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Making Futures: the crafts as change maker in sustainably aware cultures builds upon the success of the first 2009 international conference, Making Futures: the crafts in the context of emerging global sustainability agendas. The purpose of the Making Futures project is to improve understanding of the ways in which the contemporary crafts are practiced in relation to significant and new developing agendas relating to global environmental and sustainability issues.

The crafts, perhaps more than many areas of creative practice, have instinctively strong affinities with concerns for environmentally responsible and sustainable development. For example, Western craft ideals (perhaps less so realities) have typically sought to mobilise aesthetic experience as a key dimension and expression of responsible living in the face of mass industrialization - through their empathy with natural materials and the natural world, and through ‘slow’ and cooperative models of living. Indeed, as was made clear through the first Making Futures conference, a lively and significant sustainability and ethical practice debate is taking place within craft practitioner circles and concrete practice-based initiatives are emerging which strive for those re-articulations and new formulations of practice, identity and audiences. This phenomenon de-facto represents a revived micro-political level of engagement that modestly, but fundamentally, operates as a change maker, literally making the future, and in terms that are potentially charged with global significance. But it also problematises contemporary craft, making it a contested notion and opening it to interpretation in ways that might challenge or extend, as well as include, more typical associations with the applied arts and studio crafts.

Making Futures is therefore about agency, change and the search for new grounds and understandings. Fully aware of the stakes, it seeks to advance beyond cataclysmic (and somewhat debilitating) narratives on environmental sustainability, to present, amplify, contextualise and appraise the significance of the actors, actions and projects; to explore the idea that emerging sustainability agendas interrupt and restage the possibilities of craft in fundamental ways that are important to makers, their audiences, and to society more generally. In short, to understand whether these agendas offer opportunities for the crafts to redefine and reconstitute themselves as less marginalised, more centrally productive forces in society, through new formulations and/or re-articulations of practices, identities, positions and markets, in ways that might engage more closely with contemporary social and cultural needs. In this way Making Futures not only explores from an applied arts perspective crafts shifting practices and meanings in the context of environmental sustainability, but the ways in which craft itself might become a methodological frame through which to think through a wider set of socio-economic and cultural factors.

Making Futures: The Crafts as Change Maker in Sustainably Aware Cultures will be held on Thursday 15th and Friday 16th September 2011 at Dartington Hall on the inspiring Dartington Estate, Devon, UK.

The conference will bring together an international cast of academics, practitioners, curators, campaigners, activists, and representatives from associated organisations and agencies, to develop and explore the conference themes. As with the first conference, this edition of Making Futures will seek to incorporate a diverse range of practice-based case studies with approaches rooted in historical and cultural modelling. Both practice and theory will encompass social, technological, critical-theoretical, economic and political, and pedagogic perspectives. In addition to this established agenda, for the 2011 conference we wish to explore two new significant investigative themes that began to emerge as concerns during the first conference: Craft as Social Process and Craft in an Expanded Field. Please see 'Conference Themes' for full details.

The Making Futures conference invites submissions from practitioners, curators, theoreticians, historians, campaigners, activists, and representatives of public and private agencies with an interest in the relationship between the contemporary crafts, social engagement and sustainability issues.

To ensure the widest possible dissemination of the conference outcomes, all papers will be published as Volume 2 of the on-line journal, Making Futures. Plymouth College of Art will maintain this as a long-term open-access research resource. Volume 1 containing the papers from the first edition of Making Futures can be found at:

Making Futures: The Crafts in the Context of Emerging Global Sustainability Agendas. Vol 1. ISSN 2042-1664
http://makingfutures.plymouthart.ac.uk/journalvol1