Designing Craft Research: Joining Emotion and Knowledge

Abstract

This paper considers how both craft and research can be joined in the enterprise of craft research. The rationale is that craft research is still relatively new compared to mainstream design research and craft being linked to the creation of artefacts as a source of experience and emotion, craft is not usually associated with research and the production of knowledge.The paper discusses the emerging need for creative research in the crafts based on sensibilities of material understanding and human values, which contrast with the current strictures of research. Drawing on current models of design research and knowledge, the paper proposes experiential knowledge as the unifying conceptual underpinning of both. The outcome and contribution of the paper is a better understanding of the relationship of craft and research, and of the value of research for advancing craft as a discipline that is viable and relevant for the future.Keywords: craft research, experience, emotion, knowledge, material understanding, human values The Need for Research in the Crafts[tx]This paper investigates how research and craft can join in the enterprise of craft research to advance craft as a discipline that makes a valuable contribution to future living. The rationale for this investigation is that craft research -that is research into, for and through craft practice (Frayling, 1993) -is still relatively underdeveloped

Engaging trainee teachers with crafts and cultural heritage

“…In the 'key terms' exercise, the terms were chosen to reflect the central concerns of both the students' course and the research undertaken. The 'students' memories' exercise was developed in line with the view that practical hands-on craft work evokes emotions and memories (Niedderer and Townsend 2010;Luutonen 2008). In the 'connections' exercise, the pre-defined statements reflected the researchers' understanding of values associated with crafts and cultural heritage but the exercise was opened up by offering the students the possibility of adding their own statements.…”

“…in activities such as DIY, and through local guilds, and globally, e.g. through the Internet (Niedderer and Townsend 2010). The problematic situation of crafts and artisans in local and global economies (Crawford 2009) is recognized by the students for whom the 'economic potential of crafts' was the least connected of all the statements.…”

“…Students' understandings of the key terms provide baseline reference points against which subsequent analysis may be related. Niedderer and Townsend (2010) talk about the special nature of craft research that tries to combine the emotional aspects of the experience of making crafts with the production of knowledge through the activities of making. The 'memories' exercise aimed to explore these connections.…”

A Film Editor’s Visual Intentions and Use of Perceptual Phenomena in Designing Film Edits: An Observational Study

“…This work can be described as art and craft, depending on a tradition that includes conventions, principles, and guidelines for how to conduct the work (cf. Niedderer and Townsend 2014). Film editors express how their skills and knowledge become embodied intuition (cf.…”

‘You’ve got to keep looking, looking, looking’: Craft thinking and authenticity

“…Processes of othering can be deliberate, political acts, or unintentional and habitual -craft suffers from both. Dormer makes it clear that craft has felt threatened by criticisms based in the knowledge frameworks of more culturally powerful paradigms (Dormer 1997;Niedderer and Townsend 2014), whereas Harrod (2015) points out that the experience of creative flow enjoyed by the studio maker in relation to machines and tools is unlikely to be available to the industrial workplace, which maintains a version of reality in which craft is marginal to industry, at the same time as the industrial worker is written as unthinking (Rose 2014). This also raises a question concerning expectations of methodology in craft research: positivist methods of research, while only one way to tell stories about our world, may 'actually silence too many voices' (Finlay and Evans 2009: 19;Law 2006).…”