We are all makers

This is a lovely TED talk by Dale Dougherty discussing the innate desire to make things he thinks is within us all. He shows lots of people doing stuff just because they can, they're enthusiasts and they like doing it.

What is interesting to me is what he sees as the importance of the social aspect of it all. That by going to events and meeting with other makers they show what they have made, share knowledge and go on to produce more and better things.

The enthusiasm they have and their ability to produce amazing things using low-tech solutions is something that would be great to see within more of my students!

Gangsta rap about cardboard boxes

This is great - a gangsta rap in praise of kids doing creative things with cardboard boxes and toilet roll tubes ... yes, really!

via BoingBoing

Video concealing complexity

I have often observed that film of a skilled practitioner can easily conceal rather than reveal the complexity of what they do. I was just sent a lovely example of this in the form of this short video showing how to fold a shirt:

When I actually tried to copy what she was doing, with some help from a couple of friends, we could not figure it out at all until we found another video where we could follow the narrative in English (rather than Japanese). However, we still had to stop, restart and rewind the video several times until we got it.

In my experience of interpreting craft practice, video is great for giving a quick overview, inspiring someone to want to do it. However, the actual 'how to' is most efficiently put across with a few of simple line drawings to explain the crucial bits.

Craft interpretation

When I was researching for my PhD and experimenting with interpretation, I found that a well-annotated drawing was what the learners responded to best. Photographs helped, but somehow gave too much information or the view was never from quite the right angle.

At that stage I had a hang-up about drawing which I have found many people suffer from. They feel that if they can't easily produce and exact replication of something, they can't draw, and give up. However, it is a learned technique and, given a little help from a few fellow students, I found I could sketch what I needed.Nowadays I can quite quickly produce drawings like the one above using Adobe Illustrator, but always start by sketching by hand to get a feel for the perspective that will be needed and how it will work in with the text. 

These pictures show my partner Robin Wood's latest development; a device for holding a bowl whilst hand-carving which he has called the BowlMate. He developed it for learners to use whilst he is teaching and there has been so much interest from the wider woodworking community he wanted to publish plans, which I spent an enjoyable day yesterday doing. 

You can see the results of my work on his web site here and also download a PDF here.

A vision of students today

I am not sure this video tells me anything I didn't already know and it certainly offers no solutions, but I LOVE the way it has been made. I also shows interesting use of Google documents to gather student opinion and experiences. (My thanks for fellow Open University tutor Derek Jones for posting that on our course forum.)

More understanding of "the crit"

A small 'aha' moment about what is happening during "the crit" I described earlier - two things:

• The teacher(s) assess the student's work, tell them what is good about it and where it can be improved. (That bit is obvious!)
• The student experiences this process for their own work and sees it happening to other students. In this way they learn about how to critique generally; the sorts of criteria their work is judged on, things which tend to be praised, things which tend to be frowned upon, different ways of solving different problems. (That was my 'aha' moment!)

In this way they both learn how to improve their current work and how to critically evaluate their future work. Individual feedback wouldn't be as effective, being part of a group is vital, but students don't seem to understand group work. There is a constant complaint from Lecturers that students do not turn up to organised teaching sessions, but are constantly clamoring for individual attention.

Again, during the H&S training session I observed, the small group of students who attended got to see a range of common problems and solutions to them which would have been much more limited if they had been alone. They clearly did not understand this and had a tendency to wander off or be looking elsewhere whilst the others had their go.

I wonder if simply making this explicit to the students would make a difference, or if something more sophisticated with group work and peer support needs to be done?

Dissecting a chicken

I have vivid memories of a first aid training video which I watched around 15 years ago. Why? Well, interspersed between the clips about how to check someone's pulse, put them in the recovery position, and so on were clips of a chef using a large meat cleaver to joint a chicken. Each time we returned to the kitchen he was using the tool calmly and skillfully, but this was a video about first aid and the suspense was dreadful ... and yes, eventually the inevitable happened!

This was brought back to me because I spent the day watching and thinking about basic Heath & Safety training. In my current research at Sheffield Hallam University I am looking at how basic skills are taught in the Design Studios and how web 2.0 technologies could be used to support independent learning. H&S training is so important, done properly it will help prevent students hurting themselves, damaging costly machinery, and ruining their creative work, but mention it and people glaze over.

The three students who did turn up this morning I think had a really engaging and useful session. The technicians showed them so many little handy hints over and above the statutory safety stuff and they gained really valuable experience using the equipment. However, it was not efficient use of staff time and the other students won't be allowed to use the workshops until they too have had their training.

This feels like a good area to tackle in my research (there's funding for it!) and I am now thinking about how I could make it appear more relevant and interesting. I'm very squeamish so I don't think I'll be shooting it as a horror movie, but it is food for thought!

Craft learning and "the crit"

"The crit" is central to traditional design education and I sat in on one this week as part of my current research at Sheffield Hallam University. It brought back memories of doing it myself, it is a fairly scary experience, and it made me think about the Japanese craftsmen's apprenticeship experiences described in Edo craftsmen : master artisans of old Tokyo.

Firstly let me describe "the crit" for the uninitiated; it's a little like X Factor or Britain's Got Talent, but the audience are also putting on the show, they are students each showing their latest work. One by one they go to the front of the room and show images of their work on PowerPoint and hand around things they have made. The 'judges' are a group of lecturers who sit around a table making notes, discussing, asking the students questions and offering advice.

It is only three weeks until the students hand in their final projects and they need help knowing what to do to get it finished satisfactorily. Quite a few haven't made good use of the Easter holidays and are going to have a busy few weeks. The atmosphere is a bit tense, the lecturers at times have to be quite blunt to the students about their work, but whilst they are tough, they are also very fair and very supportive. There feels to be a close bond between the lecturers and students. At the end of the session another student drops into the room to give a little box to one of the lecturers; it contains a cup-cake and pinned to the top is a handwritten thank-you note!

Whilst the students go through this many times during their three years at University, the old craftsmen in Toyko had often started at a very young age and continued under the critical eye of their master for many years. For some it was clearly a positive experience, but others spoke with perplexing pride of the fact that their masters never praised their work and they were reluctant to praise their own work themselves. I can't decide if it is false modesty or a genuine feeling that they ll never be as good as their masters. Either way, it doesn't strike me as healthy.

This somehow joins up with my other major project with Open University where I have been part of the team writing a new course in Design Thinking which is entirely delivered online and all the students study it remotely. I am tutoring one of the first batches of students through the course and also moderator on the student forum so party to a wide range of online interactions. In this situation it seems to be quite difficult to "crit" the students and even getting them to do critical analysis of their own work is not easy. This too is not healthy!

I feel that for online / distance learning to be successful there needs to be a way of getting the right sort of "crit" into the arena. It needs to fall into the 'tough but fair' category, which partly comes from the attitude of the teachers (those I observed clearly worked well together as a group), and partly from their relationship with the students. Fostering all this online is very different to dealing with face-to-face relationships and so much of it falls outside the scope of the sorts of learning resources I have been designing, however it is clearly vital to their success. Hmmmm ...

via my kesurokai blog

Traditional craft apprenticeship

As a great admirer of traditional craftsmanship, I am saddened when craftsmen come to the end of their working practice without having passed their unique skills on. However, the more I read about traditional apprenticeship, the more I can see why this has happened and cannot wish for a return to the old ways of teaching.

I just finished reading "Edo Craftsmen, master artisans of old Tokyo" and of the twelve featured craftsmen only two appear both to have long-term viable businesses and trained apprentices to pass on their skills. Part of the problem is the increasing accessibility of cheaper, mass-produced alternatives to whatever they make. However, many craftsmen manage to market their produce in such conditions by selling a small volume at higher prices to more discerning customers. The failure is in part caused by a lack of younger people coming into the crafts with the vision to exploit such markets.

The descriptions in the book of the craftsmen's experience of traditional apprenticeship reveals both the rigour and the modern-day drawbacks of the system. They would start very young and spend several years doing menial tasks whilst observing the breadth of the practice, then gradually take on small tasks followed by increasingly complex ones as they grew older and more able. The emphasis was not on teaching, but learning; observing and imitating, rather than being shown how.

With a good master and a willing student this clearly works well. In her study of the Japanese ceramicist Shoji Hamada, Susan Peterson describes the relationship between deshi (apprentice) and master: “To learn as a deshi means to submit one’s self to the master, to leave one’s own self, to become ‘in’ the master. This ‘surrender’ to the master does not mean just blind imitation, but gives a spiritual discipline and the opportunity to absorb a skill into one’s bones.”

However, it is a system that relies on a huge amount of trust and non-verbal communication between master and apprentice, and that is not always going to work well. Whilst a very strict master might ensure that very high standards of craft skills are passed from one generation to the next, it might well be at the cost of creativity and the ability of the younger person to see new opportunities and develop new markets. Given also that young people stay in school much longer nowadays, I cannot see a traditional craft apprenticeship being a very appealing option.

The future, however is not all bleak, I think there are craftsmen who have adapted to new ways of teaching and also multimedia offers huge potential to record and transmit quite complex skills. In my last research project I worked with traditional Sheffield knife makers and made an online resource which was successfully used by a variety of learners. The wonders of the internet mean information travels fast and those who wish to learn in this way can readily access such resources and conduct their own apprenticeships in their own way.

via my Kesurokai blog

Kesurokai

Kesurokai was started in Japan in 1995 by the highly respected temple carpenter Sugimura San. His aim was to bring together different craftsmen who normally work remotely to exchange traditional craft techniques and knowledge.

The events were brought to Europe through Hannes Schnelle, a German carpenter who spent a significant period of time working in Japan, becoming Sugimura San’s last apprentice before semi-retirement. In 2005 and 2007 he organised Kesurokai in Germany bringing together craftsmen from a wide range of European countries along with a delegation of Japanese craftsmen led by Sugimura San.

In 2010 Chisana (little) Kesurokai will see a return trip, with a group of thirty European craftsmen travelling to Japan to work with their Japanese compatriots building a traditional tea house. I shall accompany them, both to observe as part of my research into the transfer of craft knowledge, and to document the event on film.

The peapod

I recently had a meeting with a small group of lecturers from some of our different design degree courses to discuss possible applications for my research to help with their teaching. Jane from our fashion design course highlighted the problem of many students lacking very basic sewing skills when they start. They struggle to undertake what should be simple making projects and there is limited time within the current curriculum for this level of teaching. John from our furniture design course said they had just the same problem.

As the discussion progressed, Jeff from metalwork & jewellery came up with "the peapod" as an analogy:


So, we have this idea that students need a repertoire of basic skills, that's the pod. We need to identify a set of key skills to teach them as a basis (the peas) and these will provide the students with a foundation from which they themselves can expand and fill out their repertoire.

It sounds like potentially a good application for a multimedia learning resource and I think it will fit in well with my next research proposal. I also very much liked Jeff's concept of "peer leakage" and will have to work that one in somewhere too!

Vacuum casting

The folding knives research project demonstrated that well motivated independent learners working in physical isolation but supported by an online community could acquire complex new skills and use them in creative ways. This project applied our existing methods of eliciting and representing skills to a process used by undergraduate design students in University workshops and resulted in the production of an online resource and a set of proposals for how such resources could be developed in a more widespread manner.

In the creative disciplines, where learning is often based on practical projects, the craft skills of each discipline are both a crucial prerequisite for successful learning, and a learning problem in themselves. This tends to create a complex situation in which teachers and technicians are supporting both skills learning and intellectual development at the same time. While this can be very productive, pressures on resources can lead to concentration on skills at the expense of advanced thinking.

The vacuum casting process was chosen as a pilot project to test the feasibility of producing multimedia learning resources to enable students to work more independently in the workshops. A series of workshop sessions were arranged to enable a technician with expertise in the process to teach an expert learner, one of the design lecturers.

These were observed and video recorded by myself working in collaboration with the expert learner to generate prototype learning materials. These were developed and tested by two further learners who had no prior knowledge of the process and ultimately made into an online resource which would allow students to preview materials supported by selected video then print out worksheets for use in the workshop.

The online resource developed during this research is available here

This research was carried out with Prof Chris Rust and funded by Shefield Hallam University.

Whittling away

So, before I talk more about craft knowledge I think it is important to say that this is not just based on theory and observation. My own craft is Scandinavian-style greenwood carving, with axes and knives and I primarily carve spoons, a craft I learned with friends about fifteen years ago.

The major appeal is that it is a very accessible craft. The raw material is small diameter branchwood, often prunings from my own garden or waste from a local tree surgeon. The tools are inexpensive and a special workshop is not necessary, just a large log to act as a chopping block. I do most of my carving in my front room in front of the fire. At the end of the evening most of the shavings get scooped into the log burner and the hoover quickly removes the rest from the carpet!

A ladle in cherry wood showing my distinctive tooled finish - I use no sandpaper or other abrasives.

Folding knives

This research was carried out in association with Prof Chris Rust at Sheffield Hallam University and was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.

This project focused on the skills of traditional folding knife makers in Sheffield, once a significant part of the cities famous metalworking industries but now declined to just a few master craftsmen. In our research we undertook case studies with two of these craftsmen, a blade grinder and a folding knife maker, to demonstrate the tacit nature of such craft skill and reveal the methods we used for elicitation and interpretation.

Traditional Sheffield folding knives

Contemporary knifemaker and co-resercher Dr Grace Horne acted as an expert learner, working alongside the craftsmen, observed by myself as designer, and then through experimental making and collaboration together prototype learning materials were generated. The materials were tested and developed into an online resource using a small group of learners who come from a new generation of creative metalworkers whose interests lie in adapting traditional skills to new craft practices.

Knives made by Grace Horne

As a result we were able to demonstrate that the principles for craft transmission developed in previous research could be applied to a specific example of craft knowledge with useful results for the learners. We also developed a more robust methodology for the elicitation and design development methods needed for this form of design practice.

Knives made by a learner using the online resource

Multimedia outputs
FoldingKnives: a public version of the learning materials developed during the project.
TransmittingCraft: online documentation of the project; its background, the work undertaken and outcomes, including video and images from the research.
YouTube channel hosting video clips used during the research.

In this video Russell White makes a folding knife at Taylor’s Eye Witness, one of the last Sheffield manufacturers to still make folding knives.

Expert learners

When I started working with craft practitioners, I started with ones I knew. They were all woodworkers because I’m a woodworker myself and by the end of my PhD studies I realised that, whilst what I was doing was successful, I was relying on my own skills to interpret the skills of others. To make my methods more generalisable I needed to work through someone else in an area unfamiliar to myself.

Inspired by some of the learners I had worked with, I realised the probable solution was working with an expert learner; that is one who is self confident, self motivated and already is possession of a useful set of skills relevant to those to be learned. I then gained AHRC funding to work with just such a person; contemporary knife maker and fellow researcher Dr Grace Horne.

We spent two years working with some of the last traditional knife makers in Sheffield, a city once famed for its knife making industries. During this time Grace worked alongside the master craftsmen whilst I video recorded, then we worked together to develop learning materials. Grace undertook experimental making, I designed experimental interpretation, and we worked with a group of enthusiastic amateur makers to develop on online learning resource.

The expert learner can learn with minimal instruction. They have the advantage that they have enough skill to learn through observation without needing 'bridges' as they are operating in the zone circled below:

Our research showed that, as the knowledge was recently acquired and the expert learner was consciously engaged with the elicitation process, she was able to rapidly adapt her understanding of it to improve transmission to the learners. Hence, she was able to develop the bridges needed by the novice learners to start developing their skills:

A key part of this process was the expert learner’s interaction with myself, the
designer and the developing learning resource. Through a process of video recording and summarising events using drawings and flow charts, I was able to assist with articulation of the knowledge and develop interpretation suitable for transmitting the knowledge.

Learning resources

The framework I have develped for learning resources offers a layered structure to support learners through different phases of learning.

Introductory: a passive, observational phase where the learner gains an overview of what is to be done and is introduced to any key skills or strategies.

Guidance: an active, participatory phase where the learner is guided step by step through the basic process and gains an understanding of any common errors.

Development: repetition is necessary to gain mastery of the skill and this is supported by encouraging the learner to evaluate their outcome, identify and solve problems, and offering them a greater depth of material to explore.

Video remains an important medium but is mostly used in the first and last phases; for contextualising each stage of the process and for more advanced learning where the learner has the ability to form their own interpretation.

In the central phase still images, in particular line drawings, are key to providing the interpretation necessary for learners to engage with the activity. The step by step guidance provides the bridges for the novice to start to tap into the skills of the expert and learn to read moving images, whether live demonstration or video, for themselves.

What's in a name?

I started as a web designer in the 1990s when the internet was taking off, then my research led me into so much more than just web sites so I called myself a multimedia designer, and now it’s interactive media designer as my focus is on learning resources. However, even that doesn’t quite fit …

My research focuses on the design of interactive media to support craft skills learning, but what I do is far more about people than interactive media design. I soon discovered that by far the greatest challenge in my research was the basic eliciting of knowledge needed to perform such complex skills.

It is easy to point a video camera at someone to record their activities, but for the novice this is of limited use. A demonstration by a highly skilled practitioner actually conceals the complexity of their practice because so much of their knowledge is tacit. It is deeply internalised and they respond instinctively to subtle cues that even they are unaware of. It is little wonder that the new learner struggles to imitate what they observe in video.

So, video is fundamental to my practice, but equally so are a set of elicitation techniques aimed at finding what the novice needs to know to get started and make progress. Key to this is the concept of bridges and the use of expert learners, but more about those later …