From “The art of repair: Keiko Ikoma’s subtle kintsugi“

The growth of the “care economy” contains the promise of new forms of craft practice.

In “Smash Rooms” you can pay $US 60 to destroy a printer with a sledgehammer. All those pent-up frustrations with paper jams and toner placements can be released on a defenceless piece of technology. The joy in this destruction is based on the insentience of the machine. No one will feel sorry for the printer.

You can imagine the emotional release experienced during this wonton destruction. It’s a stark contrast with the expanding domain of care in everyday life. Previously, care pertained to physical safety, such as mandatory seat belts. New practices have emerged recently, such as “self-care” and “safe spaces”. We are increasingly nervous about loss of control.

There has been some pushback. Jonathon Haidt has argued that the obsessive concern for children’s safety has deprived them of the necessary experience of adventure and risk. Helicopter parenting can produce timid children who prefer the anonymity of video games to social interactions on the street.

But there is a positive dimension to the new focus on care. It parallels the turn towards repair and maintenance as a necessary counter to the unbridled production of new stuff. This is a key message of the Value of Craft Report to be published on 22 November: “The World Needs a Hand”. What this report argues is that the exclusive focus on “man the maker”, or homo faber, needs reform. The world increasingly needs homo curare, the person who cares.

This call comes at a time when the World Economic Forum has just published a white paper on the “care economy“. Much of this discussion has been about care as a service, particularly with an increasingly ageing population. There is also a feminist push to formalise the domestic work done by mostly mothers.

But care is a two-sided phenomenon. As well as being cared for, humans seek also to have something to care for. This is particularly evident in the scale of pet care and ownership. The pet industry has grown by 450% in the last 25 years. I confess to being part of this, spending at least an hour of every busy day walking my black labrador. Sure, she loves the daily sniffathon, but what does she give back in return? She doesn’t help me answer the 100s of emails waiting for me when we return from the walk. The same of course extends to caring for plants in our gardens, not to mention the extraordinary effort we can put into looking after children, at home, school and the world.

Feeling useful to others is a key to our well-being. Meanwhile, technology is making us redundant. Homo curare is now being challenged by artificial intelligence. Many domains of life that previously required the “human touch” are being automated. Humans in call centres are now training the bots who will replace them. Even at the bedside, there is now Poe the AI Story Bear, a talking stuffed toy that children can program themselves to generate unique stories. What do we care?

But there’s a silver lining. This replacement of our productive powers helps identify our particular human capacities. Thomas Friedman argues that we are on the verge of a “human economy” whose value lies in our emotional faculties, not just intellectual capacity. He quotes Seidman:

… our highest self-conception needs to be redefined from “I think, therefore I am” to “I care, therefore I am; I hope, therefore I am; I imagine, therefore I am. I am ethical, therefore I am. I have a purpose, therefore I am. I pause and reflect, therefore I am.”

From this, Friedman predicts the rise of “Stempathy” jobs that bridge technology with human needs, “like the doctor who can extract the best diagnosis from IBM’s Watson on cancer and then best relate it to a patient.”

What’s the implication of this for the crafts? In the last couple of years, we’ve seen the rise of “craft therapy”. Lauren Leone has argued for the key role of craft in art therapy. Meanwhile, the Danish author Anne Kirketerp has been promoting lectures and publications on craft psychology. To a degree, this is formalising what is already an established “therapeutic” value of craft in personal hobbies. The sense of mastery and achievement has a direct positive effect on well-being.

The increased demand for this is already felt in evening pottery classes that are regularly booked out. However, there is also potential to expand this area of craft practice into more areas of life. We can envisage a “maker in residence” in an organisation that offers a model of work that can inspire others to exercise greater patience and deliberateness in the work they do. The material sensibility is increasingly needed as our work becomes more and more abstracted.

The rage against the machine in “smash rooms” is not necessarily a raw outlet of aggression. We can see it as anger at being deprived of agency—of no longer being useful. What were meant to be servants have become our new masters. It’s not enough just to be cared for, we need to be the agents of care ourselves.

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