Our research project gives a platform to the dialogue of crafts research, creativity scholarship and embodied cognition theory.
The wealth of practical knowledge of crafts experts has proved elusive for long. Our project investigates the applied cognition that underlies how expert blacksmiths, ceramicists, and tailors work. We look at the skill set of crafts experts (“makers”) in action, whose rich competency system combines technical, aesthetic and creative capabilities.
Videographed interviews of making sessions are used to model the material events and decisions from which a creative outcome emerges. In the dialogue between the research team and the makers state-of-the-art interviewing techniques from micro-phenomenology with a high-zoom lens and video feedback methods facilitate the verbalization of embodied “knowings”.
The overarching methodological aim is to develop and test a new set of process-analytic methods, to comprehensively document an extended process from multiple perspectives. We also hope to broker between representational accounts and post-cognitivist scholarship by evaluating what the respective contributions of mental and interactional mechanisms is.
About
This research project is a collaboration between Sigmund Freud University, Vienna, and the Cognitive Science Hub, University of Vienna.
Funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) with grant number PAT1854523.