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Craft Research: Joining Emotion and Knowledge

This paper was selected by blind refereeing for presentation at The International Conference on Design & Emotion 2010, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago and is available in the conference proceedings at http://www.designandemotion.org/library/page/viewDoc/124. As well as presenting the paper the authors were invited to introduce their new Journal of Craft Research, commissioned and published by Intellect, UK, to an international audience.

The paper coincided with the publication of Volume 1 of Craft Research (September 2010). It describes the epistemological underpinnings of the journal and considers how craft and research can join in the enterprise of ‘craft research’. It argues that craft research – i.e. research into, for and through craft practice – is still relatively new, and that craft is traditionally associated with the creation of artefacts as a source of experience and emotion, while research is devoted to the production of knowledge.

The paper sets out the context of craft, its challenge to exist between Art and Design (Dormer 1997) as a discipline and activity, which is bound to the sensibilities of material and material understanding (Risatti 2007), making and haptic perception, and to the production of emotional values. It introduces the need for creative research in the crafts, which builds on maker’s tacit knowledge, and cites examples of practice-led craft research to underpin this claim (Townsend 2004; Niedderer et al 2006; Masterson 2007; Treadaway 2009). The paper argues the case for a new position for craft based research, in contrast with the current strictures of research, and proposes experiential knowledge as the unifying conceptual underpinning of both.

The article has been submitted for publication in The Design Journal and is under review. Since the conference, three further editorials in Craft Research have built on its position, confirming its contribution to the field of craft research (http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=172/) .