The Crafts+Fabrication Workshop: Engaging Students with Intangible Cultural Heritage-Oriented Creative Design

Abstract

Engaging local communities is essential to safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (ICH). To better encourage the participation of local communities, especially younger generations, e.g., students, ICH experience and education workshops are widely adopted by academia, museums, governments, and non-profit organizations. The expected outcomes of these workshops, such as archives, documents, and even creative design solutions, can benefit the promotion and preservation of ICH. However, because of the steep learning curve of using traditional ICH tools and the lack of interactions between students and ICH practitioners, many ICH workshops currently fail to engage students in learning ICH-related knowledge, developing empathy with ICH, or designing novel artifacts with ICH elements. To bridge this gap, we designed a workshop, which integrated ICH in China, digital fabrication, creative technology, and making, to engage Chinese students with ICH and creative design. We conducted empirical studies to collect feedback from students (N = 30) and ICH professionals (N=6). The application of digital fabrication tools successfully piqued students' interest in ICH and enabled them to create interactive ICH artifacts through quick prototyping. However, the ICH professionals pointed out several issues of using digital fabrication, especially regarding tacit knowledge, use of traditional tools, and cultural authenticity. We discuss the importance of these factors in students' acquisition of ICH knowledge and ICH-oriented design, and provide implications for future ICH design workshops.