Benedict Evans
Stepping out of the firehose
An Article by Benedict EvansIn 1800, if you’d said that you wanted something ‘made by hand’, that would be meaningless - everything was handmade. But half a century later, it could be a reaction against the age of the machine - of steam and coal-smoke and ‘dark satanic mills.’ The Arts and Crafts movement proposed slow, hand-made, imperfect craft in reaction to mass-produced ‘perfection’ (and a lot of other things besides). A century later this is one reason I’m fascinated by the new luxury goods platforms LVMH and Kering, or indeed Supreme. How do you mass-manufacture, mass-market and mass-retail things whose entire nature is supposedly that they’re individual?
...we keep building tools, but also we let go. That’s part of the progression - Arts and Crafts was a reaction against what became the machine age, but Bauhaus and futurism embraced it. If the ‘metaverse’ means anything, it reflects that we have all grown up with this now, and we’re looking at ways to absorb it, internalise it and reflect it in our lives and in popular culture - to take ownership of it. When software eats the world, it’s not software anymore.
COVID and cascading collapses
An Article by Benedict Evans
Gifts and occupations
Between 1835 and 1850 Froebel worked on his “Gifts and Occupations” — a set of geometric blocks (Gifts) and basic craft activities (Occupations), that would become the centerpiece of his pedagogical theory. The Gifts and Occupations were introduced in a highly ordered sequence, which began in the child’s second month and concluded in the last year of kindergarten.