Co-crafting the social: material manifestations through collaborative crafts

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how material craft processes align and orient participatory, open, and playful co-design into a constructive and capability-building activity. The paper suggests how materiality, tools, and craft agency gives a particular perspective on participatory and hands-on constructive craft processes. These co-design processes complement collaborative visioning to have participants engage tools and materials and help guide tangible outcomes in negotiated directions. Examining the case of a mobile craft workshop called Sloydtrukk, the text frames co-craft as a concrete social ‘construction site’. By emphasising the material and practical elements of collaboration, building together, and experiencing quick results of social processes, co-craft is a form of direct action or direct manifestation of participatory making. The paper examines a series of hands-on transformations that shape social-material manifestations of collaborative craft prototyping, where participants experience immediate results of their shared efforts. The hands-on construction differs from more abstract, discursive, and discussion-based forms of collaboration and co-design, where efforts focus on visioning and agreeing on future action. With craft processes, immediate needs are met with shared efforts, guided by material, practical and craft-based co-design, combining fast and slow prototyping processes that we call co-craft.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-craft
• participation
• prototyping
• tools
• making
• capability approach

1 Introduction: a quest for tangible co-design “in the wild”

As design processes become increasingly collaborative, they also become more complex and abstract. What was historically associated with the practice of making and the production of goods becomes progressively more intangible. Rather than producing ‘stuff’ in the workshop at the design office, the designers are shaping prototypical interventions out ‘in the wild’, as Storni et al. (2015, 149) suggests:

Design is becoming less confined to the design studio with well-identified stakeholders. It takes new forms as public interventions and as explorations ‘in the wild’. This means that it becomes more difficult to understand the scope and limits of design interventions, and therefore design research needs new tools to address and reflect these changes.

Participation is becoming the foundational principle for design practices, engaging users and stakeholders through various means, navigating and negotiating conflicts, and working in the middle of social tensions, to gain insights towards design decisions. This wilderness of the design environment, while working with vague understanding and goals, means design researchers and practitioners need new tools to address and reflect such changes. Co-design processes are becoming an everyday go-to when engaging with such ‘wicked problems’ where designers have problems gaining an overview of complex and contradictory environments (Rittel and Webber 1973).

In such settings, co-design and participatory processes have emerged as essential elements in many design and making processes (Sanders and Pieter Stappers 2014). However, in many cases, shared visioning processes can be hard to bridge with practical and tangible elements where users can take part in the production of the shared outcome. There is always a risk that issues remain abstract and intangible and left removed from the hands-on and material potentials of design. With participatory processes, the realm of action and material considerations leaves the hands of the designer, and may become replaced by administration, and facilitation, especially when taking place in vague or ‘wild’ unstructured territories. In this case, designing ‘in the wild’ means a complex, messy design situation where the design framing is loose and constantly changing. The designer has limited control over the number of participants, who they are, their age, skills, or motives for participating. Participants and stakeholders may enter and leave the process at will, and in frustration, claim that the co-design process is ‘just talk’. As Latour (2010, 802) writes: ‘whenever an action is conceived as networky, it has to pay the full price of its extension, it’s composed mainly of voids’. This is a void that can risk consuming participatory design processes, and that can be hard to fill with the common materials of co-design vision processes, such as cardboard models and sticky notes. In participatory settings where the ‘void’ emerges the process may suffer from ‘lacking context’ (Koskinen et al., 2011, 4), where Hansson (2021, 131) notes design prototypes risk becoming ‘too future-oriented, lacking connection to the present’. When designing ‘in the wild’, many tacit understandings and perspectives clash as designers and users try to bridge the voids between them, and in such unstructured environment there is a risk of rushing to quick conclusions, being insensitive to local cultures, and failing to recognise traditions and informal decision networks, loyalties, and hierarchies. On the other hand, staying too long with organisational and conceptual processes can leave participants alienated, feeling their volunteer time is being wasted.

As Hansson (2021, 149) has observed, many co-design practices turn abstract and quickly become de-contextualised when working in settings with little experience of formal design processes. While brainstorming and unpacking a problem using post-it notes may make sense in offices and on whiteboards, Hansson notices how the same sticky notes appear alien in other settings, such as in a participatory design workshop in rural Kenya and fails to concretise the participant’s ideas of immediate change. Guided by the needs for unspoken yet specific values and visions of outcomes, designers may impose their design solutions without regard for the local knowledge networks and traditions (Gewald, Leliveld, and Peša 2012). At worst, the design process may become so detached from the local context that it can result in a form of cultural destruction (Mwangi and Rutten 2012; Maathai 2010). So, we set out to examine more closely, and ask ‘how can collaborative making and craft elements in co-design processes make abstract visioning “in the wild” become more concrete and help mobilise participation over a longer time?’

2 Co-craft and capabilities as tangible complements to co-design

Removed from the design office, out ‘in the wild’, the design process differs from the more linear and criteria-based client-to-designer problem statement that defines a typical design brief (Cross 2008). Uncertainties, conflicts and ‘voids’ are ever-present. To anchor work and enhance participant agency, more context-based methods can be used and implemented, focusing on listening techniques, such as Hamdi’s (2004) ‘small change approach’. This means highlighting the importance of context, building on local engagement, amplifying existing processes, and emphasising incremental tangible processes and results to build a sense of community between diverse participants and sustain a sense of commitment to the shared outcome. Hamdi suggests small but tangible results help to build trust and open for longer and more committed engagements with participants. With practical and constructive elements, hands-on and at full scale, making together helps make abstract ideas ‘anchored in tangible reality’ (Sennett 2008, 21). Both the process and the results can be experienced by all involved. Tangible and material-based processes have significant implications and are essential parts in crafts, help shape shared meaning and offer tools for collaborative place-making (Corcoran, Marshall, and Walsh 2018). The advantage of in-situ processes, with fast prototyping in the local context, is that it provides quick feedback and iteration, which helps engage locals in participatory processes (Wei, Bryan-Kinns, and Sheridan 2020). Craft engagements can complement co-design processes with a hands-on approach, manifesting tangible results to otherwise vague decisions, to build trust and move processes forward ‘in the wild’.

The social aspect of craft is not necessarily all intuitive. Craft has traditionally been understood as a solitary practice or at least celebrated as such in the studio tradition of crafts and the popular term ‘Do-It-Yourself’ or DIY. But as with design, a discipline having moved from the private studio to engagement across the social realm, craft is becoming more popular as a materials-based method to engage users in immediate and constructive design forms. In contrast to the managerial process of co-design, craft practices are rooted in everyday life and material culture, which can support designers to attach and embed their practices in a more sensitive way. As Cheng (2019, 37) asserts, craft can be seen as a ‘negotiation tool’ that helps people to place their work ‘within a material, social, and historical context’. This way of working also comes to touch upon Ratto’s (2011) concept of ‘critical making’ as it provides one methodological entry point encouraging a shift away from a focus on the objects themselves to expand into the shared acts of making. A critical engagement through construction and materials is typical in craft research, as Adamson (2007; 2013) suggests a particular form of ‘thinking through craft’, an approach that emerges from the tangible skills of the craftsperson. By underlining the agency of tools and materials, a more nuanced perspective emerges, de-centring the ideas of the craftsperson or designer towards the situation of more interconnected processes of becoming. Here, Latour’s (2005, 89) notion of the ‘construction site’ can work as a principle for understanding emergent and actuated forms of social construction:

When you are guided to any construction site, you are experiencing the troubling and exhilarating feeling that things could be different, or at least that they could still fail – a feeling never so deep when faced with the final product, no matter how beautiful or impressive it may be.

Just think of the interests and shared forms of attention a construction site can muster, and how people gather around in fascination seeing processes of becoming, be it the mundane pleasure of experiencing a cup of coffee being made, the childhood dream of visiting a chocolate factory, of the urban gatherings around a building coming up. The public construction site, with shared efforts and results, can also work as a testbed and display of the more discreet principles of what John Dewey named ‘publics’ and also how design plays part in them (Marres 2012; Dixon 2020). The constructive craft aspects of the construction site underline a hands-on prototyping practice of possible living, where interests interact, clash, or alliances are formed.

The craft element is not merely about making visioning more concrete in co-design but it also offers the integration of hands-on capability-building alongside the design work. Capabilities can be defined as ‘the freedom that people have to do or be certain things’ (Robeyns and Fibieger Byskov 2020). As Nussbaum (2011, 20) addresses, capabilities are not only ‘abilities residing inside a person but also freedoms and opportunities created by a combination of personal abilities and the political, social, and economic environment’. They do not exist a priori but are shaped in correlation with the surrounding society and environment and can range from elementary and practical skills to more abstract values and social processes. Capabilities, hence, concern what people can be and do.

Co-craft offers an opportunity to integrate the cultivation of practical capabilities into co-design processes and frameworks to increase the agency of participants. Here, agency is defined in line with Sen’s (1985a), 203) notion as ‘what a person is free to do and achieve in pursuit of whatever goals or values he or she regards as important’. According to Alkire (2009), agency primarily refers to people’s opportunities to participate in social, economic, and political actions. With co-craft, it is noted that the agency of participants does not exist a priori but is created and cultivated amongst people. Increasing agency opens new vistas for action and an expansion of valuable freedoms. As Latour (2005a, 52) posits, ‘agencies are always presented in an account as doing something, that is, making some difference to a state of affairs’. Rather than focusing on objects as solutions to a problem, the interest of co-craft concerns how the practical integration of constructive processes into co-design can support creating agencies and capabilities: in changing the local ‘state of affairs’. In being part of collaborative and productive processes, using co-craft, people can engage and take control over their environment, increasing their agency (Hansson 2021, 75–76).

3 Three transformations in innarhult: cases of co-design and co-craft processes

Being practical and tangible by definition, craft practices can help bridge the ‘void’ between participatory ideation and decision processes and their tangible outcome in co-design processes. By curating these craft processes so an emphasis is put on shared, concrete, and accumulative operations, participants can open up for more co-dependent forms of collaboration. To explore these types of participatory prototyping processes, a series of workshops took place north of Gothenburg in 2019 and 2021, intending to expand the interfaces and roles between professionals and amateurs, craftspeople and users, and where the participants involved should be considered ‘collaborative crafters’ (von Busch 2012; Hansson 2021, 83–84). Building on field studies, on-site action research, and interviews with key facilitators, we will soon examine how crafts as a material and tangible practice help facilitate collaborative modes of co-design and making.

The key partner of the research project in Linnarhult is Eco Agroforestry Center (EAC), a civic organisation. EAC was established in 2016 by founding members that have their cultural roots in the East African countries (primarily Uganda, Rwanda, and Ethiopia). As of 19 February 2022, the EAC listed on its website that their vision is to be ‘a buzzing meeting place and social integration centre, a cultural institution that is a known and respected resource amongst the city residents’. EAC’s core pillars are agroforestry, education, integration, and impermanence. Their wish is to make children and youth in the peri-urban areas of Northeastern Gothenburg come to the EAC Linnarhult site for play and recreational activities in nature.

A crucial contributor in the Linnarhult context is Karl Hallberg, one of the founders of Sloydtrukk, a mobile-based design studio based in Fengersfors, Dalsland, about two hours’ drive north of Gothenburg. As mentioned in a personal communication with Hallberg 9 January 2022, Sloydtrukk’s vision is to help build practical capabilities through handicraft, where the satisfaction of building, and being able to act, becomes a result in itself. The Sloydtrukk methodology is about seeing opportunities in the things around us to take action now - not later. With simple craft techniques, they want to teach how to work with the materials and capture the interest through a short introduction to quickly build something tangible and real. The facilitators of Sloydtrukk work with specially made tools that show their origin from the forest and their simple constitution to arouse curiosity as much as underlining their simplicity and tying the constructive processes to previous experiences of making (See Figure 1).

Figure 1. Sloydtrukk’s specially made tools. The tools show their origin from the forest and arouse curiosity. Photo: Hansson (2021).

Engagement in rudimentary craft is not foreign to Swedish youth. The school subject slöjd, or ‘sloyd’, and its pedagogical approach, articulated by Otto Salomon and introduced in the 1870s, was widely adopted across the Nordic education systems (Alm 2012). The basic principles of sloyd are present in school curricula in the Nordic countries and part of compulsory education, and this has also driven the development of research in crafts as a pedagogical activity. Across the last decades, practitioners of traditional craft vocation, utilising participatory research methods beyond archive studies and ethnography, have entered university contexts and academic publishing to shape craft as a living heritage with examples of contemporary utilitarian and sustainable techniques of construction (Almevik 2016).

The workshops were three transformations, showing how fast and tangible prototyping can be embedded in a slower and more long-term prototyping process. Specifically, the three participatory transformations Sloydtrukk organised in Linnarhult used crafts as a method for hands-on development, exemplifying the social construction site of a co-designed collaborative outdoor environment. In all three cases, the objects were co-created together with children and youth of EAC. This will be unpacked more in detail in the next section.

3.1 Transformation 1: co-design activities for visioning

The process started when a student of the master’s program Child Culture Design, Saskia van Ruiten, decided to work with a youth organisation connected to EAC, named Tidsnätverket Bergsjön (TNB). Van Ruiten was interested in what ideas and visions youth (generation Z) have about their future. During her exam project in 2019, van Ruiten conducted several co-creative workshops with young people between 15 and 17 years, where the youth got support in articulating their needs and ideas about change, short-term and long-term. A desire brought forward during these workshops was the idea to create a stage or outdoor cinema in Linnarhult, which EAC saw as an opportunity to develop the place based on young people’s needs. The idea was articulated through classic co-design methods in brainstorming, conversations, and activities where paper sketches, collages, cardboard models and post-it notes were used as tools (Figures 2–3). Van Ruiten then made the youth’s ideas more concrete in a series of photo collages that became part of a project report, the tangible outcome of van Ruiten’s project. A meeting was held with EAC where van Ruiten shared the findings and the youth’s proposals. The report highlighted the need for young people’s voices to be heard and concretised in action. The report further emphasised how young people want to be rewarded through direct feedback on their input, i.e. they want to see tangible results from their efforts through concrete changes. ‘They would like to be rewarded by seeing tangible results arising from their effort’ (van Ruiten 2019).

Figure 2. Co-design activities for visioning. Traditional co-design tools were used, such as cardboard models and post-it notes photo: van Ruiten (2019).

Figure 3. Co-crafting benches. Special tools and methods were used to encourage the collaborative efforts, for example, using a double saw. Photo: Hansson (2021).

As noted above, the first transformation is an example of how traditional co-design is often conducted within an educational design context as a collaborative visioning tool used in discussions, negotiations, and communication. Initially, a set of co-creative workshops are performed, where post-it notes, and cardboard models play an essential role. The result is a project documentation and/or an academic thesis where the ideas of change often stay abstract or are sent upward in the hierarchy or off to decision-makers. But here, the process took another turn.

3.2 Transformation 2: co-crafting benches

In January 2021, with research money from FORMAS, it became possible to revisit van Ruiten’s report and reconnect to the youth’s ideas of building a stage/outdoor cinema. One of the EAC members who volunteered for the TNB organisation initiated this idea. The aim was to concretise change and anchor it ‘in tangible reality’. building on the visions from the previous co-design workshop, the participants now became engaged in a fast and concrete prototyping and building activity. Sloydtrukk was involved in running the practical building part of the workshop, now using materials and elementary craft tools to further develop in the next stage of the transformations.

3.3 Transformation 3: co-crafting the stage/outdoor cinema

The first successful Sloydtrukk activity showed how the co-craft process made the co-design visions real. But more than that, also how the shared visioning work, combined with craft and direct collaborative action, delivered the goods. Sloydtrukk’s collaborative processes made the previously discussed and sketched ideas ready to be realised, using primitive materials such as wood, nails, hammers, and saws. With the help of a truck, materials and tools were brought close to the site. Here workshop participants met up to unload the truck together, carry the materials to the site, and set out to build the outdoor furniture and seating. This ‘making do’ activity (Daniels 2010), was a process of co-craft, and resulted in a set of wooden benches placed on the slope overlooking the site for the envisioned stage and outdoor cinema (Figure 3). About twenty children between 8–25 years participated per day in the prototyping process. The two-day process left the participants with an explicit desire to continue the work and build the remaining part of their shared vision.

For the co-craft workshop, Hallberg of Sloydtrukk had prepared some special methods and tools for making the collaborative efforts in the workshop tangible for all participants. To start with, everybody had to help unload the truck with all materials and tools, carrying the oversized pieces of wood and timber, sledgehammers, and sawhorses. Most things had to have two or more people carrying the tools or equipment, thus spurring informal conversations and a clear need for simple coordination between participants.

Some of the tools of Sloydtrukk had also been made explicitly for co-craft. An example can be how two plain saws had been welded together at the end of the blades, placing the two handles at the opposite ends. (Figure 3). The saw thus required the two people to be operated, synchronising their movements. This simple but very practical part of the workshop emphasised how every participant could join to their best abilities; in carrying materials, mounting, and holding pieces while others cut or nailed pieced together, or using the collaborative saws. All participants could help build. The success led some of the youth who participated in the workshop to continue the process and co-constructed the actual stage/outdoor cinema. They wanted more children and young people from around the area to come to Linnarhult to participate in realising the area’s potential. (It should be noted that the activity took place in the light of the pandemic when there was an emerging need to create safe outdoor spaces where youth were able to gather and meet). Sloydtrukk was hired once again and was in charge of the third transformation which took place over two weekends in early August 2021. Several planning meetings took place via Zoom over the summer, where a working group, including a youth representative, an earlier chairwoman of TNB, discussed how the idea of the stage could be concretised. As EAC Linnarhult allows exposure to many different knowledge and life worlds, Hallberg wanted to develop a process where different knowledge was used. To also adapt to the local context and the material assets at the site Linnarhult, Hallberg chose poling as a method (Figures 3–4). The purpose of the poling method was that many could participate, where co-crafting would demonstrate that we are strong and capable together.

Figure 4. Co-crafting the stage/outdoor cinema. The mobilisation of joint efforts resulted in a construction where only simple tools and technologies were used. Photo: Hansson (2021).

The essential part in the design of the construction process was to make possible access for everyone over 15 years not only to participate but to make a notable difference; all hands were needed to make the stage real. No previous knowledge or skills in construction was demanded, and only simple and accessible tools, such as saws, hammers, and nails, were used (Figure 4). Almost any participants could help carry some materials, hold a piece of wood in place, or pull the ropes for the poling equipment, making everyone an essential part of the building process independent of skill or age. The idea of ‘shared ownership’ becomes very real when everyone can contribute and leave their mark in tangible ways.

4 Co-craft and collaborative prototyping in Sloydtrukk’s workshops

Within a design setting, a way to articulate and analyse Sloydtrukk’s participatory workshops is to use the lens of prototyping. The trajectory of the workshops aligns well with classic modes of designerly practice, as it started with discussions and identification of needs, moved on to collaborative visioning and exploration, and then to more concrete building exercises (Aspelund 2006; Cross 2008). But compared to the prototyping of studio practice, where users may come with valuable feedback but agency is reserved to the designers, the participants in Linnarhult emphasised the pride and shared ownership that came with the combination of visioning with being active members in the construction of their visions. Thus the craft element in Linnarhult manifested a special form of co-design prototyping where the pragmatic building phase and the tangible outcome were emphasized. This making part of the workshop transformations highlights a direct form of prototyping futures, where visioning takes presence in concrete materials, and can thus be tested by participants in situ. In Linnarhult two paces of prototyping overlapped in the elements of co-craft; a fast type of prototyping and a slow type of prototyping.

Originating from software development, Fast Prototyping signifies design processes that ‘move quickly into practice’ (Hillgren, Seravalli, and Emilson 2011, 173). Today, this method has become popular across design fields, especially in service design and social innovation, to gain a quick overview of issues and conflicts while testing scenarios of possible courses of action on participants. With concrete goals and user groups, the fast-prototyping model quickly informs designers with insights into the issue at hand. However, fast prototyping also has its limitations, where the quick pace can overlook conflict, fail to recognise tacit implications and social issues, and with its high pace, alienates marginalised participants. To deal with more entangled social issues, Young Foundation, a well-known organisation within the field of social innovation, instead suggests a Slow Prototyping approach in approaching communities. According to the Young Foundation, cited in Hillgren, Seravalli, and Emilson (2011, 173)

Slow prototyping takes an idea and refines it slowly throughout extensive user testing before a final version is delivered. Slow prototyping can accommodate a gradual scaling up process – making sure that the final version can be adaptable to accommodate the nuances of specific geographical areas or communities of need.

Sloydtrukk’s workshops in Linnarhult noted that co-craft offers a combination of fast and slow prototyping to a more integrated and intertwined infrastructuring practice; a fast opening visioning workshop, followed by slower co-crafting, with physical collaborative construction and cultivation of capabilities. Sloydtrukk worked with the participants to move quickly into visioning and get the ideas and plans off the ground while moving on to a grounded and practical work of building the seats and stage together to contribute to the more long-term changes. However, unlike traditional co-design activities (ex. Hillgren, Seravalli, and Emilson 2011; Stuedahl and Smørdal 2015), the co-craft examples of Linnarhult stresses the material production aspects, where all participants help move the visioning work into concrete form; into wooden public furniture and design. Analyzing the prototyping elements of the workshops offers a few insights into how co-design and co-crafting processes can interlink;

Firstly, by having all participants able to contribute to visioning and then building the envisioned result actively, the process itself becomes proof of concept, encouraging participants to join in the next steps. The cases in Linnarhult show how a co-craft design approach can help fill the ‘void’ after an abstract visioning process; getting into action to make participants feel their ideas are moving towards realisation. Starting from simple tools and objects, such as the seating, to the bigger and more cumbersome stage: a final design that could not have been achieved without the coordinated and collective efforts. This scaling of individual and co-designed visions towards larger-than-the-individual results was the outcome of a robust co-design process complemented with hands-on co-craft. This scaling can further contribute to continuity and trust amongst participants, and participants spoke positively about how it escaped the trap of unfulfilled visioning and project fatigue.

Secondly, the practical elements in the Linnarhult workshops show how collaboration in co-craft gets very concrete, both in building the idea but also building the skills for further collaborative accomplishments. This coordination of efforts happens in the small negotiations that take place continuously, in carrying heavy pieces of wood or tools together, in holding pieces while others cut or nail them together; almost no element of the workshop can be done individually. As such, this element of co-craft allows participants also to give shape to their own constructive public. Along the way, Linnarhult became the epicentre of a prototype Thing (Latour 2005b; Ehn 2008; Binder et al. 2011; Björgvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren 2010; Hillgren, Seravalli, and Emilson 2011), which in a very concrete way was binding the assembly of people more tightly to their design vision and their shared matter of concern.

Thirdly, the work brought attention towards design as a rehearsal of new relationships in practice, much in line with the work of other researchers (Halse and Boffi 2014; Stuedahl and Smørdal 2015). With the combination of collaborative visioning work in the first fast prototyping phase and the slower and skill-building parts of the second and third workshops, participants engaged in a series of translations – and doing so in concrete ways where skills and self-esteem improved along the way. In this way, the co-craft approach in Linnarhult also aligns well with the design ideas of ‘local adequacy’, where connecting with grassroot needs help establish control over making processes tapping into the locality of make and use (Usenyuk-Kravchuk, Hyysalo, and Raeva 2021). Cultivating collaborative capabilities put attention to how people develop locally adequate designs for achieving local adequacy in tangible and practical situations (Shove et al. 2007). As Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (2012) points in ways relevant to collaborative crafts; local practices are shaped through the interplay between materials, skills, and what is considered meaningful. What is considered adequate is not limited to a strictly utilitarian or functional perspective, but as suggested by Sennett, one should not forget how the workshop is a basic organisational space where craft and construction of collaboration takes place, where cooperation building a whole larger than its parts, a process which is ‘an exchange in which the participants benefit from the encounter’ (Sennett 2012, 5).

And as a fourth point; the intertwined modes of prototyping resulted in both a co-design of the objects in their environment, as well as of civic agency. As told by participants, the intertwined and collaborative visioning and building processes were experienced as having a big impact on their motivations and pride in their work. It was a hands-on model for further engagements on the site. As the seating and stage was finished, participants continued to activate the environment with further workshops and events, artist and school visits, engaging visitors in everything from agriculture and cooking to ceramics and metal smithing. New plans and actions continuously emerge from Linnarhult.

The fifth and final point; in the hands-on integration of problem definition, visioning, design and making, co-craft was the practical and hands-on techniques that could anchor the unstructured process ‘in the wild’ to make sure participants with many levels of skill and abilities could all contribute and join in a meaningful way. The tools were explicitly designed to make this invitation apparent, and the collaborative efforts were grounded in work and pride in the participants’ shared accomplishments as a collective. With simple tools, that in every part of the work require the hands of others, Sloydtrukk made sure the youth could take full ownership and bring constructive process to the ‘wild’ and sometimes unruly settings.

5 Concluding discussion: The emancipatory potential of co-crafting

Collaboratively crafted material objects have specific uses and thus limit some possibilities compared to free brainstorming (they are material after all). Yet, we see them shape radical outcomes in constructive participatory prototyping processes that make co-craft a promising complement to co-design processes ‘in the wild’. The scaling of the fast and slow prototyping elements, mixed with the purposeful design of Sloydtrukk’s pedagogy moving from simple collaborative tools to more complex and scaled-up collective efforts builds a solid foundation for other researchers to build on. Furthermore, three results show promise of being achieved in other settings where co-design takes place ‘in the wild’; (1) tangible results, (2) practical and collaborative capabilities, and (3) palpable proof of the benefits of shared coordinated action. Let us break down the three points in more detail. Firstly, co-craft makes visioning take on tangible results. By being a design process that combines fast and slow prototyping, the values of participation are manifested across two paces of time. The shared prototyping, combined with the practical building activities, anchors the design work on-site, enables concrete results and cultivates practical agency to intervene in one’s surroundings. Secondly, co-craft helps develop collaborative capabilities in line with the ideas of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. In Nussbaum’s (2011) ‘central capability framework’, she highlights how the capability to play concerns people’s opportunities ‘to laugh, play, and enjoy recreational activities’, and affiliation concerns the importance of training collaborative capabilities, ‘to be able to live with and towards others’ where people should ‘be treated as dignified beings’ (Nussbaum 2011, 34). Co-crafting offers tangible ways to build not only hands-on skills on constructing public spaces, but the playful means to also affiliate in ways that build capacities for collective action. But more so, by being collaborative, co-craft is a radical departure from traditional crafts or DIY activities that emphasise the individual actor. Instead, the focus is on how co-craft makes participatory processes immediately accessible, not abstract, making capabilities applicable to the everyday life of the participants. And thirdly, co-craft gives proof and tangible results of shared action, and not only by the most skilled of the participants. By designing the co-craft activities to include all levels of skills, from carrying materials and holding while someone else uses the saw, up to pulling ropes and coordinating action, the shared processes of construction orient users towards seeing how the co-craft process binds together needs, action, and results.

To answer the initial question of the paper on how collaborative making and craft elements in co-design processes can make abstract visioning more concrete and help mobilise participation over a longer time, the process of Sloydtrukk demonstrates how diverse actors, with shared ownership and distributed leadership, can co-craft help give tangible results to co-design processes ‘in the wild’,anchoring progression in the work process in collaborative making. In each step, everyone, regardless of age and background, can contribute with different and important knowledge as well as simple hand-skills. As shown in the example of Linnarhult, co-craft offers a material process of Hamdi’s (2004, x) notion that design sets things in motion, in ‘acting to induce others to act’ - the accumulation of small accomplishments and tangible results builds trust to engage in further collaboration. The real potential of co-craft is that it directly responds to the participants’ immediate needs that become evident in the initial visioning co-design process. The combination of fast and slow prototyping makes constructing the desired outcome real and tangible and bridges the initial ‘talk-the-talk’ with a shared sense of ‘walking-the-walk’. And it does so while also cultivating collaborative capabilities anchored in the local historical, cultural, social, and material context. We consider co-craft a valid process working in tandem with co-design, a possible method to make co-design more tangible and anchored in local conditions, and a process worth further exploration.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the participants in the workshops in Linnarhult plus organizers and co-leaders. We particularly want to thank: Eco Agroforestry Center, Saskia van Ruiten, Karl Hallberg, Hudallah Ahmad, and the youth of TNB Bergsjön. We also want to thank FORMAS Gestaltad Livsmiljö, The Swedish National Handicraft Council (NFH), Bergsjön 2021, and TNB, which together funded the workshops.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Swedish Research Council [2020-02427].