny
3D Modeling and Pre-Industrial Craft: The Dominy Workshop and the Horological Gear Cutting Engine
Kayle Avery, University of Delaware (US)
Abstract:
Kayle Avery will describe the making, animation, and interpretation of a horological gear cutting engine for the H.F. Du Pont Winterthur Museum in Wilmington, Delaware as part of their recent exhibit redesign of the Dominy Workshop, where three generations of Dominy family craftsmen from Long Island worked. He will offer a method for virtualizing pre-industrial crafts using open-source software and describe pairing the 3D model with historical research to bring the model to life and connect it with the exhibit. The goal is to create a display that will provide visitors with a richer understanding of the machine’s uses, the skills and knowledge required to operate it, and the family that did so against all difficulty.
Bio:
Kayle R. Avery is a curator, historian, and digital artist working at the intersection of creativity, virtuality, and loss. He is currently a PhD student enrolled in the Hagley Program in the History of Capitalism, Technology, and Culture at the University of Delaware where he researches the history and material culture of imagined worlds. In 2021, Kayle received a M.A. from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. His thesis, “History as Database: Bioshock and the New Design Source,” considered the rapidly changing relationship between digital craftspeople and design source media.
Crafting Beyond the Range of Sensing: Machine Tools as Sensorimotor Prosthetics
Simon Penny, University of California Irvine (US)
Abstract:
ICRN founder Simon Penny will outline the remarkable and rapid development of precision engineering in the UK in the first half of the nineteenth century, elucidating the emergence of new crafts or skilled practices specific to this realm of engineered materials and increasingly precise metrology. He will draw upon perspectives from distributed, enactive and embodied cognition to elucidate some qualities of these new cognitive ecologies, and reflect on the transition from artisanal to technical practices, the increasing use of technical drawing and the increasing mathematization of engineering. Lastly, he will discuss the development of mechanical computing in relation to the development of machine tools and industrial machines.
Bio:
Simon’s longstanding concern for embodied and situated aspects of aesthetic experience, along with a critical analysis of computer culture, has led to a focus on what he refers to as postcognitivist approaches to cognition - subject of his monograph Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art and Embodiment (MIT press 2017). He was director of A Body of Knowledge: Embodied Cognition and the Arts conference UCI 2016. He is professor of Art, Music and Informatics at UCI, associate editor for AI+Society (Springer), guest professor at Nottingham Trent University and co-director and co-originator of ICRN, with Tom Fisher. More at simonpenny.net
Recovering micro-materialities in technological interactivity
Christopher Baber, University of Birmingham (UK)
Abstract:
Chris Baber’s interest is in the Ergonomics of using technology (both the potential for harm to people and the nature of the necessary skills) and in Embodied Cognition. Using technology requires ‘technical reasoning’ through tacit knowledge. Acting is thinking; physical actions are directed towards achieving goals, solving problems, and finding efficient and satisfying solutions to these problems. Tacit knowledge is difficult to verbalize and accounts of skilled action in the historical records are limited (written by people who were observing rather than performing the actions). We need to better capture the micro-materialities of interacting with technologies.
Bio:
Chris is the Chair of Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. An Ergonomist by training and practice, Chris has long been interested in the ways in which the tools and technologies people use can influence their cognitive and physical capabilities. He is particularly interested in the ways in which data collected from sensors (on the person or on tools) can be used to model skilled activity and the ways in which sensemaking is supported or disrupted by digital technologies. This talk develops ideas on how sensemaking can be performed through interactivity and how this can be captured in the notion of micro-materiality.
Tacit Knowledge in Print: Codifying Craft Knowledge in the Enlightenment
Mark Thomas Young, Technical University of Delft (NL)
Abstract:
Towards the end of the seventeenth century, English natural philosophers increasingly ventured into a new space in the effort to acquire technical knowledge; artisans workshops. Their goal of codifying craft knowledge motivated the development of a new literary genre, the history of trades. This presentation explores the social and epistemological challenges faced by philosophers who contributed to this project and shows how, instead of signaling a rehabilitation of the status of artisans, attempts to appropriate the technical knowledge of craftsmen were often coupled with rhetorical strategies designed to reinforce rather than relinquish boundaries between artisans and natural philosophers.
Bio:
Mark Thomas Young is a post-doctoral researcher at the Technical University of Delft. His research covers two fields; the Philosophy of Technology, where he focuses on the use of automating technologies and the History and Philosophy of Science, where he explores instruments, craft practices and tacit knowledge in the early modern period.
[2-3pm EST / 7-8pm GMT]
* Moderator – Tom Fisher, Emily Whitted
Beyond Preservation: Re-evaluating Intangible Cultural Heritage in the UK Ceramic Industry
Neil Brownsword, Staffordshire University (UK)
Abstract:
Since 2003, Neil Brownsword has been engaged in mapping the impact of global economics upon traditional ceramic manufacture in his hometown of Stoke-on-Trent. Using a range of intersecting approaches that include social practice, collaborative performance, object installation and re-enactment, his works have drawn greater critical attention to people and traditional knowledge marginalised by regional industrial change. Whilst advances in automation technology and outsourcing have facilitated greater productivity, once commonplace skills associated with ceramic manufacture have been displaced, threatening the continuation of traditional know-how. This presentation elucidates Brownsword’s artistic projects which re-evaluate intangible cultural heritage within Stoke-on-Trent’s ceramic sector.
Bio:
Neil Brownsword is an artist, researcher and educator who holds a Professorial position in ceramics at Staffordshire University. Brownsword’s artistic research examines the manufacturing histories of North Staffordshire’s ceramic industry, and the effects globalisation has had upon people, place and traditional skills in recent decades. His reactivation of associated post-industrial spaces and endangered industrial crafts has achieved impact internationally via cross-cultural exchange, and curated trans-disciplinary collaborative projects. From 2012 – 2020 he initiated and co-led Topographies of the Obsolete with University of Bergen, which has engaged 97 participants from 13 countries with the former Spode factory and Stoke-on-Trent’s broader post-industrial landscape.
Artist Collaborations and Creativity at John Smedley Ltd/ John Smedley Archive Charitable Trust and the Ruddington Framework Knitter’s Museum
Jim Gravette, Ruddington Framework Knitters Museum (UK)
&
Jane Middleton Smith, John Smedley Ltd. (UK)
Abstract:
The Framework Knitters Museum remains the only site in the world with a training program to preserve the endangered craft of hand frame knitting. The last two years have seen the museum work with artists and craftspeople to help articulate the skill, ingenuity, and resilience that knitters have shown in the last 400 years and to find new applications for this knowledge and craft. This story now unfolds through a series of creative commissions produced by artists and wellbeing groups that engage the visitor with the power and importance of craft and creativity.
Since 1784, John Smedley has used only the very finest fibers to design and manufacture innovative, luxury knitwear, using craft skills that pre-date the Industrial Revolution combining them with the latest technology. The core processes and dedication used in the creation of our knitwear, are the same as those employed by skilled artisans in many other crafts. This paper will outline the evolution of the company’s thinking in terms of working with craftsmen and artists and will showcase how the juxtaposition of our products with those of other craftspeople is being used to promote the brand and grow new audiences.
Jim Grevatte Bio:
Jim Grevatte is manager of the Framework Knitters Museum. He’s worked in the museums and galleries sector for over 20 years in many capacities including learning officer, curator, researcher and advisor. He has extensive experience of leading museum projects particularly where this requires developing new approaches in close consultation with users and museum staff.
Jane Middleton Smith Bio:
Jane Middleton-Smith has had a long and varied career in education, heritage and museums. Since 2009, she has worked as the Archivist for John Smedley Ltd., caring for and cataloguing the collection of this family-owned company, now considered one of the most significant of its kind. Jane has been instrumental in the creation of a Charitable Trust to take the project to the next stage and is currently working towards establishing a museum offering on site. In addition, she is researching and publishing the history of the family, the company and its products – hosiery and knitwear – and establishing the Trust as a ‘go-to’ organization in the world of fashion and textile research.
[3-3:15 pm EST / 8-8:15pm GMT]
Nov. 14, 2021 [Day Two]
[10-10:10am EST / 3-3:10pm GMT]
[10:10-11:10am EST/ 3:10-4:10pm GMT]
* Moderator – Emily Whitted
Training Living History Interpreters: A Continuous Process
Tom Kelleher, Old Sturbridge Village (US)
Abstract:
Living history interpreters do much more than don historical clothing; they also must master and refine a wide array of communication techniques and often rather arcane sets of hand skills as well, to effectively engage the public in meaningful conversations about the past and the present. In this session Tom Kelleher, Historian and Curator of Mechanical Arts at Old Sturbridge Village (the largest outdoor history museum in the Northeast U.S., depicting a rural New England town of the 1830s), will summarize some of the means employed, and challenges encountered, at one living history museum, and how they continue to evolve with changing times and technology.
Bio:
Tom Kelleher is currently Historian, and Curator of Mechanical Arts at Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. In over thirty-seven years there, he has worn many hats both literally and figuratively, working as a costumed historical interpreter, trainer for the cooper shop, supervisor of the mills, coordinator of historic trades, research historian, and program coordinator, including organizing and conducting introductory and on-going staff training. Tom has also researched and developed dozens of historic characters and programs, and presented them, along with teaching a variety of craft skills, communication techniques, and historical subjects at museums, schools, and historical societies around the count
Working Tinplate by Hand and by Machine: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Processes
Karl Schmidt, Dakota Tinworks (US)
Abstract:
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tinsmithing was an industrial craft. Tinsmiths typically worked independently but were dependent on tinplate made in mills and tools made in foundries. Until the early 1800s, when a series of patent tinsmithing machines were invented and introduced, tin work was done entirely by hand, using stakes to shape the metal. New hand-powered machines sped up the process of shaping the metal, particularly for repetitive operations. In this video demonstration, Karl Schmidt, using antique tools, will discuss the process of working the tinplate both by hand and by machine, highlighting the multi-sensory nature of this work.
Bio:
A retired history professor, Karl Schmidt is owner of Dakota Tinworks (www.dakotatinworks.com), where he makes and sells reproduction historical tinware, using authentic materials such as hot-dipped tinplate, shaped with antique tinsmithing tools. Karl trained with master tinsmith William McMillen at Historic Eastfield Village in New York. His detailed understanding of the work of 19th century tinsmithing comes from actually working in the field, making reproductions and studying antique tinware for clues to what was produced and how it was produced. His work is informed by examining 'study pieces' (original tinware), as well as through research in museums and archives.
One Farmer's Past, Another Farmer's Future
Peter Watson, Howell Living History Farm and the Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums (ALHFAM) (US)
Abstract:
In this presentation, ALHFAM Skills and Knowledge Database founder Pete Watson, now co-chair of ALHFAM's Skills Training and Preservation Initiative, will introduce the strategy that the organization is using to help historians manage the living—and often intangible—culture surrounding the objects in a material collection. This management extends beyond the preservation of the objects themselves and into the preservation of the skills that give them purpose.
Bio:
Pete Watson is the Director of Howell Living History Farm, a 220-acre heritage site operated by the Mercer County Park Commission, near Titusville, New Jersey. The farm preserves the history of a 280-year-old New Jersey farmstead interpreted to the years 1890-1910; it hosts tours and interactive learning programs for 65,000 visitors annually. Pete is chairman of the New Jersey Living History Council, executive committee member of the Association for International Agricultural Museums (AIMA), and Past President of the Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums (ALHFAM). He is the co-chair of ALHFAM's Skills Training & Preservation Committee and the organization's strategic initiative to teach and promote the conservation of skills. His interest in researching and sharing skills, including those that can be adapted for present day and future applications, began during his work as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, where he helped farmers introduce and improve animal powered farming systems with support from local and national agricultural extension services.
[11:10am-11:40pm EST / 4:10-4:40pm GMT]
From Habit to Behavior: The Historical Influence of Two Different Attempts to Explain the Adaptability of Human Actions
Daniel Black, Monash University (AUS)
Abstract:
In this talk, Daniel Black will “compare ‘habit’ and ‘behavior’, two ways of conceptualizing patterns of human action that have influenced attempts to manage working bodies.” In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he argues, “responses to the ills of industrialization were importantly informed by the concept of habit, whose emphasis on processes of shaping and adaptation allowed for the possibility of self-directed personal change over time. During the twentieth century, however, habit was supplanted by behavior, a concept founded on mechanistic principles of cause and effect and the probabilistic analysis of human action, which broke human action down into discrete fragments of time.”
Bio:
Daniel Black is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University, Australia. His research focuses on embodied relationships with technology. His most recent book is Digital interfacing: Action and perception through technology.
[12:10-1:10pm EST / 5:10-6:10pm GMT]
* Moderator – Tom Fisher, Marla Miller
Jacquard Heads and Fulling Mills: How Machines and Craft Skills Unite in Early Industrial Textile Production
Justin Squizzero, The Burroughs Garrett +
Eliza West, Textile Historian (US)
Abstract:
Textiles, often perceived as the bellwether of industrialization, are also a nexus for exploring how early mechanization was used in tandem with craft knowledge and hand skills. In this presentation, historical hand weaver Justin Squizzero will speak about his work recreating the work of 19th century fancy weavers, working with - and within - his loom, and textile historian Eliza Will will detail her work to re-embody the craft knowledge of early 19th century American woolen finishers. The two will then be joined by Dr. Marla Miller for a discussion on how practitioners are able to access different types of industrial craft knowledge, and how that knowledge is further tempered through work.
Bio:
Justin Squizzero is a handweaver based in Newbury, Vermont who recreates historic textiles on 18th and 19th-century equipment. Squizzero’s textile training began as a child under his grandmother, followed by an apprenticeship to Kate Smith and Norman Kennedy of Marshfield, Vermont. Having previously worked at living history museums including Plimoth Patuxet Museums and Coggeshall Farm Museum, Justin returned to weaving full-time in 2013. Through his business The Burroughs Garret, he weaves historic reproductions and figured coverlets using a 19th-century Jacquard machine on an 18th-century handloom, and teaches British/American handweaving at The Marshfield School of Weaving.
Eliza West specializes in understanding the skills and craft processes which have created
our made world. Though she loves all materials, she finds herself always returning to her first love: textiles. Eliza has an MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. Prior to earning that degree, she worked as the head of costuming at Fort Ticonderoga, where she used clothing and tailoring as a lens through which to teach early American history. Currently Eliza works for the Lost Mural Project, whose mission is to conserve and interpret a unique 1910 synagogue mural in Burlington, Vermont.
Cognition and Wood
Hugh Crawford, Georgia Institute of Technology (US)
Abstract:
In this talk, High Crawford will look at “practices occupying the place between traditional notions of craft and industrial production.” In building construction, he notes, “dimensional lumber standardizes materials, processes, and workers, yet on-site it must be worked. Some tools scale production, increase precision and force, and also are a form of computation.” This paper will discuss that nexus via the barn-beam auger. From the 1880s, this tool bores mortises in large timbers. Where a framing the chisel effects one measurement—width—the auger regulates width, depth, angle, and the gestures of the operator, and helps show how tools that partially automate shaping material are part of a larger cognitive envelope.
Bio:
T. Hugh Crawford is an amateur woodworker, a long-distance trekker, and an Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he teaches in the Science, Technology, and Culture program.
[1:10-2:10pm EST / 6:10-7:10pm GMT]
* Moderator – Marla Miller, Emily Whitted
Oliver Betts, National Railway Museum (UK)
Dr. Oli Betts is the Research Lead for the National Railway Museum where he helps develop the academic work of the museum. A historian of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Britain, whose primary research focus has been on the relationship between space, social class, and lived experience in Modern Britain and beyond. Deeply passionate about working-class and industrial history, he is currently Co-Investigator on ‘Piston, Pen and Press’, and as part of this AHRC-funded project is developing links with literature scholars, creative writers and museum professionals.
Kirstie Blair, University of Strathclyde (UK)
Kirstie Blair’s primary area of research is Victorian literature, particularly poetry and poetics, working-class writing, literature and religion, Scottish literature, and literature and medicine. She also researches and teaches in the field of children's literature from the nineteenth century to the present day. She has published two monographs on Victorian poetry, and edited or co-edited two essay collections, plus a variety of articles and book chapters. She is currently completing a monograph on working-class verse culture in Victorian Scotland and has just edited an anthology of Scottish Victorian newspaper verse, The Poets of the People's Journal.
Seth Bruggeman, Temple University (US)
Seth C. Bruggeman is an Associate Professor of History at Temple University where he also directs the Center for Public History. A graduate of the College of William & Mary’s PhD program in American Studies, Bruggeman studies the role of memory in public life, and particularly how Americans have used objects—in museums, monuments, historic, sites, and other commemorative spaces—to exert control over how we understand the past. His courses concern American cultural history, material culture, memory, and public history. His books include Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022), Commemoration: The American Association for State and Local History Guide (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Born in the USA: Birth and Commemoration in American Public Memory (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), and Here, George Washington Was Born: Memory, Material Culture, and the Public History of a National Monument (University of Georgia Press, 2008).
Amy Glowacki, Springfield Armory National Historic Site (US)
Amy is a 27-year career employee of the National Park Service. Currently she is the Program Manager for Interpretation and Education at Springfield Armory National Historic Site and the soon to be established Coltsville National Historical Park. She served as the Northeast Region 1 Youth and Volunteer Program Manager. During her twenty years at Lowell National Historical Park she focused on education and interpretation, before shifting to volunteer, and youth employment programs management. She holds a Master of Arts degree in public history from Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis and a Master of Science degree in resource interpretation from Stephen F. Austin State University.
[2:10-2:30 pm EST / 7:10-7:30pm GMT]
* Simon Penny, Emily Whitted, Tom Fisher, Marla Miller
The Industrial Crafts Research Network (ICRN) is an international, interdisciplinary research network of academics, museum professionals, designers and practitioners dedicated to the study of and communication of skill and knowledge within industrial crafts. ICRN focuses on skilled practices specific to industrial contexts. It deploys ethnography and leverages the theoretical perspectives of embodied, enactive and distributed cognition to understand these practices in the context of tools, materials, procedures and working environments. ICRN publishes research about these understandings and applies them in developing exhibits and displays that communicate ‘know-how’, using sensor, robotic and interactive technologies.
ICRN focuses on the human experience of industrial crafts, particularly their cognitive dimensions, drawing from paradigms of embodied, enactive, situated and distributed cognition, to inform a range of novel theoretical, methodological and design questions. New methodologies are needed to make these practices accessible to analysis. An ethnographic approach is viable where experts survive, but where they don’t, we rely on literature and other ephemera (surviving objects, designs, floorplans, managerial records) to interpolate bodily practices. Documenting skilled practice is particularly urgent in the context of deindustrialization, as contemporary audiences are decreasingly familiar with skilled industrial labor and many industrial heritage sites experience difficulty preserving skill in their communities and communicating those skills to their public audiences.
This wide category includes a vast number of skilled material practices that emerged alongside industrial technologies; they are distinct from both pre-industrial and studio crafts. Industrial craft work arose in response to new materials, power sources and labor processes, as part of new industries. They are evident in textile production, ceramics and engineering, from precision machining to foundry work, among many other settings. Industrial craft skills involve a greater degree of mechanical mediation between worker and material than in their artisanal predecessors and in many cases this mediation involves some of the cognitive work of production being embedded in the machinery. This last characteristic makes them a little-studied aspect of the development of the digital technologies that characterize our times.
The goal of this event is to build an interdisciplinary discursive environment and community, with the aim of identifying platforms for future work. It will bring together industrial craft practitioners, museum professionals, historians, designers, anthropologists, cognitive scientists and others to address the questions outlined above. Given the international nature of the ICRN’s work and caution for the health and safety of presenters and attendees, this symposium will be an entirely virtual event held on November 13-14, 2021. Each day’s content will be scheduled to best accommodate the multiple time zones of presenters and attendees. All presentations will be captured on video and disseminated free online and archived in the ICRN website. Papers will be collected and archived in University of California’s eScholarship open-source online publishing platform. As the content of the symposium clarifies, ICRN will pursue the potential for a special issue in a journal or other collective publication, but this is not a requirement of presenting at the symposium.
The ICRN is grateful to our sponsoring institutions for support in mounting ths event: Claire Trevor School of the Arts, University of California, Irvine. Public History Program, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University.
Simon Penny: Director (ICRN co-director)
Emily Whitted: Assistant Director
Symposium board: Marla Miller, Kirstie Blair, Tom Fisher (ICRN co-director)
Sookyung Cho: webmaster
Allison Smith and Kelly Donahey: Zoom tech
Evan Stanfield: Graphic design
For all symposium or ICRN inquiries or to join our mailing list, please email IndustrialCraftsNetwork@gmail.com Sign Up Mailing List