Heritage preserved
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board is involved in another project to enhance craftsmanship, where routines and instructions are developed to support craftspersons to take part in documentation before and during a restoration.
Visiting craft researcher
Craft skills are often maintained in professional practice, but even in this case exploration does not always make economic sense when coupled with production. Know-how and skills are primarily means to produce; developing methods and improving skills is the way to improve personal competence. In order to provide the opportunity for craftspeople and businesses to exchange knowledge and development of methods outside the professional field, the Craft Laboratory has established a programme for visiting craft researchers. In this way, a craftsman affiliated to the University of Gothenburg can get economic support, access to workshops, research infrastructure and scholar mentorship to investigate a craft-related problem, to create learning resources or experiment new work methods, tools and products. This practice-led craft research is theoretical in the sense that it is aimed at explaining and understanding the craft procedures and processes, and practical because both the methodology and the findings depend on the researchers’ ability to skilfully perform the procedures and control the processes - as opposed to knowing how they are performed or controlled.
Craftsmanship as an academic research discipline
One may question the risks and the advantages deriving from ‘academising’ the crafts. The answer is not unambiguous. Nevertheless, one may look at surgery as the discipline of medicine where the research emerges from practical surgery, and is carried out by surgeons to support a better practice. In a similar way, the Craft Laboratory seeks to strengthen the field of practice in traditional crafts, in a way that theoretical inquiry is not an external contemplating position for a theorist, but a perspective from within that is grounded on the logic of practice.
AN OPEN DIALOGUE Above, detail of the decorations in the cathedral of Nidaros. Craft Laboratory seminaries focus on heritage crafts.
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