D Wood - Craft is Political

Craft is Political

Craft is Political

Edited by D Wood

Contents

My sincere thanks to:
The authors who responded to my request for essays and trusted my ability to oversee their work and this project;
the reviewers, pre- and post-manuscript, who gave the project a thumbs up;
Libby Davies, for seeing the project through on behalf of Bloomsbury;
Frances Whitehead, who said, do what you know;
and, above all, Tony Fry, who said, do it.

D Wood

In 2009, during the first months of my doctoral candidacy in Design Studies in New Zealand, I attended a lecture by Bill McKibben, the American environmentalist and climate change campaigner. McKibben was at the University of Otago to promote 350.org, his worldwide association that advocates private and public action to reduce global warming. The organization was founded in 2008 when the atmosphere contained about 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Having paid little attention to atmospherics to that point, I found McKibben ardent and inspiring and the lecture stayed with me. I am not a marcher or soap-boxer or group-joiner, so over the next few years I wondered what I could do to counter the ruinous society of which I am part.

World travels brought me back to the southern hemisphere in 2016 to attend a workshop with consequences that are reported regularly.

Reflection on my contribution to global unsettlement needed more urgency, but the issues were overwhelming and seemed beyond my expertise and capability. Then, one of the workshop facilitators said, do what you know. Craft is what I know as a practitioner, teacher, researcher and writer and an idea began to evolve. Instead of being privately passionate about craft I could publicly promote it as an alternative to mass-produced temporarily adequate goods; advocate for the maintenance of craft skills; proselytize about repair and retrofitting; draw attention to the importance of the hand for much more than pressing a touch screen; and continue to write, bringing recognition to little-known craft practitioners and practices.