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Community Making & Making Communities: Crafting non/digital interactions Mary Loveday Edwards_ and Hannah Maughan_ Falmouth University [email protected]; [email protected] CARE, which stands for ‘Community Asset-based Abstract Research and Enterprise,’ is a research project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council’s Millions engage in creative handicrafts, activities that are Connected Communities Programme. It brought undertaken voluntarily for pleasure and involve high levels of together an interdisciplinary team of academics, competence and creativity, representing an important area of practitioners and community researchers to work community asset that is often devalued or dismissed (Hackney, T H collaboratively with hobbycraft (amateur or voluntary) 2013a). This paper draws on research from the AHRC-funded E M groups. The aim was to test and develop a project Co-creating CARE (Community Asset-based Research and E : D methodology for co-produced community learning Enterprise), which explores how crafts knowledge might be applied E M through creative practice, skill-sharing and storytelling through processes of co-design (engaging all stakeholders), co- O C to build confidence and promote self-reflection and creation (collaborative work) and co-discovery (by formal and R A reflexivity. We wanted to explore how craft knowledge informal researchers). The project works with community groups T I S might be applied through processes of co-design and partners in Cornwall, Birmingham and Dublin and uses I N G (engaging all stakeholders), co-creation (collaborative participatory action research methods in digital fabrication, virtual T E work) and co-discovery (by formal and informal communication, and face-to-face activities and workshops. C H researchers). The project worked with community CARE initially aimed to explore how craft might work as a bridging N O groups and partners in Cornwall, Birmingham and activity, bringing disparate groups together to enhance social L O G Dublin and used participatory action research capital. A series of short films were made to explore Y methods in digital fabrication, virtual communication, intergenerational skill sharing through creative making (Hackney, and face-to-face activities and workshops. Co-creating 2013b). These demonstrated how film can communicate crafts in CARE was a big project, but not a digitally-based or community settings; the activity also revealed the power focused one. In the context of the All Makers Now? relationships embedded in creative exchange, as tensions emerged conference we will discuss why we were impelled or around, for instance, digital making, suggesting important moved towards including digital elements, what these questions about the future of traditional skills and how these might elements were, and their effect on the project. be productively combined with new technologies (Maughan, 2014). Creative hobbies are a fertile ground for exploration: To find out more about collective sharing through making, research millions engage in them each year. Activities such as took what we term a ‘material consequences’ approach, embracing knitting, crochet, embroidery, woodworking, playfulness and risk. Participating groups were asked to metalwork, photography, quilting, lace-making, basket collaboratively devise ways to capture and reflect on the ‘small making, beadwork, model making and weaving, for stories’ of collaborative interaction through making. The resulting instance, are undertaken voluntarily for pleasure and research ‘texts’ (a digital sharing platform, a sewing box of involve high levels of ingenuity, competence and embroidered ethnographies (stitched stories and interactions) and a creativity. Hobbies are particularly valuable for this digital fabrication workshop) embody and materialise a narrative of project because they represent an important area of co-discovery as groups address the value of learning and through community asset and strength: skills, knowledge, sharing and making, digitally and otherwise, and reflect on how this expertise and capabilities that are often devalued or knowledge might be applied in other aspects of their lives. dismissed (Hackney, 2013a), but which, if recognised, might be developed and applied more widely through Keywords: Co-design, community, stitch. volunteering, training, community activism, small business or social enterprise. A focus on handicrafts offers opportunities for an integrated participatory methodology (co-creation) that both grows from the grassroots and has the potential to be scaled up and applied to other communities of interest such as sports clubs, business groups, ecological societies, performers, dance enthusiasts or gardeners (Wenger, 2002). While small group settings foster dialogue, the experience of making, whether drawing, construction, knitting or sewing, brings something more that can enhance trust and focus concentration 79 All Makers Now? | Conference Journal . Vol 1 . 2014 | Falmouth University | ISBN: 978-0-9544187-9-3 Loveday Edwards, M. et al. (Csikszentmihayli, 1979). But there is something more relationships embedded in creative exchange, as than this which became and remains central to the tensions emerged around, for instance, digital making, project; making is connected with narration. There is a suggesting important questions about the future of long history of women talking while they make, traditional skills and how these might be productively exchanging confidences and telling their life histories in combined with new technologies. Hannah Maughan sewing groups and quilting bees, which we wanted to was Practice Researcher and was buddied up with explore. Barbara, a member of the local branch of the West When working with proposed and existing groups Country Embroiderers. Barbara is a self-taught and within the project we needed to be clear about what phenomenally talented technical maker who is we meant by community . Alison Gilchrist, who was a particularly interested in traditional embroidery. consultant on CARE and has been involved in Barbara, who volunteered to be part of the project, community development for over thirty years, has was invited to fill a shoebox with objects which drawn on complexity theory to argue that community expressed herself and her craft. As the recipient, is an integrated and evolving system of diverse and Hannah’s task was to creatively respond to the dynamic networks. She promotes an edge of chaos contents of the box alongside a short film of Barbara model of community between rigidity and in her home, speaking about her practice. Hannah T H randomness in which arrangements of untidy creativity responded to the task in this way: E M operate. This is very different from the relatively rigid, E : D settled values and practices that characterise long- The box contained all the ingredients of a E M established groups. Gilchrist also reminds us that Mountmellick embroidery kit which Barbara had O C communities can function in positive and negative carefully put together, including thread, fabric (with R A ways. This was important to remember. While informal a hand drawn outline of a motif) , A4 instruction T I S networks can work as a collective resource, they can leaflet and a photograph of the finished piece of I N G also be oppressive and exclusive, preventing the work (Barbara’s I assume). T E community acquiring new insights or learning from C H different or challenging experiences. Barbara had gifted me a mini project in itself. It N O In addition, Richard Sennett argues that modern suggested step by step learning, the passing on of L O G society is de-skilling people as social isolation and the knowledge and skill, all of which greatly appeals to Y superficial nature of social contact (through short term me. It created an instant link between us, my way of labour or online interactions) breeds anxiety about thinking and teaching and Barbara’s experience of those other and different from ourselves. Cooperation, her embroidery group and how she approaches her in contrast, allows us to benefit from exchange by craft and learning. However, my initial response was achieving what couldn’t be done alone. that it would be far too easy for me to take up the True cooperation is a difficult, demanding process; a kit, complete it and be done with it, and in this sense ‘fraught, ambiguous zone of experience where skill and I wondered if that was what Barbara expected. competence encounter resistance and intractable Instead, I tuned into the film and was fascinated by difference’ (Sennet, 2012). This echoes Gilchrist’s (2000) both the words and the work that featured. The film notion of an intermediate zone of ‘untidy making’ and was far more personal and gave a stronger insight captures some of the tensions experienced in our phase into Barbara. What stood out to me was the one buddy exchanges . Participants’ different notions of traditional bobbin Honiton lace work that Barbara creative making alternately clashed or found grounds painstakingly and beautifully produces by hand; a for compromise. Sennett (2012) argues that exchanges true labour of love and evident personal passion. I of difference (what he terms ‘dialogic cooperation’) or had for some time been looking for an opportunity the location of common ground (‘dialectic cooperation’) to explore ways to investigate making lace digitally or, most often, a combination of the two, are necessary and saw this as an opening. to achieve knitted together interactions. He contends

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