The role of craft in creative innovation: skin, cloth and metal

This paper explores the central idea of creative innovation in the crafts through research methodologies informed by experiential knowledge of fashion, textiles and jewellery practices. The relationship between the body, materials and technology is reinforced through discussion of aspects of two projects, Crafting Anatomies (Townsend et al 2015) and Flex-It (Dean and Niedderer 2014) which the authors were involved in and which draw on references to advanced, modern and historical crafting contexts. The paper seeks to demonstrate how craft, and research through craft, can facilitate creative innovation by mediating the recursive interaction between analogue and digital techniques (Adamson 2015). In Crafting Anatomies, skin as material and clothing, is the starting point from which to craft new biological, surgical and wearable outcomes, informed by fashion and textile approaches. Flex-It explores elasticity as a medium for emotional expression in silver jewellery design and production, and how complex pieces devised using established techniques to incorporate moving parts, can be produced using additive manufacturing. The examples demonstrate how craft continually reinvents itself, by contributing to its own development while benefiting the wider areas of human experience and existence