Research  questions

An analysis of student responses to:

Questionnaires

Student's journals/sketch books Mandatory student essays

4. Researcher’s experience

A workshop journal which recorded and included:

A transcription of workshop experience The past experience of workshop teaching The past experience of laboratory work

5. Institutional assessment data

In the form of paperwork, talk and process:

Assessment criteria

Transcription of each student speaking to the group about their work

Transcription of individual teacher/student mark negotiation of course work Teacher’s comments

Teacher’s mark sheets

6. Overall network

The above five analyses fragment the passage from idea to object. They will finally be considered as material for an integrated network using the data from the above five analyses.

Data collection took place one day per week for 10 weeks plus informal contact at other times. An ongoing relationship with the jewellery programme, its staff and some students was established during the residency.

During the residency:

1. the general atmosphere of the workshop was observed and noted in terms of the researcher's own experience

2. formal lectures and paperwork delivered by the teacher were noted and transcribed

3. talk and actions of students doing jewellery as a major option were noted and transcribed

4. four students were asked to respond to a 25 question questionnaire 5. student journals were accessed, collected and photocopied

6. student essays were collected and analysed

7. assessment events were observed, noted and transcribed 8. texts related to assessment were collected

9. texts in general considered to impact on the course were collected and noted.

Workshop life was followed over the duration of the course. All involved started and finished together and all share an interest in seeing a technical concept (the pancake die and batch production techniques) transformed into objects of aesthetic interest (ten related jewellery objects). All interests are at risk including the teacher’s job, the student's education and the researcher’s thesis. Although they all conform to the “rules” of the course what they expect from it may differ.

Data collection began in week seven of the course, after the hydraulic die-forming project had been completed and when the pancake die and the batch production project was about to begin. The course was entered at this point because it enabled the process that used the difficult-to-make pancake die for the third project, the batch production, to be followed from start to finish. Five students were enrolled for close observation on the grounds that they were jewellery majors and they intended to follow the pancake die process through to the batch production project.

From these five, one withdrew, leaving four subjects along with informal contacts with non-majors adding substance and depth to the general workshop experience and to the trajectory of the pancake die as a tool for batch production. Coming to the course at this stage is useful because it is both sufficiently small and self contained to manage as a research project.

Although ANT renders some things visible in the workshop it also obscures others such as passion, desire, expression and joy. The model of the laboratory is not totally interchangeable with the art school studio/workshop as the aims and intentions of science and visual art differ. The "truth" of craft/art objects is not found by repeating the experiment but by their appeal to certain current socio/cultural norms. The overlap with science is only useful in the context of the research because both are shaped by dominant “paradigms” of the moment but the link between science and its offspring, technology, differs from the link between craft in craft/art and its offspring, meaning and aesthetic experience. The research cannot be considered to be a definitive conclusion to workshop life because it lacks the authority of a large subject sample and the diversity of reasons students

undertook the course. Nevertheless the research does illustrate a method of understanding workshop life in the context of a university workshop.

Before the formal research can begin, observation and comment on workshop life as it is played out on a daily basis sets the scene. Although strong inferences can be drawn from the formal research an account of the informal interactions between humans and non-humans in the workshop opens to view the random nature of workshop life. The following narrative observes and comments on the "learning to make jewellery tribe" as it goes about its business of satisfying institutional demands and group and individual needs and desires.

The Work Shop Makes Objects: a socio/technical narrative set in an academic jewellery workshop

Let us at last give the artisans their due. The liberal arts have adequately sung their own praises; they must now use their remaining voice to celebrate the mechanical arts. It is for the liberal arts to lift the mechanical arts from the contempt in which prejudice has for so long held them, and it is for the patronage of kings to draw them from the poverty in which they still languish. Artisans have believed themselves contemptible because people have looked down on them; let us teach them to have a better opinion of them selves; that is the only way to obtain more nearly perfect results from them. We need a man to rise up in the academies and go down to the workshops and gather material about the arts to be set out in book which will persuade artisans to read, philosophers to think on useful lines, and the great to make at least some worthwhile use of their authority and their wealth.

(A Diderot Pictorial Encyclopedia Volume 1)

Diderot in the article “Art”

Summary The narrative is a transcription, interpretation and voice of the seen and heard

during a residency in an academic jewellery workshop. These sights and sounds shape, and are shaped by, the ubiquitous techno/social apparatus of an academic jewellery workshop.

Introduction

The narrative is written as dialogue between workshop actants (including the researcher) in the language of the workshop. Does the dialogue reveal anything about how the techno/social apparatus of the workshop makes jewellers? Where in the dialogue is craft: is it submerged by the relations of the workshop with the

university and art school whose territory it occupies and whose rules and laws it must obey? The search for craft must go on, as it is the underlying premise of the research. In the narrative, sightings of the construction of craft will be alluded to, but mainly left for readers to find as they follow the story.

Craft is constructed by the complex relations of hands and objects in the techno/social environment of the academic workshop, hands and objects cannot be ignored, workshops exist primarily for hands to make objects. The narrative looks at the way the workshop employs hands to make objects for later assessment at an arbitrary time, date and place at the end of a jewellery production course. Of course the workshop cannot carry out this task alone; it enrols others to help out, principally students enrolled in a jewellery production course, a teacher who brought his knowledge of production jewellery each week to the workshop, other staff who entered and left the workshop spasmodically, outsiders who interrupted it and a researcher, an ex jeweller and jewellery teacher who comments on workshop life. Nevertheless the focus is on the workshop, thus the narrative title "The Workshop Makes Objects".

Rationale

As the data for analysis is collected in a university jewellery workshop the nature of workshop life itself influences the direction of any research carried out there.

Noting, transcribing and reflecting on workshop life over the duration of a course of study opens to view the environment in which the later formal research projects take place. Below is such an introduction based on the argument that the workshop facilitates and mediates all activities within its domain, including formal research projects.

Observations recorded as a non-participant observer over a ten week course of study are mused upon from a number of perspectives. ANT is always there, nonchalantly looking and listening for networks in the techno/social world of workshop life. Tables and diagrams are occasionally offered with numbers and words to short cut techno/social relations. Inferences founded on highlights, watersheds, turning points and controversies pepper the narrative. Added to these are formal and informal conversations between workshop actants and reflections based on the first hand experience of the researcher. Underlying everything is the

struggle of the workshop to assert itself in a form which meets the needs of all its inhabitants.

An important outpost of a jewellery teaching workshop is the human body. The workshop uses the human body in a number of ways, for instance to present the materials it shapes for public spectacle, to train the body to perform its tasks, to enable its skills, machines and tools to be converted into human lifestyles and to use the body as a market place for its goods. But the workshop is never an isolated entity. In this case it is answerable to the academy, a place where the hands of jewellery students are persuaded to produce objects which not only mediate the satisfaction of personal desire and/or an introduction to a vocation but serve the wider interests of the university as well.

The original transcript was organised chronologically using a loose episodic form as an arbitrary structure. In the final draft the chronological time structure is replaced by non-temporal socio/technical formations made from the plethora of micro events of workshop life. The workshop is indifferent to chronological time continuity as its pace is set by the vagaries of workshop practice. Workshop life is neither smooth nor seamless; it is disrupted by institutional interference from outside and controversies on the inside. These disruptions fragment workshop continuity creating time and space for the researcher to reflect, contemplate and reconstruct his experiences of workshop life.

The transcription is based on spontaneous journal entries rewritten as a running narrative. The narrative is selective, not all notes were used, but it remains roughly in the rambling style of the hand written journal. Reflections on the notes are highlighted as boxed comments and at times font, point and indent changes. But generally the narrative is in two forms, firstly the researcher's choice of what formal and informal sights and sounds were worth collecting and transcribing as workshop dialogue and secondly commentary on them based on his experiences, insights and theoretical knowledge.

Introductory dialogues

First impressions of workshop life came from contacts with it and its people on several occasions prior to the commencement of the course. A newcomer to

workshop research needs to be as familiar as possible with its spaces and contents before the humans move in. These visits were to “speak” to its furniture, machines and tools poised ready for the humans to arrive.

The first human was the jewellery course coordinator, the person in charge of, and a teacher in the jewellery programme. A discussion about the jewellery programme’s (and thus the workshop’s) “fit” within its closest outside organisational structure, the Bachelor of Visual Arts, ensued. The jewellery programme is only one of many options offered in the BVA. The programme, without a separate identity, highlights the tension between visual art and workshop life especially when they share common courses, aims and administrative structures. The role the workshop plays in the BVA was discussed; in particular the impact arcane nuances of jewellery workshop life have on other courses in the BVA. As jewellery workshop practice could be described as a “craft” experience, the question is asked “What is the Role of Craft in the BVA programme?"

This conversation came at an opportune time as it concerned the "big picture"

view of the workshop set in the context of the jewellery programme, the school of art and the university. In terms of the hand and the object, it touched on the relations and influences between/of hand skills and material objects and visual art prompting a another question for the narrative to consider “What is the Role of the Workshop in a BVA programme?".

Visiting the dormant workshop at this point was essential to “soak up” its atmosphere and to make drawings of its floor plan, layout and contents. Making drawings was a way of predicting movements enforced by the workshop layout and to determine the best vantage points to study workshop life without getting in its way. This helped to find a hitherto unused narrow bench facing away from most of the workshop activity to expand on journal notes and to establish a “home” in the workshop which could be alternatively private or public.

The workshop comprised the expected range of tools, machines, benches, and storage facilities arranged symmetrically in a room partially divided by a floor to ceiling wall. The space had been two smaller workshops later made into one by the partial removal of an interior wall leaving the single space with two entrances and exits on either side of the remaining wall. This meant entrance to, and exit from the workshop could be carried out surreptitiously as the partial wall did not allow both

doors to be viewed simultaneously. The maze like structure of the workshop with its entrances, pathways and dead ends was already suggesting socio/technical relations. Two jewellery cases, standing near the centre of the workshop exhibited past and present student work showcasing the sort of objects the workshop could make and contrasting strikingly with the general industrial ambience of the workshop.

Heavy benches with vices are arranged around the walls of the work shop. The course co-ordinator’s workbench sits centre stage near the large round table and a whiteboard used to organise seating during lectures and as a drawing, thinking and designing space at other times. The future of jewellery work shops is represented by a computerised CNC machine in an isolated corner, a monument to the future of the traditional jewellery workshop. Other workshop equipment includes a press, hand and power rollers, tree stumps for metal smithing, storage cupboards and a sink.

Two other rooms linked with, but outside the main workshop are a specialised room for hot, wet and toxic activities and a storeroom managed by the studio technician/storeperson for the distribution and management of communal tools and small machines. These two areas have a laboratory feel about them because of their layout, the nature of the esoteric, but well used apparatus and the warning signs and instructions on the walls. An atmosphere of surveillance pervades the space where humans are more strictly monitored and supervised by the workshop, its apparatus and the staff who manage it.

Humans, meeting the workshop for the first time, are confronted by interior architecture, furniture and machines ready to direct movement, behaviour and social interaction. The interior architecture, furniture and machines are both an ally of, and impediment to, the humans who engage with them.

The empty unlit workshop was revisited a second time to imagine the role of a non-participant observer. Although not claiming the same unfamiliarity with the territory as Latour and Woolgar in “Lab. Life” having been, in the past, both a jeweller and jewellery teacher a sense of the outsider was overwhelming. The role of “outsider ethnographer” in a university jewellery workshop had not been fore shadowed, workshops which taught and made jewellery in the past were home territory. These past experiences in similar workshops had to be put aside and

replaced by, at least, a modicum of naivety. Will the difference between a jeweller and teacher inside and outside of academia be sufficient to disengage past experiences of workshop life? Will the environment be hostile and alienating to a degree that it will stifle the research? Can the lack of knowledge of, and experience in academic workshops be construed as a form of naivety similar to Latour and Woolgar’s claim in the Salk endocrinology laboratory? In fact, is Latour and Woolgar’s claim as observers not privy to the beliefs of the laboratory possible?

Lynch (1997, p.97) does not think so. When he wrote “the problem is that most of the terms of the tribe are our terms as well” he was referring to Latour and Woolgars knowledge and experience of sociology and anthropology. Perhaps Latour and Woolgar’s understanding of how science was made in the laboratory is not so different from the researcher’s knowledge of jewellery making in a university workshop? Will past experiences get in the way? To what extent does the unfamiliar role as an “ethnographer” in the workshop render it a naïve experience?

Is it alien or familiar territory?

A position as an outsider, a non-participating observer is important. Only as an outsider can one dispassionately observe what is going on? But this is difficult because any role played in the workshop, including that of a researcher, draws one into workshop life. It is especially difficult for a former workshop practitioner and teacher. The temptation to revert to past roles has to be repressed; the risk of directing rather than observing may deny insights into how this workshop makes objects.

After visualising the abstract research experience, the next step was to plan practical moves to see, hear and record the workshop in action. Of course data had to be collected: but what and how and from whom? Experiences of others is necessary, someone who has successfully written a thesis. Work sheets prepared to help organise the workshop observations were submitted for expert scrutiny. They consisted of floor plans, observations of bench and machine and tool use, talk and the paper work introduced to, and taken from, the workshop. The strategy was far too complex and unwieldy to manage in the workshop, noting on blank paper would be a better approach because it does not predict workshop life, it follows it.

A rugged hard-back journal would be the best way to record the week by week sights and sounds of workshop life.

The apprehension of entering old territory in a new role resulted in over preparation - rather than let the workshop speak in its own language it had been set it up to say what the researcher wanted to hear. Help was needed to deal with the crisis.

It was suggested interviews would support the observations but what would interviews look like in this instance. An Internet search for interview guidelines was fruitful but it was finally decided that a series of written questions to distribute to a small number of students majoring in jewellery was a better approach.

Observations by an outsider are not enough; the experiences and observations of those who belong to the territory are necessary if a more comprehensive picture

Observations by an outsider are not enough; the experiences and observations of those who belong to the territory are necessary if a more comprehensive picture