Making Futures Research Group

Description

Making Futures is a research platform exploring contemporary craft and maker movements as ‘change agents’ in 21st-century society.

Making Futures upholds this diversity of practices and traditions because the group believes these exchanges enable it to develop a unique set of cross-cultural perspectives on contemporary craft and related micro-maker entrepreneurs across non-Western as well as Western forms of modernity and post-modernity. Recent Making Futures conferences and related events have taken place in Beijing, China, Cebu City, Philippines and Cheongju, Korea.

Community is at the heart of the Making Futures agenda as well as appreciating the value of makers as singular creative agents producing material objects, focusing on the social dimensions of maker practices and how these can positively contribute to the construction and regeneration of communities.

Convinced of the transformative potential of small-scale making and its capacity to contribute to new progressive futures, Making Futures seeks to situate these material cultures at the centre of the critical issue facing global consumer society: how to move beyond the reductive instrumentalism of ‘homo economicus’ and modes of mass consumption that are destructive of human and non-human natures.

As such Making Futures purpose is to explore the possibilities for maker economies built around contemporary craft, neo-artisanal design-to-make and related creative micro-entrepreneurs and movements. Making Futures believes that these activities have the potential to consolidate into nascent post-industrial maker ecologies that, while not replacing global consumer manufacturing, can nonetheless contribute substantially to progressive economic and social change at local and regional levels and beyond.

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

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University affiliation(s)

Arts University Plymouth
Tavistock Place
Plymouth
PL4 8AT