Co-crafting the social: material manifestations through collaborative crafts

Abstract

This paper examines how material craft processes align and orient participatory, open, and playful co-design into a constructive and capability-building activity. The paper suggests how materiality, tools, and craft agency gives a particular perspective on participatory and hands-on constructive craft processes. These co-design processes complement collaborative visioning to have participants engage tools and materials and help guide tangible outcomes in negotiated directions. Examining the case of a mobile craft workshop called Sloydtrukk, the text frames co-craft as a concrete social ‘construction site’. By emphasising the material and practical elements of collaboration, building together, and experiencing quick results of social processes, co-craft is a form of direct action or direct manifestation of participatory making. The paper examines a series of hands-on transformations that shape social-material manifestations of collaborative craft prototyping, where participants experience immediate results of their shared efforts. The hands-on construction differs from more abstract, discursive, and discussion-based forms of collaboration and co-design, where efforts focus on visioning and agreeing on future action. With craft processes, immediate needs are met with shared efforts, guided by material, practical and craft-based co-design, combining fast and slow prototyping processes that we call co-craft.