HUMSS - Sarah May

Of digitality, craft and time

Ethnography based reflections on joiner's everyday work

“Faster, cheaper, more precise” – when joiners interpret the effects of their increasingly digitized work, they often use the comparative. They compare their current work practices with a “before” in which they developed designs on drawing boards rather than using CAD programs, in which machines were not controlled digitally but guided by hand. In the context of my ethnographic work, it became clear that time is a crucial factor in understanding craft and its digitalization – not only in terms of acceleration and improvement, but also with regard to the joiner’s self-image as craftspeople who acquired their skills through practice, repetition, experience. Within this talk I focus on joiners’ everyday work contexts to analyze the interdependence of time, knowledge and economic efficiency within the skilled crafts of the present.