What we mean by craft–and indeed what we admire about examples of it–is often constrained by ideas we have about mechanization, the need for unity between artist and maker, and beliefs we have about what the Arts and Crafts movement meant to consumers and practitioners in the period ...

The deeper you dig into the Arts and Crafts movement, the more you will find that there is no single, satisfactory answer to the central question Triggs asked: What is the relation of the machine to culture? What we find instead is evidence of struggle, of complexity, of contradiction ...

So easy has it become for us to focus on aesthetics as the defining feature of an object that we can miss the larger through lines that fundamentally connect objects that can look radically different ...

Ignore for a moment the question of style and Henry Dreyfuss’s streamliner locomotive transforms before your eyes. Here, in a single object lies the fulfillment of so many ideals–of form following function, of ornament ...

Finally codified in 1995 as his Ten Principles of Design, Dieter Rams’s approach to objects demonstrates a remarkable consistency with ideas that emerged in late 19th design reform. Simply put, Rams believed that design should make the world a better place ...

Writing nearly fifty years ago, Pasadena Art Museum curator Eudora Moore sensed a continuity between the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement and contemporary design springing up in California ...