The handicraft work belongs to the “Artisan”, noun whose definition, by the Oxford Dictionary is: “A worker in a skilled trade, especially one that involves making things by hand”.
So we can say, in a broader sense, that the craft work belongs to "the one who exercises an activity, both artistic, both common, for the production of goods and services, organized mainly with its own manual work and the members of the family (or a limited number of workers), without the use of machinery for a mass-production, carried out in a workshop, in his home, in the form of a walking shop". (by Treccani Encyclopaedia).
So the artisan activity, by its very nature, is a work that must be "done with the hands" and this even if there is a partial intervention of the machine.
Some works, since ancient times, are performed with the help of special mechanical equipment, such as the lathe, the drill, the wheel, but it is still the hand of the craftsman who completes the work.
Another prerogative of handicraft production, as already mentioned, has always been the creation of objects of use, that is products with limited aesthetic autonomy, but intended for a specific use, which differentiates the classification from that of the "objects of artistic craftsmanship".
On the other hand, industrial design is oriented towards the production of objects that do not depend on functional and / or artistic problems and that are expressly designed for their mass production.
(*) Franco Grossi (2015), Master & Maker, ISBN 978-88-98683-00-0, pages 62-63
