Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman

Our idea of the craftsman as an independent, creative individual dates back to William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Romantic as that image may be, the status and income of a practicing "craftsman," whether boat builder, potter, weaver, or woodworker, has always been tenuous, and remains so to this day. As much as we might covet or applaud handmade products, they cannot, and do not, compete in the general marketplace. Craftspeople work at the margins of contemporary society, and the fault lines can, at times, offer a revealing perspective on the cultural landscape.In this moving account, we follow Korn's search for meaning as an Ivy-educated child of the middle class who finds employment as a novice carpenter on Nantucket, morphs into a self-employed designer/craftsman of fine furniture, takes a right turn into teaching woodworking and design at Colorado's Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and finally founds a school in Maine: The Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, an internationally respected, non-profit institution teaching design, furniture making, and related arts to over 400 students a year.This is not a "how-to" book in any sense. Korn wants to get at the why of craft, in particular, and at the satisfactions of creative work, in general – to understand their essential nature. How does the making of objects both reflect and refine our own identities? What is it about craft and creative work that makes them so rewarding? What is the nature of those rewards? How do the products of creative work inform society? In short, what does the process of making things reveal to us about ourselves? Korn draws on four decades of hands-on experience to answer these questions eloquently, and often poignantly, in this personal, introspective, and revealing inquiry.