What Does ‘Handmade’ Mean Today?

Abstract

The phrase ‘designer maker’ is being employed increasingly in the contemporary craft and design marketplace, especially among those seeking to make a full-time living from their practice. It marks those makers who may undertake original design and prototyping themselves, but who, in order to scale up their production in ways not always possible for a solo hand maker, outsource some or all subsequent aspects of production to other makers or machine-assisted manufacturing processes. But despite widespread use of this phrase, some makers remain keen to manage the scale of their business. As a result, many of those craftspeople and designer makers we spoke to who were in a position to scale-up their production while stepping back from the making themselves were reluctant to go down this path. Elsewhere we have explored these issues in terms of balancing making income with quality of life, as well as in terms of the desire to be a maker, to be doing the creative work oneself, and thus not ‘get too big’ with the added pressures and responsibilities of being an employer (Luckman, Cultural Trends, 27(5), 313–326 (2018)). In this chapter, we home in more on what upscaling and outsourcing reveals about competing definitions of, and attitudes towards, the idea of ‘the handmade’. We also explore attitudes towards handmaking versus other forms of production, including outsourcing and the use of digital tools.