Accelerate Debates: Craftwork

Often held up as the antithesis to a consumer economy, craft promises to reconnect us with the intimate processes of making, long lost to mass-production. But does it? Is craft an essential means of artistic expression or merely a posh luxury signalling uneven glaze on an overpriced ramen bowl, fake etsy sellers flogging ‘hand-made’ tat, and the fetishisation of manual labour?

Is the trend for hen party ceramics ‘crafternoons’ and poorly-whittled wooden spoons the symptom of a screen-tired society craving a more tactile relationship with their objects and work, or just bougie middle-class experience-seeking; cosplaying an imagined idea of manufacturing tied up in exclusivity?

Architecture has always shared a relationship with craft, and in many places in the world buildings are still hand-made. In the Global North however, architecture students are often trained to painstakingly hone craft skills, only for them to join an industry of computer-based practice where buildings are assembled from Revit libraries rather than made by craftspeople.
Debate

For this Accelerate Debate, we will be joined by a panel of speakers who will discuss whether craft is procrastination, or the process we need in an era of global heating and rising inequality.

Each will bring to the stage one crafted item they believe humanity can't do without, and will have to defend it as other speakers mercilessly argue for it being wiped from history — and you’ll be the ones to decide.