The Craft Laboratory
The Craft Laboratory is a national centre for crafts and craft professionals. The Craft Laboratory promotes, transfers, safeguards, and develops traditional craft skills in the fields of building crafts, cultural landscapes, and gardening crafts - knowledge that is essential for the care and development of cultural environments and for the work towards a sustainable future.
Craft Sciences refers to diverse research activities conducted across and within different craft subjects and academic contexts. The field is transdisciplinary and holds a breadth of topics, source material, methods, perspectives, and results.
Research at the Craft Laboratory employs a variety of theories and methods that deal with different temporalities, from the study of history and the examination of present materials and practices to the forecast, design, or making of heritage futures. The research is mainly practice-led, and the research groups involve practitioner-researchers, with the common goal to inform, sustain or improve craft practices. A recurring approach is to develop projects in collaboration with stakeholders in practice, using cultural environments and restoration or construction sites as laboratories.
The Craft Laboratory perceives craft as the processes of making, hence theories and methods in craft research need to elicit and substantiate the process of making, its motion, sensation, vision, and haptic experience. Consequently, we have a keen interest in dynamic ways of documenting and mediating experiences and non-traditional approaches and outputs for research communication.
