I first met Glenn Adamson when he supervised my PhD at the Royal College of Art more than a decade ago. By then he had already written Thinking Through Craft (2007), and would go on to publish widely, including The Invention of Craft (2018), Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects (2018), and most recently A Century of Tomorrows (2024). As a curator, writer and historian Adamson works at the intersection of craft, design and contemporary art – always with an insistence on craft as a cultural force.

I came to know him not only through the academy but also as head of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum. There he co-curated the landmark exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990 (2011–12) and co-founded the Journal of Modern Craft. Around the time I completed my doctorate, he returned to the US as director at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Since then we’ve kept in touch, mostly online, mostly sharing notes about subcultures, the subject that first brought us together. I’ve noticed that while Adamson’s intellectual commitments are steadfast, his reach is rhizomatic, expanding to roles as curator at large at Vitra Design Museum, artistic director at Design Doha biennial in Qatar and curatorial director at Design Miami.

Adamson maintains a foothold in London, with a home in the East End. Still, we arranged to meet North at Camden Art Centre, chosen for its proximity to a studio visit he had scheduled afterwards. I waited by the reception desk; when he arrived, it felt as if no time had passed. It was one of those typically grey London days, mercifully without rain, and we found a table in the café garden. Months earlier, in my invitation, I had told him about this new journal, and that I wanted to hear his thoughts on making now. He remembered. Leaning across the table, with his usual quick focus, he began. For the next hour we spoke about material, margins, the relationship between craft, design and art – and in particular what it means to be human in the act of making.

Shehnaz Suterwalla: When you look across the span of your work, what leads your thinking?

Glenn Adamson: I think about the question of what’s being made. As a tangible object gets made, the person who is making it also gets made in the process. For me, these two things are inseparable. I’m a strong believer in the idea that the making of the artist is the means by which the value of a work is generated. It’s your interest in the person or people who make a work that accounts for your interest in the object – or ought to. When an object is fetishized and divorced from its human origin, that’s when you have a distortion field, it’s what disrupts the value of material culture. It’s really in the person, the maker, that value adheres. The same thing goes for the work that I do. Whether it’s writing a book, or a profile of a maker, or curating an exhibition, or doing a bit of teaching – I’m always trying to create a humanistic account of the objects around us to draw out surprising elements of creativity that can be observed in objects. It’s amazing how often humans exceed expectations.

SS: You’ve been working with craft studies for thirty years. You helped to form craft studies. A consistent idea resonating in your practice, one that you coined in 2018, is ‘material intelligence’: The notion that an object has something of itself – an ontological power that is relational to the maker, and to those who engage with it, to its larger environment. Is thinking about making from a human-centric point of view counter to that idea? Or have you changed your mind?

GA: Oh no, I’ve always considered material intelligence to be something that people have. They demonstrate it through the making of an object. You can decode it, or read it in an object. If you know what you’re looking at, know how to make something, or have technical expertise, it’s difficult to hide the material qualities of an object from you. I think of materials themselves as being inert until human agency operates on them.

SS: Is material intelligence organic? What are its defining principles?

GA: It’s cross-disciplinary. Nobody could corner the market on it because it’s too huge an area of knowledge and human instinct and capability. A comparison I like to make is to emotional intelligence, which everybody has to some degree, maybe some people more than others. It’s an arena of shared, overlapping, capabilities, also differentiated by human action, belief and understanding. Material intelligence is like that too. A scientist, a historian and a maker will all have different forms of material intelligence, even if they’re thinking about the same material.

SS: Intelligence has become such a loaded word, especially when preceded by the word artificial.

GA: Yes, but I don’t think of material intelligence as oppositional to artificial intelligence, though there is clearly a strong tension between them. Partly because material intelligence implies an analogue investment in physicality. You couldn’t have artificial intelligence in practice without material intelligence being applied. I’m interested in the prospect of makers creating hybrid practices across the two.

SS: The intersection between emotion and memory comes into play consistently in your ideas of material. There’s a strong emphasis on embodiment.

GA: To some extent it’s political, in the small-p sense of upholding the value of the humanities in a society, both in the university and the museum sector – and more generally – where the sciences are respected and better funded. It’s my way of creating a connective tissue across these different disciplines that are mainly thought of in hierarchical terms. Material intelligence, for me, is a way of creating not equivalence, but a sense of equality and mutuality.

SS: You refer to material intelligence mostly in relation to craft. In your books you explore craft and material intelligence in terms of their resonance across society. You deploy them as points of intervention for discussion about gender, race, ideas of nationhood. It seems craft for you is never just an aesthetic category. It carries multiple layers of interpretation. It’s an epistemology. What is it to think through craft?

GA: When I was writing Thinking Through Craft (2007), which was based on my academic dissertation, I was interested in using craft as a deconstructive term in regard to art and architecture. I thought about using the word ‘craft’ as informed by feminism and post-colonial theory, in other words, as a way of valuing marginalised subject positions.

Recently I’ve been thinking about it more constructively. I developed a short definition of craft: ‘skilled making at human scale’. I used to resist the idea of such a definition, precisely because I was in a deconstructive frame of mind; I was using it in an active, relational way. It became a word to hurl into an existing discursive framework to try to do damage to it. But when craft is defined positively in this way, it’s an enormous, contiguous human phenomenon to explore.

I don’t like to apply the word craft to immaterial practices like thinking or writing. For me the concept of skilled making implies a tangible outcome. It doesn’t need to be a discrete object, it could be a building for example. What’s key is that it’s a physical process.

SS: And a haptic process?

GA: Yes, haptic, which is the ‘human scale’ part. Obviously it almost always involves tools. But tools that are guided by the person at human scale, and skilfully.

SS: You think of the margin as an active space to think about craft. Do you think the margin continues to be essential for craft?

GA: Yes. My interest in this idea peaked with my book The Invention of Craft (2018), where I argued that as a matter of historical origin, craft was ‘invented’ as an oppositional term to industry and its associated terms: serialisation, mechanisation, alienation, mass production – all those things that are best understood in Marxist terms. And also fine art. Still today, I think of craft as a passport into different places, times and cultures. This is what I was thinking about for the Ground/work 2025 exhibition at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, for example. It includes an African artist, a Mexican artist, a Japanese artist, a British artist, a Swiss artist and an American, and each of them is coming at the prospect of craft from a different place. It was helpful for me to have a sense of a shared territory between them.

When you start thinking about how different cultures respond to industrialisation – in different ways, at different times – it’s an interesting and complicated mix. Craft is universal; ‘skilled making at human scale’ has always been with us. It’s everywhere. I try to hold the continuity and also the fracturing of craft simultaneously in my mind: both the positive, constructive aspects of craft and the deconstructive, critical aspects of it. It has to be a dialectical process; if you were only thinking of it in a deconstructive way, you’d come up with the same answer every time: that craft is the marginal resistance, the small-scale human thing that’s fighting the brave fight but ultimately getting overwhelmed. Or if you’re thinking of it only constructively, as a humanistic, affirmative activity, that celebratory mode can become quite conservative. If you think of it in both ways at once, though, you get a complex set of conflicts that unfold uniquely and in particular circumstances.

SS: You have a lovely anecdote in Fewer, Better Things (2018) about your great aunt who, at the age of twelve, knew how to skin a pig and pressure-can it. There you’re thinking about craft and design in terms of ideas of specialism.

GA: Yes, absolutely. I think specialism is probably most important in the craft arena. To be a craftsperson requires such a dedication of life. I don’t have much interest in the 10,000-hours rule associated with Malcolm Gladwell, which has always seemed ridiculous to me: does it take 10,000 hours to become a potter, or 10,000 to learn how to throw at a wheel, another 10,000 to learn how to glaze the pots and another 10,000 to learn how to fire them in a kiln? The point is, it takes a lot of human commitment, it’s a matter of life scale to become a craftsperson. For me that’s what specialism is about. The trade-off that you get by investing your time and effort into your own skills. Not everyone does this with their lives.

GA: Let me just knock one other thing on the head. It’s about the art, craft and design relationship. It’s unhelpful to think of these as three territories that overlap as if they were in a Venn diagram. They’re just not on the same plane. A good comparison might be that in art you might think about colour, weight and form. But you wouldn’t have an argument about whether something is colour, or is form or is heavy. They’re all different aspects that impinge on an artwork.

That’s how I think of craft, design and art. Craft is a matter of physical making in a certain way, skill-intensively. Design is a certain form of agency that we might have associated with a technical, modern, administrative establishment of power. And art, since Duchamp, has been defined as a theoretical, nominative category, which can absorb almost anything into its field of view and action. They’re not comparable. They’re operating on different levels and in different directions. It’s unhelpful to debate how they operate in relation to one another without that complexity. If you think of them simply as three circles that overlap, that’s not close to describing what’s going on in practice.

SS: Could craft exist if you didn’t have industrialisation? I’m thinking about the notion of resistance. In the past we’ve talked about the idea of the radical. Do you still think about that word?

GA: I use that word more in the context of design, which is another part of what I’ve been working on. I’m determined to uphold the value of a design avant-garde, in distinction to other terms that you might use for contemporary design that’s sort of edgily ambitious.

The most common of these is collectible design, which is a term I absolutely reject. At Design Miami, where I’m working now, a lot of design galleries would describe what they’re showing as collectible design, which obviously places an emphasis on the people buying it rather than the people making it. It also explicitly and transparently attempts to position design in relation to art that you might also collect. These ideas came out of auction houses, galleries and fairs rather than coming out of the domain of making.

My proposal would be that we think instead in terms of a design avant-garde, that would have as its lineage a history that is mostly – though not entirely – European, that comes out of modernism, the Bauhaus, etc., and passes through radical design in Italy, and then ultimately ends in the flourishing and diverse set of worldwide practices in India, Brazil and Japan, as well as other places informed by the radical tradition in Europe. I’m interested in the etymology of the word ‘radical’, which means going to the root; either pulling up the root, or going back to a primary or fundamental condition that has been occluded or somehow obscured. That’s where design and craft perhaps have a strong relationship to one another.

SS: What’s going on in studio practice right now that you think is interesting?

GA: Globalism. The most important thing is that the studios are everywhere. What’s happening in them? Technology is obviously part of the story. You have a lot of transformations coming around CNC and 3D printing and now artificial intelligence. And then you also have a very elastic sense of workforce.

The normative ideal of the studio craft movement was one person working in their studio, maybe with an assistant or two. The normative ideal of industrial design, conversely, was somebody who was working separately from the field of production, creating designs that would then be manufactured in a factory devoted to that purpose. But what you have in today’s design avant-garde is a malleable and polyvalent set of practices that introduces different kinds of labour and different kinds of technology in a permissive and creative way. Most of the people I’m interested in as makers are inventing a way of making to get to the object that they want.

SS: I’m interested in this notion of labour in permissive ways and what this means. Does it relate to ideas of precarity?

GA: The most compelling examples are where precarity is being addressed head-on. For example Chris Schanck, who’s working in Detroit, who went to Cranbrook Academy of Art. You could say he’s a privileged white male designer. Then he moved to Hamtramck, a largely Bangladeshi immigrant area of Detroit. It also has a lot of remnants of the auto industry, providing a service sector to the big companies with small shops making machine tools and parts. Chris cobbled together a studio team of maybe fifteen, twenty people, some of whom were women from these immigrant families living in the area, and some of whom were skilled fabricators who used to work as upholsterers or metal finishers. He partly learned from them, partly trained them, and through the process invented a way of working in a community. I’ve been struck by his case; how the objects he makes are a pretext to keep the shop going, instead of the other way around. He judges his success on how many people he’s keeping employed, rather than who is buying his furniture.

SS: That example is an interesting comment on the cult of the artist, and the histories that support that narrative. It comes back to your point about craft being politically and socially integrated. This example feeds into live political debates about what it is to be local. Is that important for the artists you work with?

GA: Yeah, and that the local can be anywhere.

SS: So not necessarily a heritage local…

GA: No, it’s a capabilities local. More akin to how you might think about slow food or the ‘ten-mile diet’. Another example is Studio Raw Material. They are in India and their town, Makrana, is like the equivalent to Carrara in Italy. It is an incredibly significant and long-standing source for stone, especially marble. Studio Raw Material make work out of offcuts that are lying around and have been discarded from production sites. This is different to what’s going on in the standard marketplace, of course, which has a preference for large, perfectly rectangular slabs – so you end up with bits of marble that have been knocked off every which way. This is the material, alongside working with people from the quarries, that is used to make Studio Raw Material’s furniture. It’s like an archaeological practice, extracting latent use value out of the waste around them, and also giving people who have quite precarious and dangerous jobs a much better living because of their involvement in the studio. There’s a social practice element in this way.

SS: Yes. Within the history of India, notions of extractivism are incredibly political due to colonialism. Could these interventions and techniques be thought of as a reparative practice?

GA: Yeah, that’s a good word for it. Reparative, and also sustainable.

SS: These ideas are uplifting. Now I’m going to bring the beat down! Looking at your work again, I kept returning to the idea of melancholy. Is your work a lament for what gets lost, what gets forgotten, for what no longer exists? Is your process across writing and curating a melancholic method of retrieval and remembrance? One that defends craftspeople and their stories?

GA: The last chapter in The Invention of Craft is about trauma. Craft movements, like the Arts and Crafts and studio craft movements, are traumatic responses to the fracture and violence of industry. I’m interested in that argument still, and I would say that craft has often been melancholic. I have tried to understand that feeling or sentiment and also get past it. I’ve wanted to direct my energies towards a future-facing understanding of craft. That means not only being haunted and replaying narratives of loss – or indeed thinking only in terms of preservation. I remember I was once speaking to the ceramic artist Clare Twomey, and I found myself saying, ‘I don’t think you should try to save anything that can’t save itself.’ Because you end up having a therapeutic or parasitic object on your hands when you try to do that. Self-consciously traditional craft would be the main example of this – like weaving tweed by hand in a village. Yes, you can create subventions to protect that, but when you do that you end up transforming the object in ways that are unanticipated anyway. So you probably won’t have saved the practice; you will have changed it, while contributing to the idea that craft is economically unviable. I don’t believe that myth at all and there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. Craft can be a powerful economic force of its own. In that sense I would reject melancholy as the mindset, but I do recognise its importance. Right now, the current political situation is so horrific, and climate change so real, that you start feeling melancholic about the future rather than about the past. It’s not so much about what we’ve lost already, but about what we will lose.

SS: That’s why I used the word melancholic rather than nostalgic.

GA: Exactly. Around our moments of crisis, my instinct is maybe more emotional or personality-driven rather than logical or theoretical. I try to find positive energies and to frame them effectively rather than get into a mode that’s elegiac.

SS: We had spoken at the beginning about the idea of who is a maker. Let me ask you also: What is it to make?

GA: First of all, I would always try to use a very common-sense definition of a word like making. I think generally a maker is somebody who is operating in the physical environment, probably making an object, although it might be something larger scale – a building for example. But making something that has a kind of duration. There are more ephemeral making practices, such as cooking, but I’m less inclined to consider them as craft. An object that has duration can become a commodity, and that’s a crucial feature of craft: it’s a differential way of making commodities than in industry.

Beyond this, making actually creates something new in the world. Even if it looks exactly like things that were produced before, it’s probably different in some way just because the world changes – and as I mentioned a moment ago, it is hard to stay still as a maker. By making you introduce some kind of value (that word again!). Generally speaking, if you don’t have making you don’t have value and vice versa. There are lots of things that are made that have value that are not craft. This loops us back to the skills part of my definition, the idea of making at human scale. Making is obviously a much vaster concept than craft, but that’s how I would define it: introducing some physical value into the world.

SS: I’ve heard you speak many times about not being a maker yourself. But you write, you make books, you make exhibitions, you make thought, discussion, dialogue. Do you say you’re not a maker because you’re drawing a distinction between the material versus the immaterial?

GA: For me it implies a very different set of skills. I have a skill set in the areas of discourse and arrangement. It’s a matter of orchestrating existing objects when it comes to curating and creating a setting for them. Also working with a designer to create that setting, because I’m not a designer. I’m keenly aware that I’m not making the physical exhibition either—for that matter, the exhibition designer isn’t doing that either! It’s the artisans or the fabricators who are doing it. I’m at a remove from that element of making an exhibition, which is a tangible process. When I’m writing it feels even less physical. It’s a mental process. A book can be a physical object, but in a way it pre-exists any physical instantiation of itself.

SS: I feel inspired by this conversation’s use of the word ‘physical’. We must have used it more in one hour than I’ve heard it referenced in two weeks. Everything else I’m hearing is about zeros and ones, the artificial and ephemerality, things that cannot be captured through that kind of material reality. It’s refreshing to come back to the notion of the physical; I can see why it’s kept you going for thirty years.

GA: It’s amazing to me that anybody could ever think that it was not the most important dimension of experience. It shapes where we are. Who we are. Any other force is bound to be dehumanising. It’s possibly very useful to have those other words – artificial, ephemeral – in combination with the physical, or physicality and materiality. There are ways they can be life-giving. But if you don’t have physicality in the equation, what good is it going to do?