craftsman culture Navigating the site:
Arnold Pacey
How does the "Eureka effect" contribute to our understanding of invention, the driver of technological complexity?
Is the development of craft culture responsible for complex changes in designs?
Chapter 3: Meaning in the Hands
"the secret of inventiveness is to fill the mind and the imagination with the context of the problem and then relax and think of something else for a change."
"...subconscious can use to work on the problem... hand up .... a picture of what the solution may be."
solution to problems: tool complexes are one of several a means of solving problems.
adaptation -- computer screen (TV), keyboard (typewriter), clock (analog).
exaptation -- Archimedes principle of displacement.
p. 59
tactile refers to the knowledge we ascertain from or obtain from touching things around us.
tacit refers something (an intent or belief) that is understood without a need for explicit directions, explanations or spoken instructions.
The sense of form
"The ability to recognize patterns of one kind or another is important in a variety of disciplines, and may be compared with the ability of a good engineer to evaluate structural design 'by eye'. What is needed...is a sense of form derived from an accumulation of visual memories of how particular structures may look in a great variety of contexts, both adverse and favorable."
pp. 61-62.
"The process operates to a large extent intuitively and unconsciously...."
p. 62.
for more on Sense of Form see here
Using all the senses
"In preindustrial circumstances much practical knowledge may have been gained through the hands. ...Workmanship depended on handling materials, as well as on vision
"artisans may have been thinking with their hands."
p. 67.
Artists and Alchemists
"Real practical work with furnaces and stills"
p. 70.
Paracelsus, retained links to craft technology and tradition of formal learning: hands and mind together in a sort of self dialogue.
pp. 70-71.
Ellul the critic of our over-reliance on automated tools.
From Alchemy to information technology
Jacques Ellul "remarked that man had 'lost contact with the primary element of life and environment, the basic material out of which he makes what he makes. He no longer knows wood or iron...."
p.73.
"Zuboff comments that the operators were controlling a complex process very skillfully using tacit knowledge that 'they were unable to describe verbally.' They were practicing a craft skill --even a form of alchemy-- that depend on the immediacy of sense experience."
p.74.
"today, less awareness of sense experience is involved."
"awareness is still an important part of human experience of technology."
p.75.
see Technology as a disturbance.
| Meaning in Technology, 2001 | 
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1. Music, Sources of Technology
6. Exploration, Invention and the Remaking of Nature
Tools of Toil: what to read. Tools are historical building blocks of technology.
Postman–Tech | Postman–Television | Pursell | Pacey–Meaning | Pacey | Taylor | Head | Tenner | Eberhart | Snow | Kaku
