02.01.18
Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand | Audio

Episode 74: Eyes and Hands


Cræft, according to historian and author Alexander Langlands, is a Middle English word meaning “a form of knowledge, not just a knowledge of making but a knowledge of being.” The kind of knowledge that comes from a lifetime of making thatched roofs, for example, from cultivating the plants to living underneath one. And this desire for embodied knowledge hasn’t gone away, Michael says, as shown by the popularity of adult coloring books:

 In the industrial world and late capitalist society, people keep coming back to things you can do with your hands, if only because it's sort of restoring some dim echo of that connection that obviously are hardwired into us at a fundamental level.

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Posted in: Arts + Culture, The Observatory




Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer. A former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Eye and Communications Arts magazine, she is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. Jessica received both her BA and MFA from Yale University where she has taught since 1994. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal.

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