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Handwashing

With posts about posters and housewares and fairs, we at Work + Play have demonstrated our love of the handmade, which would include, by our definition, factory-produced items altered by hand into something original.

The blog run by Greenjeans, a Brooklyn-based handmade store, suggests that corporations may soon adopt the handmade aesthetic in the same way that they have emphasized environmentally friendly programs and operations efforts in their business-to-consumer communications. And just as some of the corporations who trumpet their eco-friendly records may not, in fact, be doing what they can or should to protect the environment, companies who adopt a handmade aesthetic will likely attempt to mechanize or simulate it. What’s more, at an organizational level, efficiency will certainly demand that these companies eschew handmade practices in production. “Handwashing,” Greenjeans suggests, may be the new “greenwashing.”

Specifically, Greenjeans’ is concerned that adoption of the handmade aesthetic will require simulation of handmade elements, for example, digitally printed “handwriting” of a name on a mailed envelope.

I agree that mechanized simulation of the handmade aesthetic will please no one. I also believe it will fool few. For me, the issue of adopting the handmade aesthetic for electronic media—for purposes corporate, non-profit or personal—seems to present challenges just as fundamental as those posed by the threat of simulated handmade goods.

The handmade is, by definition, tactile. It can be held and touched. Even the aesthetically pleasing motion-graphics work cited by Greenjeans cannot be touched and held by the viewer.

If the aesthetic of an e-media piece works, then most of us should be able to overlook that the piece itself was not, in most cases, made by hand—at least, unless you consider the hands that moved the mouse or held the camera. I think the key to effective translation of the handmade aesthetic to web, video and film is an effective communication of the tactile. Sight and sound should be used to relate textures to viewers so that they can imagine with clarity what it would feel like to bend or twist or run their hand across the images. When this is accomplished, the handmade aesthetic brings something wholesome, energetic and pleasing to electronic media.

(Thanks to The Morning News for calling the Greenjeans article to our attention.)