"Utility, material, and technique, if taken into due consideration, automatically give us the calm, warm beauty of the artisan works that we use daily."
— Yanagi Sōetsu
If you have delved into the varied and complex worlds of manufacturing methods, both modern, industrial, and traditional crafts, you will start to see key markers or witness marks key to the chosen method of production. The use of hand-tools influence the resulting objects in countless ways.
Starting from the most foundational, straight lines and right angles are an obvious tell-tale sign of human influence, and ubiquitous in our built environment. The same can be said for measuring systems. If you grew up being taught the metric system, you probably think in centimetres, and design to the nearest 5mm. If you were taught the imperial system, you probably think in fractions of an inch, and wouldn’t dream of rounding to the nearest 13/64”. If you instead measure things proportionally, either by body parts (waist-high, within reach, fits my hand) or by ratio (put a stretcher 1/3 down a table’s undercarriage vs 30cm down) you will end up with noticeably visually different objects. The same is true of tool use.
A machine cuts dovetails equally spaced, but hand-cut dovetails don’t have to be.
If you are taking a board to desired thickness for a table top with a scrub-plane and then a smoothing-plane. You are unlikely to bring the underside, where it will never be seen, to the same surface finish, as it makes no practical or economical sense to do so. These witness marks, irregularities, and imperfections “hint at the infinite” and we are deeply tuned to reject the cold, harsh, impersonal results when these are artefacts aren’t present.
Similarly, machine cut joinery requires rotating blades at some point in the process. These blades come in fixed sizes (often imperial if manufactured for the American market) and for efficiency you are likely to design casework with joinery and parts of the same dimensions, not because it will serve the proportions of the final object, but result as a side-effect of that particular method.
This is not to say machine-made objects are bad. There are reasons William Morris’ Arts and Crafts movement eventually petered out. Machine-made goods are cheap, consistent, available and good-enough, but they sometimes represent a missed opportunity.
This is why I have a focus on hand-tool methods. It may be slower, more difficult, and result in irregularities, but there is beauty in the time taken, and the ability to design without a ruler, but by eye, depth to the imperfections, and uniqueness in the resulting story.
“A work devoid of innate beauty is a dead work: this is therefore the importance of the artist-craftsman to whom we today ask not only to produce good works, but also to work closely with the 'traditional craftsmanship so as to revive beauty even in everyday objects." — Yanagi Sōetsu
Further Reading:
By Hand and Eye — George R. Walker and Jim Tolpin
The unknown craftsman — Yanagi Sōetsu