Entangled Materialities

This paper discusses craft and design practices through their impact on the environment. We consider how to act concerning the consequences of the craft and design industry. Also, we reflect on the agency of our field of practice in changing how we perceive the environment. We present three case studies of the European glass industry sites in Sweden, Italy and Finland, where we study contamination of the soil with participatory, speculative and craft methods. Through these cases, we reflect on our role in soil communities and ask how we may act in them with responsibility, hope and care. We conclude by proposing to act locally, to share our practices and make them visible, expanding our situated, personal skills and knowledge towards the political.

Practitioners’ Experience in Clay 3D Printing

In the context of artistic research, making has been traditionally understood as a process between the maker and the material. However, the digitalization that influences all practices brings us new kinds of making processes in which the ‘digital tools’ have a profound impact on the practitioner’s experience – also in the context of art, craft and design. This study explores the maker’s experience from a practice-led approach to understanding the subjective experience with clay 3D printing. To open up the 3D printing process with clay using our embodied understanding, the full process is viewed metaphorically – borrowing from music. The preliminary findings show that metaphorical viewing and the use of a score enables a successful review of the nature of computer-based practices in a way that all aspects and potentials fall naturally into place.

Editorial

This special issue on embodied making and learning is dedicated to aspects of embodied cognition that goes on in the field of art, craft and design. The contributors to this issue were invited from the Embodied Making and Learning (EMAL) research group at the University of South-Eastern Norway, where aspects of learning in creative practices have been studied from many different angles throughout the institutions nearly 80 years existence, and amplified since the formation of the group in 2014. With its 50 members, divided into five thematic clusters related to embodied making and learning, this research group is one of the largest in the field. It involves both experienced and early career researchers, as well as experienced university teachers, from several disciplines.

Craft and Design in an Age of Climate Crisis

A key tension at the heart of artisanal capitalism is the desire on the part of many makers to work ethically as well as generate an income, but does the world really need more ‘stuff’? Craft practice has long had as a central tenet a profound respect for materials and this sensibility continues to inform much craft practice today. So too do ideas of workmanship, of quality and building to last which also have rich and long traditions in craft practice and are all the more salient in the age of ‘fast fashion’, accelerating disposability and climate crisis. This chapter explores how makers are working to negotiate these tensions and possibly even become part of the solution not the problem.

Selling Craft and Design: The Cultural and Economic Intricacies of the Contemporary Artisanal Marketplace

This chapter explores the contemporary marketplace for Australian craft and designer maker products as experienced by the makers and mediators in our study. What became clear was the ongoing importance of place—including localness and proximity—to the Australian market. Here emerges a paradox in the current relationship between craft and digital technology. Whereas the whole moment of growth in handmaking is in so many ways a direct result of the internet, with its greater access to materials, skills knowledge and (potentially) markets, it is the value of a face-to-face, hand-to-hand economy, we argue, that is clearly also re-asserting itself here.

What Does ‘Handmade’ Mean Today?

The phrase ‘designer maker’ is being employed increasingly in the contemporary craft and design marketplace, especially among those seeking to make a full-time living from their practice. It marks those makers who may undertake original design and prototyping themselves, but who, in order to scale up their production in ways not always possible for a solo hand maker, outsource some or all subsequent aspects of production to other makers or machine-assisted manufacturing processes. But despite widespread use of this phrase, some makers remain keen to manage the scale of their business. As a result, many of those craftspeople and designer makers we spoke to who were in a position to scale-up their production while stepping back from the making themselves were reluctant to go down this path. Elsewhere we have explored these issues in terms of balancing making income with quality of life, as well as in terms of the desire to be a maker, to be doing the creative work oneself, and thus not ‘get too big’ with the added pressures and responsibilities of being an employer (Luckman, Cultural Trends, 27(5), 313–326 (2018)). In this chapter, we home in more on what upscaling and outsourcing reveals about competing definitions of, and attitudes towards, the idea of ‘the handmade’. We also explore attitudes towards handmaking versus other forms of production, including outsourcing and the use of digital tools.