Studying Material Interactions to Facilitate a Sense of Being with the World

Abstract

Material interactions are fundamental to design and craft education; however, they might also provide opportunities to reflect on sustainable behaviour in general. In this paper, we present an interdisciplinary undergraduate course in which students interacted with clay and wool. By engaging novices in material-based craft processes, we examined renewed ways of experiencing the materials to reconsider our everyday material interactions and our dependency and responsibilities in regard to materials in general. Through this example, we discuss the potential of craft practice as an educational platform to discuss materiality and to facilitate a deeper and more holistic understanding of the consequences of our material behaviour beyond the creative practices. The students' reflections over the five weeks touched upon their renewed appreciation of materials, and their changed interactions with materialsmoving towards a dialogical stance rather than only using them as a means to an end.

Learning with the Natural Environment: How Walking with Nature Can Actively Shape Creativity and Contribute to Holistic Learning

“…We started with reading all the reflections written by all eight students to familiarise ourselves with the content. After this, we examined the texts to identify key elements regarding experiences, reasoning and references of the students (see also Aktaş & Groth 2020). We created codes for each information type that the students referred to.…”

Shared Authorship in Research through Art, Design, and Craft

“…The participants were encouraged to focus on the processes of interacting with the material rather than making artifacts to then discuss the experience of making and interacting with artifacts, as well as rethinking their relationship with the material. The participants' reflections on these experiences, from the perspective of active materials, provided new insights to theoretically articulate how human-material interactions may change everyday material engagements (Aktaş and Groth, 2020). Therefore, the participants co-authored the generation of new insights.…”