Week 110: Craft
This weekend I went to Papercamp 5, an event organised by Alex which describes itself as being somewhere between a conference and a village fete, about paper.
As someone working in digital, it’s refreshing to have a day listening to talks about analogue practices and history. Inevitably though, I find it hard to switch off from work completely, and my mind seeks connections between the two worlds.
After attending last year I pondered on the role of paper in the NHS. We still largely talk about paper as a “fall back” for when digital channels aren’t available, rather than a useful technology in its own right.
I was reminded of this again this week. The application form for secondary school for my eldest child asked for 2 official documents showing their name and address, suggesting a letter from their GP (which we don’t have) or their red health book (which for us has an out of date address, given it was printed in it 10 years ago when she was born!). Paper, it seems, still carries an authority that digital records don’t — even when it’s a decade out of date.
This year I thought more about ‘craft’, a word easily associated with paper, with its history and tactility. A few of the talks at Papercamp told stories of paper in different contexts (colonial record-keeping and old wrappings for oranges), revealing different social and political histories. A talk about risograph printing explained how these fascinating machines work, and the trial and error that goes into making successful prints with them.
But digital can be a craft too. Many of the technologies we use, like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, are now multiple decades old, and have their own rich histories, with their biases, mistakes and past optimisms encoded directly into the languages. You don’t have to understand all this to use them, but it helps. There’s experimentation and trial and error too - the same code will run differently in different browsers and devices, and be interpreted differently by different human users. There is no one mathematically perfect solution, it’s as much art as science.
This was all in my mind when reading about the US Web Design System (USWDS), where the previous team and community have been seemingly replaced by a single AI Engineer. We’re thankfully not in that situation at the NHS, but we are seeing an increasing number of automated AI contributions to our design system - a new type of sloppy spam. We’ve not yet determined a policy on how best to deal with it.
I’m not anti AI, it’s definitely a useful tool. But I don’t want to lose the craft of making digital things, or the community effort and conversation that goes into them.
And I like to think that one day in the distant future there will be events somewhere between a conference and a village fete looking back at the digital things we’ve made.
Papercamp will return next year, on 18 September 2027. Follow Alex to find out when tickets go on sale.