Hello everybody
Today, I would just like to share with you an excellent article by Christian Guellerin, president of the Cumulus association.
Christian looks at design but especially in this article on what could become of French companies, if we developed the manual side that our children have from birth.
THE CIRCLE. What if the rehabilitation of "handwork" was a response to the industrial problems of Western economies that see their factories moving further and further away? What if design education had a decisive role to play in this enterprise? We must relearn how to manufacture "with our hands", it is a matter of "the solidity and reality of the world".
At a time when problems of business competitiveness are being raised, when economists and politicians are constantly creating ministries, commissions or "recovery" committees to try to get Western countries out of successive crises and find models of industrial growth, is it incongruous to talk about the rehabilitation of "manual work" as a response - modest certainly - to the decline of Western industries?
Should we be surprised, when children draw at school, work with paper, cardboard and other materials, make various objects, play with Lego or Meccano and then, later, make models or arrange their rooms, that once in higher education they only devote themselves to supposedly intellectual tasks, as if intellectual recognition were a virtue and the fact of "putting one's hands on" was derisory, even degrading? Should we be surprised that in France, in particular, the best students who graduate from scientific courses definitively abandon technological culture, and all aspects of product design and manufacturing as soon as they access the best Business schools? Should we be surprised - as the boss of Schneider recently pointed out - that the best engineering schools no longer produce engineers, and that Centrale graduates prefer financial trading rooms in London or Frankfurt to factories?
The scientific organization of work, since the industrial revolution of the mid-19th century, has continued to separate intellectual work, entrusted to the "elites", and manual work, entrusted to workers. Taylor, from the end of the 19th century, models a scientific organization of work (Scientific Management) which leads to separating the management which thinks, which models, which determines the procedures, which dictates the rules of a "job well done" to workers who are less and less qualified since they are confined to only applying procedures and no longer thinking. It is at this time that design is born as if to compensate for this "inhumanity" of separating the body from its mind.
This organization obviously leads to the disappearance of the skilled worker, the one who thinks, the one who links thinking to manual work, to the benefit of an increasingly less skilled worker. We must remember Charlie Chaplin in "Les Temps modernes" who, as soon as he thinks, is "eaten" by the machine or reread "325 Francs" by Roger Vaillant to know that "thinking" leads the worker to his downfall. Busard, Vaillant's hero, his arm crushed by the press he operates, is also eaten by the machine.
This scientific organization of the company has an economic virtue, that of paying less qualified workers less. But the problem is that other emerging countries pay workers even less and distort the conditions of competition. And the company no longer has this stratum of qualified workers who are the first relays of creation and innovation, those who make the link between strategy and industrial "implementation". Do we need to go further to understand the decline of industry in Western countries?
The recent work carried out by these same companies around quality standards meets - perhaps unintentionally - the same objective. Putting procedures in place - and having to apply them, which is the least of all things - obstructs the possibility of those who apply them to have to think. Just as they handicap structures in their capacity to innovate. To create, to innovate, for the zealots of Quality, it is to go beyond the norm and to contravene the interest of the company. The standardization policy has allowed some companies to structure themselves, but has led others to bankruptcy due to a failure to reform the models put in place and to innovate.
The "productive recovery" of Western industrial companies may involve taking "things in hand". It is about retraining staff and rehabilitating the virtue of congruence between the mind and the ability to build, draw, assemble, and disassemble oneself. It is about rehabilitating the individual capacity of each person to do things with their hands, to be the first to implement innovation and give it meaning. This is why companies need designers, because beyond their creative ideas, they do things!
"The hand is spirit" the Companions teach us, it is a question of remembering it to reconcile the head, the idea, and the doing, the acting. No "design thinking" seminar has ever modified, nor developed an activity or more generally a company, nor generated the slightest added value. Only those who take "things in hand" allow us to move forward. This is why "design thinking" needs designers. No "post-it" on the wall has ever produced anything.
If I were a "politician" in charge of industrial development, I would make sure to rehabilitate technology and manual labor courses in schools. I would call them "design and innovation courses" to dust off their image and recognize the quality of their dedicated and too little recognized teachers.
And I would affirm the responsibility of design schools to reconcile "making do" and "doing", a condition for efficient entrepreneurship, a condition for the reindustrialization of our territories.
And if everything started with the rehabilitation of “manual work”.