Communications As Craftsmanship

How Comms Professionals Can Rise Above Banality

The communications profession can be more than a job well done. Artificial intelligence, limited budgets and resources, cookie-cutter templates, and half-hearted work are threats to the quality of work and to our profession at large.

If we want and try, the comms professional can achieve a level more often associated with handicrafts. Communications can be craftsmanship.

Communications As Craftsmanship contains eight chapters:

1. Consultants Propose. Professionals Dispose.
2. Craftsmanship, Certainty, and Risk
3. Quality Is Imperative. Perfection Is Impossible.
4. The Effects of Technological Monotony
5. Diversity (Variation)
6. Durability
7. Messages, Medium, and Polish
8. The Future of Work in Communications

This mini-book is inspired by David Pye’s The Nature and Art of Workmanship. Pye died in 1993. He was an architect, industrial designer, and craftsman. For many years he was also the Professor of Furniture Design at the Royal College of Art in London. In Workmanship Pye explores the meaning of skill and its relationship to design and manufacture. I’ve applied his philosophy to the work of professional communicators.