This doctoral project develops an interdisciplinary collaborative approach to
furniture designer\maker practice. At its core is a practice-based framework
that can be used to assess and reflect upon the tacit, primarily visual nature
of makers’ knowledge and the way that this can be communicated in order to
develop design outcomes.
The enquiry takes as its focus a two-year collaboration between the author –
a British-based furniture designer/maker – and six indigenous Icelandic craft
practitioners in which the ultimate goal was the creation of artefacts that, it
was hoped, would be expressive of Iceland’s native craft traditions. During
the ‘Iceland Project,’ as it came to be known, interaction between and among
participants was grounded in a predetermined plan developed democratically
through consultation and dialogue.
The project successfully develops new knowledge through a contemporary
reinterpretation of indigenous Icelandic craft-making knowledge and
demonstrates this through the making of artefacts imbued with recognized
cultural status. It also extends furniture designer/maker research by
developing an innovative practice-based method of collaboration rooted in
the multimedia archiving of the making process which can then be used to
illuminate and facilitate future practice.
The project is a scholarly display of makers’ knowledge: the process is
shared democratically among peers; the decisions that articulate design and
methods of making are reviewed; and inter-subjective outcomes are
generated. To facilitate learning from designer/maker practice-based
research, the creative narrative is necessarily partly articulated through visual
media and artifacts
