This week’s Apprenticeship Pattern was one that really got me thinking. This week I read ‘Craft over Art’. This pattern talked about exactly what the title says. It was more about focusing on the craftsmanship than the beauty of one’s work. I know that a lot of what I will be doing will not be focused on the arts but when I first started reading this article I thought it was very harsh their way of putting it. I thought that in any job you always want to improve yourself so doing projects that will make your work look better would be the ideal, but after reading their reasoning behind it I got a better understanding for their thought process. One point they had mentioned that I had honestly forgotten about was the feeling of the customer. The goal as the employee is to make the customer happy, and that is the main priority for any company I will be working for. This means that I will always need to place the interest of the customer first before my own needs, and that in hand does make me a better craftsman. This doesn’t mean that what I make has to look awful or unprofessional, but it also needs to be useful to whoever I am helping out. While you may get self satisfaction from something that you have made yourself that may impress your boss or colleagues, making the customer has its own satisfaction in itself. I really like how they mentioned that utility and beauty were interdependent of each other. They say that when a software is more useful there is more pressure and a need for it to be of high quality. I think for myself that this is a very important lesson and pattern to learn about. Everything I do I care a lot about the outer appearance of it. I care a lot about the image and how pretty it looks and sometimes I forget about the utility of the design. When I start working for other people and making products for customers, I will really need to think about how useful my software is and if it will truly make the customer happy. When working in a company, it is not just myself that I working with to make happy and useful, but a whole team of employees and customers.
