The Making – Value and Values in the Craft Object

169-183
With an educational background in both the crafts and industrial design, I have a continuing research interest in the relationship between the two and several previous projects have explored this overlapping territory (most recently the EPSRC ‘Emotional Wardrobe’ project within which I compared product and garment design practices). The research presented in this paper involved a detailed literature review in relation to the historic evolution of contemporary crafts, craft and design processes, the nature of skills and their particular relationship with craft and design practice. The research also involved comparative analysis of the crafts and consumer goods markets and several concise case studies of influential craft practitioners. Semiotic indicators and the broad cultural context of artefacts were analysed in order to develop a comparative model of values and value in the craft object. The work reported in this paper explored the financial value of the crafts alongside their human values and led to the establishment of a taxonomy of these values. The paper concludes with recommendations for strategic improvements, so that craft practice can become more accessible to a wider audience and hence more economically sustainable in the long term.
The project resulted in several new models, notably the clarification of generic craft roles, a craft skills continuum, a historical model of the relationship between production and cost, value indicators and generic craft values, and the crafts as a socio-economic intervention process. The international conference where the paper was presented provided a unique forum for craft historians, theorists and practitioners to analyse contemporary craft culture where these models could be seen to be closely aligned to the emerging field of ‘craft science’.