Craft Research - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2020

The craft sciences have emerged as a field of academic research in Finland, Sweden and Norway since the early 1990s. In Finland, craft research has examined various aspects of crafts using a multidisciplinary approach, adapting a range of methods from other academic disciplines according to the research topic. Another source has been the schools of domestic sciences in which craft research has been a recognized field. In Sweden and Norway, craft research has developed strongly in architectural conservation and cultural heritage with a focus on traditional craftsmanship and the performative elements of intangible cultural heritage. This article offers an overview of the developments and progress of the field of craft sciences in these countries, including its methodological approaches, with a focus on Ph.D. theses. Through mapping recurrent methodological approaches, the following categories were derived: craft reconstruction, craft interpretations, craft elicitation, craft amplification and craft socialization. The aim of the classification, and the model derived from it, is to help researchers and students understand better how different types of knowledge relate to different research methods and apply them within their own research. The purpose of the research is to create a common infrastructure for research and education in order to connect and strengthen the dispersed academic communities of craft research and to establish craft science as a formally recognized discipline within the academic system.

The study explores creating intentional cultural dialogue through craft and cultural heritage and examines significant learning experiences of a cultural craft course reported by thirty-two (N = 32) exchange students. The students were from ten countries and studied Cultural Heritage and Craft Education in the International Study Programme at the University of Eastern Finland during the academic year 2018–19. The methods applied in the course were significant learning and collaborative designing for supporting cultural dialogue. Data were collected through reflective essays and reported in Dee Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning framework. The analysis identified six types of significant learning experiences and confirmed that cultural heritage embodied in crafts serves as a significant platform for cultural dialogue. That is, a holistic craft process including designing, making and reflective evaluation can support cultural learning. The research contributes to the development of international study courses and provides means to enhance cultural dialogue in the context of craft education.

This article investigates how craft knowledge can be utilized and acquired in the handcrafting process using digital tools and digital fabrication methods. It is based on a study that seeks ways in which craft-making and handcrafted objects can be translated using digital technology and addresses the following questions: (1) What forms of knowing and meaning-making are evolving in a craftsperson working with digital means? (2) What does it mean to manipulate material in computer-aided design through virtual reality, and how does this inform analogue material practice and experimentation? The study was carried out through the author’s craft practice. Originating with a hand-knotted artefact, the author transformed this analogue form into digital form using a range of techniques. The activities act as both a survey of digital fabrication capabilities and a way of exploring new thinking mechanisms offered by this emerging form of practice. The study broadens our understanding of the craftsperson’s role within the capabilities and limitations of digital interface and tools. Several iterations of digitally fabricated objects were documented and reflected upon. This emerging craft practice acts as a catalyst for established disciplines within art and design to collide and interact. Outcomes of this study include mapping new workflows and the translation of gestures within digital and analogue material practice and reflection on how the materials and methods used in digital fabrication have the potential to expand the meanings connected to the things that are created. These outcomes evidence not only how the craftsperson utilizes her previously acquired knowledge in a new context of working with digital tools but also how she acquires new handmade knowledge through the act of translating analogue practice into a digital one.

Over the past twenty years, hobby crafting has experienced a revival of interest, as people have started to seek new ways to engage with crafts as creative leisure in an increasingly digital world. Along the way, emerging, digital technologies have provided new tools and ways to engage in hobby crafting. Indeed, today’s hobby crafts are frequently concerned with material mediated via the internet and accomplished with the aid of software, which also affects our understanding of maker identities in online communities. This article argues that digitalization has not only revolutionized hobbyist craft making with new tools and technologies, but has also paved new ways for practising creative skills, which has had a significant impact on makers’ engagements with craft materials, objects and communities of practices. This is demonstrated through netnographic explorations on Facebook’s leisure craft community where digital material practices are increasingly prevalent in hobbyists’ everyday life. As a conclusion, the article speculates on visions of the future of hobby crafts and its relevance as a leisure pursuit.

This article introduces a design research mediation project, Anti-amnesia, that explores various connotations of ‘wealth’ as embedded in the material culture and human narratives surrounding traditional crafts in Portugal. The project argues that ‘wealth’ is undergoing a process of signification that is semantically reductive, being brought to tacitly invoke monetary gain rather strictly, if on an underwritten basis, and this is bearing an adverse effect in terms of perceptions towards other consequential but intangible values related to craft practices. In this regard, it presents the case of traditional Azulejos tilemaking, a long-established cultural archetype in Portugal, whose original technique is on the brink of dissipation due to the emergence of newer manufacturing and architectural paradigms. The article respectively reviews the actions of a collaborative initiative Azulejos do Porto that is focusing on the craft’s reanimation through making creative connections between culture and community development. The article correspondingly presents a case for design research and pedagogy to establish long-term hands-on collaboration with such restorative initiatives that are oriented towards traditional making. The project conjectures that the resulting interknowledge can reveal complementarities between all stakeholders: which can be tactical towards addressing critical issues that are affecting traditional crafts’ relevance to contemporaneity; provide suitable conditions for an extended evaluation of crafts’ multifaceted nature in terms of value to culture and society and can connect newer generations of creatives to their making heritage, thereby ensuring a continuity of specialized know-how.

Crafts: Today’s Anthology for Tomorrow’s Crafts, Fabien Petiot And Chloé Braunstein Kriegel (eds) (trans. Eileen Powis, Gammon Sharpley, Fabien Petiot, Chloé Braunstein Kriegel And Francoise Jollant Kneebone) (2018)

Paris: Editions Norma, 434 pp., ISBN 978-2-37666-007-1, h/bk, £57.40

Polish Lace Makers: Gender, Heritage, and Identity, Anna Sznajder (2020)

London: Lexington Books, 320 pp., ISBN 978-1-49858-431-9, £75.00