Design Beyond Traditional, Contemporary and Digital Craftsmanship

Timeframe: 2017-2020

This doctoral research focuses on craft values both in digital craftsmanship and handmaking practices. It sets out to explore the question: how can we use the role of craftsmanship expertise and knowledge, to re-define prototypes quality in practice-based design research communities? By initiating debate and dialogues with craft practitioners from very different backgrounds and by observing them in their studios, we are building a deeper understanding of the attributes that are mostly associated with hand and/or digital making and their relevance to the design process. Reinforcing handmaking values in digital practices could be relevant when producing design prototypes able to support debates around the importance of the role of making and the future of craftsmanship and practice-based design processes. Form, materials, crafting processes and interactive elements are powerful choices the designer makes every time he/she wishes to build a narrative around a prototype. These elements are able to heavily shape the discussion around the artefacts, within communities that focus heavily on making processes (e.g. RtD community).