Repositioning Contemporary Crafts by Crafts-Consumers’ Values: Roles of Crafts and Craftspeople for Sustainable Crafts

Abstract

Contemporary crafts might have lost something in its translation and transition along cultural changes. People-centred crafts research is focused on interactive communication between craftspeople and crafts-consumers, and this research plays a role in the transformation into the written word toward the construction of fundamental crafts research which can be applied to the early design process and the development of crafts. Research for people-centred crafts implies paramount research for the relation between crafts and people who share and possess them, stressing the need for crafts-consumer studies that craftspeople, as makers, have not paid enough attention to (i.e., studies of consumers who experience the objects). People-centred crafts research also aims toward a sustainable future of crafts.

People who give craftspeople and crafts new missions for the flourishing of beauty in their lives are the people who use and enjoy crafts in ordinary life. Crafts research needs to approach various issues in crafts with a broadened perspective. There are some crafts studies about crafts and the human, but while numerous academic crafts research projects have attempted to explore aesthetic value with an inclination toward art, the topic of ‘use’ connected to people who use crafts is far from a fully studied and analysed research project. No matter what the makers intend for their works, there can be limits in transforming and incorporating the work for ordinary people’s lives if the fundamental study of ‘use’ is not made. One jeweller, Alyssa Dee Krauss, has said that what excites her is the relationship that can exist between a piece and its wearer, an object and its holder; the idea that people develop personal, sentimental, or intellectual affinities with objects (Ramljak 2005). Her philosophical background in her works suggests to what crafts research must shift their attention. Crafts research must touch upon the relationship between crafts and crafts-holders or wearers, which can generate new values and meanings in the process of domestication. Through observing, interviewing, and participating in crafts-consumer activities, the attention of the researchers needs to focus on the meaning of crafts-consumers’ values. The interactive communication between craftspeople and crafts-consumers will play a role in the transformation of a new set of crafts knowledge. Crafts research does not end with the finished physical work or critics’ perspectives and assessments of the work, but must rather come to a conclusion by the evaluations from interconnections within people’s everyday lives and the objects; users and the objects.