A craft or trade is a pastime or an occupation that requires particular skills and knowledge of skilled work . In a historical sense, particularly the Middle Ages and earlier, the term is usually applied to people occupied in small scale production of goods , or their maintenance , for example by tinkers . The traditional term craftsman is nowadays often replaced by artisan and by craftsperson .
17-413: A craft is an occupation or trade requiring manual dexterity or artistic skill. Craft or Crafts may also refer to: Craft Historically, the more specialized crafts with high-value products tended to concentrate in urban centers and their practitioners formed guilds . The skill required by their professions and the need to be permanently involved in the exchange of goods often demanded
34-499: A certain division of labour between industry and craft. The nature of craft skill and the process of its development are continually debated by philosophers, anthropologists , and cognitive scientists . Some scholars note that craft skill is marked by particular ways of experiencing tools and materials, whether by allowing tools to recede from focal awareness, perceiving tools and materials in terms of their practical interrelationships, or seeing aspects of work that are invisible to
51-423: A higher level of education , and craftspeople were usually in a more privileged position than the peasantry in societal hierarchy . The households of artisans were not as self-sufficient as those of people engaged in agricultural work, and therefore had to rely on the exchange of goods. Some crafts, especially in areas such as pottery , woodworking , and various stages of textile production, could be practiced on
68-474: A part-time basis by those also working in agriculture, and often formed part of village life. When an apprentice finished their apprenticeship, they became a journeyman searching for a place to set up their own shop and make a living. After setting up their own shop, they could then call themselves a master of their craft . This stepwise approach to mastery of a craft, which includes the attainment of some education and skill, has survived in some countries to
85-604: A shortage of skilled manual workers, leading to lucrative niche markets in the trades. [REDACTED] Media related to Crafts at Wikimedia Commons Core rope memory Core rope memory is a form of read-only memory (ROM) for computers . It was used in the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer I) and the UNIVAC II , developed by the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in
102-402: Is an organized event to display and sell crafts. There are also craft stores where such goods are sold and craft communities, such as Craftster , where expertise is shared. A tradesperson is a skilled manual worker in a particular trade or craft, with a high degree of both practical and theoretical knowledge of their trade. In cultures where professional careers are highly prized, there can be
119-476: Is the " traditional " main sector of the crafts. It is a type of work where useful and decorative devices are made completely by hand or by using only simple tools . The term is usually applied to traditional means of making goods. The individual artisanship of the items is a paramount criterion, an such items often have cultural and/or religious significance. Items made by mass production or machines are not handicraft goods. The beginning of crafts in areas like
136-477: The Apollo 8 spacecraft's core memory consisted of wires that were woven around and through electromagnetic cores by hand. The core rope memory they created contained information used to successfully complete the mission. Crafts and craftspeople have become a subject of academic study. For example, Stephanie Bunn was an artist before she became an anthropologist, and she went on to develop an academic interest in
153-553: The Ottoman Empire involved the governing bodies requiring members of the city who were skilled at creating goods to open shops in the center of town. These people slowly stopped acting as subsistence farmers (who created goods in their own homes to trade with neighbors) and began to represent what we think of as "craftspeople" today. Besides traditional goods, handicraft contributes to the field of computing by combining craft practices with technology. For example, in 1968,
170-656: The 1950s, as it was a popular technology for program and data storage in that era. It was later used in the 1960s by early NASA Mars space probes and then in the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), which was built by Raytheon . The software for the AGC was written by programmers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Instrumentation Lab , and was woven into core rope memory by female workers in factories. Some programmers nicknamed
187-446: The finished product LOL memory , for Little Old Lady memory. Similar to magnetic-core memory, magnetic rings (or cores) are used to determine the data of the software. Unlike magnetic-core memory, the cores themselves are not used to store the data; the way a core is wired controls whether that core represents a '0' or a '1'. There are three main types of functions a wire can have in core rope memory: To read from core rope memory,
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#1732798042686204-657: The late 19th century and was characterized by a style of decoration reminiscent of medieval times. The primary artist associated with the movement is William Morris , whose work was reinforced with writings from John Ruskin . The movement placed a high importance on the quality of craftsmanship, while emphasizing the importance for the arts to contribute to economic reform. Crafts practiced by independent artists working alone or in small groups are referred to as studio craft. Studio craft includes studio pottery , metalwork , weaving , woodturning , paper and other forms of woodworking , glassblowing , and glass art . A craft fair
221-499: The other magnetic cores. The sense wires are used to encode the data by either going through a core or bypassing it. By using many sense wires, multiple bits of data can be stored for each core. In the case of the Apollo Guidance Computer, each core had 192 sense wires passing through it, which could store 12 16-bit words per core. By the standards of the time, a relatively large amount of data could be stored in
238-611: The present day. But crafts have undergone deep structural changes since and during the era of the Industrial Revolution . The mass production of goods by large-scale industry has limited crafts to market segments in which industry's modes of functioning or its mass-produced goods do not satisfy the preferences of potential buyers. As an outcome of these changes, craftspeople today increasingly make use of semi-finished components or materials and adapt these to their customers' requirements or demands. Thus, they participate in
255-582: The process of craft. She argues that what happens to an object before it becomes a "product" is an area worthy of study. The term crafts is used to describe artistic practices within the family of decorative arts that traditionally are defined by their relationship to functional or utilitarian products (such as sculptural forms in the vessel tradition) or by their use of such natural media as wood , clay , ceramics , glass , textiles , and metal . The Arts and Crafts Movement originated in Britain during
272-425: The set/reset wire is given a strong current to change the polarity of the cores. This induces a small voltage on the sense wires passing through them, which can then be used to interpret binary data. The inhibit wires pass a current in the opposite direction of the set/reset wire for all cores but the desired one, acting like a memory addressing system . This prevents the sense wires from detecting polarity changes from
289-610: The untrained observer. Other scholars working on craft skill focus on observational learning and mimicry, exploring how learners visually parse the movements of experts. Certain researchers even de-emphasize the role of the individual craftsperson, noting the collective nature of craft understanding or emphasizing the role of materials as collaborators in the process of production. There are three aspects to human creativity: art, crafts, and science. Roughly, art relies upon intuitive sensing, vision, and expression; crafts upon sophisticated technique; and science upon knowledge. Handicraft
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