Abstract
Material interactions are fundamental to design and craft education; however, they might also provide opportunities to reflect on sustainable behaviour in general. In this paper, we present an interdisciplinary undergraduate course in which students interacted with clay and wool. By engaging novices in material-based craft processes, we examined renewed ways of experiencing the materials to reconsider our everyday material interactions and our dependency and responsibilities in regard to materials in general. Through this example, we discuss the potential of craft practice as an educational platform to discuss materiality and to facilitate a deeper and more holistic understanding of the consequences of our material behaviour beyond the creative practices. The students’ reflections over the five weeks touched upon their renewed appreciation of materials, and their changed interactions with materials – moving towards a dialogical stance rather than only using them as a means to an end.
Keywords
design education, material exploration, interdisciplinary, novice makers
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.229
Citation
Aktas, B., and Groth, C. (2020) Studying Material Interactions to Facilitate a Sense of Being with the World, in Boess, S., Cheung, M. and Cain, R. (eds.), Synergy - DRS International Conference 2020, 11-14 August, Held online. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.229
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Studying Material Interactions to Facilitate a Sense of Being with the World
Material interactions are fundamental to design and craft education; however, they might also provide opportunities to reflect on sustainable behaviour in general. In this paper, we present an interdisciplinary undergraduate course in which students interacted with clay and wool. By engaging novices in material-based craft processes, we examined renewed ways of experiencing the materials to reconsider our everyday material interactions and our dependency and responsibilities in regard to materials in general. Through this example, we discuss the potential of craft practice as an educational platform to discuss materiality and to facilitate a deeper and more holistic understanding of the consequences of our material behaviour beyond the creative practices. The students’ reflections over the five weeks touched upon their renewed appreciation of materials, and their changed interactions with materials – moving towards a dialogical stance rather than only using them as a means to an end.