On Being Master of One’s Own Stuff

I have tried to make a case for self-reliance of a certain kind—being master of your own stuff. This requires a basic intelligibility to our possessions: in their provenance, in their principles of operation, in their logic of repair and maintenance, in short, in all those ways that a material object can make itself fully manifest to us, so we can be responsible for it. (p.205)

The core of Crawford’s book is an argument for human agency and engagement with our material reality through making and fixing things. He makes this argument mostly in the context of work and the trades, but we can try to understand his points in the context of design. After all, design involves the act of shaping our material environment and so plays a large role in whether our experience with our things is empowering or alienating.

Crawford connects the act of making or fixing things to various personal and social benefits (which I examine in other notes). At base, he sees manual engagement as an exercise of human dignity and a means to experience life with a kind of wakefulness.

Spiritedness is an assertion of one’s own dignity, and to fix one’s own car is not merely to use up time, it is to have a different experience of time, of one’s car, and of oneself. (p.55)

He feels a defense of such an attitude is necessary in the face of product companies that would rather hide the inner details of things from the public than allow them access in full transparency. This breeds a passivity and dependence in people, denying an aspect of what makes us human. Crawford makes this point in a discussion about the way we see the dangers of technology:

The complaint usually centers on our alleged obsession with control, as though the problem were the objectification of everything by a subject who is intoxicated with power, leading to a triumph of “instrumental rationality.” But what if we are inherently instrumental, or pragmatically oriented, all the way down, and the use of tools is really fundamental to the way human beings inhabit the world?… [T]hen the problem of technology is almost the opposite of how it is usually posed: the problem is not “instrumental rationality,” it is rather that we have come to live in a world that precisely does not elicit our instrumentality, the embodied kind that is original to us. We have too few occasions to do anything, because of a certain predetermination of things from afar. (pp.68-69)

Crawford makes a distinction here between autonomy and agency, two concepts that he worries get confused with one another. We may think that the objects in our lives provide us with more freedom when they do things for us and spare us the details of how they operate. While the author recognizes this as a useful and necessary quality of technology, he stresses that it is more accurately defined as a kind of autonomy rather than agency. It excuses us from exercising basic evaluative abilities by offering us a set of choices that have been sanitized for our consumption. Crawford’s idea of agency prefers the challenging and messy, but rewarding, experience of manual and cognitive engagement with our things.

If we accept Crawford’s point, it may give us cause to re-examine the role of design. Our work is often framed as shaping objects and environments for the ease of others. Traditional concepts of usability lead us to build things that don’t ask people to think, the very situation that Crawford is arguing against.

It’s probably the wrong-headed to think that the solution is to make things less usable. Just as Crawford sees the value of electric starters or automatic oil pumps in his motorcycles, we can acknowledge the utility of usability practices for digital interfaces (for example).

I think the point is more along the dimension of transparency in design. How do the things we make invite re-appropriation, deconstruction, and ownership by people? Can we see the people we design for as more than just users or consumers, but as actors and agents who want to engage with their world in the same ways that we do when we design? The approach may not be appropriate for all contexts, but the possibility for a more animated and engaged public of makers is an attractive one.