Centuries ago, if you wanted a chair you had to enlist the help of your local craftsman, who would design and construct the piece of furniture by hand. It was a painstaking but personal process, resulting in a one-of-a-kind object. Then the Industrial Revolution came along with its machines that could do the same job as your local carpenter – only faster, cheaper and with greater precision. As technology evolved, the divide between traditional making and digital manufacturing widened. Individuality was replaced with reproducibility. And a lot craftsmanship became a luxury, not a necessity.

Today, that school of thought is changing, thanks to a growing number of designers who are creating innovative tools and techniques that combine hands-on craft and digital fabrication. "When you think about the word 'craftsmanship', it has this nostalgic meaning," says designer Joong Han Lee. "But to me, the word actually means moving forward with evolving technology and finding a new way of creating." Lee, a recent graduate of the Masters program at Design Academy Eindhoven, has done just that with his Haptic Intelligentsia project.

The industrial designer constructed a modified 3D printing machine that uses a glue gun and haptic interface to tactually control the making process. When the tip of the gun nears the invisible computer-generated 3D shape, users feel resistance which in turn provides them with a non-visual guide for creating their object. Using only tactile stimulation, makers are able to construct an item by building layer upon layer of material. The result, as Lee had hoped, is a purposefully imperfect object that shows traces of both the digital tool and the human hand.