Description
Making Futures 2024 will explore craft encounters with current material innovations where artists, artisans, designers and others work across disciplines and communities toward a more equitable, sustainable and resilient world. The conference looks at how these encounters begin to alter both the formal and conceptual expectations of craft, opening traditional techniques to the behavioural, biological and environmental dimensions of physical matter beyond object-making, to take a more holistic view of how materiality shapes and influences human experience.
As with all forms of creative practice, the boundary of what is considered ‘craft’ is fugitive—adapting and transforming as we look with urgency at how the deep, historical knowledge and artisan traditions associated with craft might provide contemporary society with an alternative to our current habits of consumption and enable us to live more respectfully with each other, the natural world and our planet.
CALL FOR PAPERS & PARTICIPATION
We are inviting participation in Making Futures 2024 to be held 17, 18 and 19 of October, 2024 in Plymouth, UK and online.
We are seeking contributions from designers, artists, makers, educators, scholars, policymakers, scientists, and any creator or curator of culture on the topics covered in the upcoming conference focused on areas of material practice and craft that are breaking new ground.
We are most interested in aspects of material-led creative practices and innovations that expand traditional techniques into new domains of design practice, knowledge production and exchange, interdisciplinary thinking and making, cross-cultural learning, material hybridity, speculative or new materialism, creative and material ecologies, models of art/science pedagog, small-scale and distributed material production, circularity in material practice and education, and other physical and philosophical interfaces between life, matter, and creativity.