Photo: Pulse by Markus Kison (DE)
According to the participants of Pixelache09 Digital Craftsmanship seminar, Digital Craftsmanship involves:
- Thinking with your hands
- Developing digital media cookbooks and recipes
- Getting different people to share same focus, taking steps in the areas where they are not comfortable
- Contributing back to the community of teachers
- Being cross-over artists and designers, enough skills to 99% of things needed
- Allowing non-specialists to enter, make technology itself culturally diverse
- Building spaces for learning that reflect the culture that we have online
The discussion involved people from UdK Berlin, Culture Lab Newcastle, Taik Media Lab, Konstfack Stockholm, Kitchen Budapest and other schools/labs. It was evident that digital craftsmanship is difficult to compare with traditional master-apprentice relationship. It seems to be more about a specific approach (or one could even say attitude) to working with digital media. All the basic building blocks (physical parts, hardware, software) are kept open for modifying and one should have enough skills and confidence to work on all different aspects of the project. A key for successful learning and development is to be connected to a network of peers and knowledge / resources that can be shared.