MAKING
FUTURES
CRAFT AND THE (RE)TURN OF THE MAKER IN A POST-GLOBAL SUSTAINABLY
AWARE SOCIETY
For the website please click HERE>
Making
Futures
will be held on Thursday 24th and Friday 25th September 2015 in the
magnificently sited Mount Edgcumbe house on the River Tamar opposite the city of
Plymouth, Devon, UK.
Making
Futures investigates
contemporary craft and maker movements as ‘change agents’ within 21st century
society, particularly in relation to global sustainability agendas, social
innovation and community regeneration. Embracing contemporary craft and making
as instances of thought in action, and convinced of their transformative
potential at personal and communal levels, Making Futures envisages
the ‘return of the maker’ as a radically open project capable of
generating new progressive possibilities - of contributing to new social and
economic futures.
Making
Futures welcomes submissions from all who have an interest in the
relationship between contemporary making, sustainability and social change,
including artists, craftspeople, designers and design groups, curators,
historians, theorists, campaigners, activists, and enterprises engaging in
making and/or with makers.
We welcome proposals for practice-led case
studies, presentations based in critical-theoretical and historical analysis,
and unconventional formats that might include performance, objects, AV, and
other media and materials. The working language is English but the scope is
international and we welcome accounts from non-western contexts.
CONFERENCE THEMES:The
call is open to three Research Workshops and the six Indicative Themes that more
generally underpin the Making Futures series:
Indicative
Themes:
- Lifecycles
of Material Worlds (Sustainability in Practice)
- Craft
in an Expanded Field
- Critical
Perspectives on Producers & Consumers
- Translations
Across Local-Global Divides
- Materials
& Processes of Making
- Making
Thinking (Crafting Education)
- Digital
Crafting – Defining the Field
in collaboration with the School of Materials, The Royal College of
Art.
- Makers
& Frugal Innovation
in collaboration with the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, and
Fab Lab Barcelona.
- Place-Making-Space:
tools and methods for ‘crafting communities’ and ‘making
places’
in collaboration with the Community21 Sustainable Design Research Group at the
University of Brighton.
KEYNOTES:We
are pleased to announce the following confirmed keynotes:
- Rebecca
Burgess,
Executive Director of Fibershed, San Geronimo, Northern California, USA.
Fibreshed is an international network of regional textile communities based on
carbon farming, regenerative textile manufacturing, and public education, and a
co-founder of the Carbon Cycle Institute (CCI).
- Keith Harrison,
International Artist-Maker and Research Professor at Bath Spa University, UK.
Keith has been involved in a series of process-based live public experiments
that investigate the direct physical transformation of clay from a raw state
utilising industrial and domestic electrical systems. Kieth will also be showing
in one of the associated exhibitions, Acts of Making.
- Mark
Miodownik,
Director of the Institute of Making, University College London, UK, a
multidisciplinary research club for those interested in the made world: from
makers of molecules to makers of buildings, synthetic skin to spacecraft, soup
to clothes, from furniture to cities.
- Cameron
Tonkinwise,
Director of Design Studies, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, USA.
Cameron’s areas of research include Sustainable Design, systems of shared use,
and the role designers can play in enabling social systems change.
CONFERENCE EXHIBITIONSAlongside
the conference we will run two major exhibitions:
Acts of Making:
a
Crafts Council Touring Project in partnership with Plymouth College of Art and
Plymouth City Council, Arts & Heritage; 2015
Jerwood Makers Open:
a
UK national exhibition commissioned by Jerwood Visual Arts.
CONFERENCE BURSARIES:A
limited number of full bursaries are available to independent makers, see
website for details.
REGISTRATION OPENTo
facilitate high levels of delegate interaction conference places are limited.
Early bird offer: book before 17th May 2015 and save £40 on the Full
2 Day Registration Fee.
FOR FULL DETAILS PLEASE VISIT THE CONFERENCE
WEBSITE HERE>
|
