Art, Craft and Labor

Don Knuth named his landmark book series The Art of Computer Programming. I met the emeritus Stanford professor once. He said he admired what I had done for all people with wiki and that his own work was of interest to an increasingly small but dedicated community. site

Art serves art itself. Art can be a business but that playground for speculators lies outside of art.

Labor serves capital in an economic horse race that evades anything broader than monotonic motivation.

Craft lies somewhere between art and labor. It serves others but by engaging the whole of oneself. Craft might sound old fashioned, pre-industrial, inefficient. But it is the wholeness in service that we seek when we use the term.

See Symmathesy in Programming for craft in teams.

See Problems in UI Engineering for some tough nuts.