I am always fascinated by Pro Mike's speech. Friday morning, I attended his lecture which was about the relationship between design and craft. Although it was for undergraduated students I still have benefited a lot from it.
The point he emphasized 100 times was that 'Design is Reflective' which was about consumer culture. User-centred design is mainstream in our economic society. Further, he mentioned the edge of craft and design. As he said, craft was not just about making things. It was a sort of interactive way which could engage in people. Think about the relationship between traditional skills and our common life.
Here was an example about MA jewelry student named Vidar Hertov. His conceptual jewelry work ' The Manifesto' shocked me a lot. You could not image my feeling when I saw he smashing the hammer down onto the car door like a sort of jewelry craft skill. After that, he cut off the door and finished it as a piece of jewelry. The process was very striking and convulsing. It was about experience.
The similar example from a book which I read before. It was about famous Dutch jewelry artist Ted Norton's work. He says: Jewelry must use traditional codes in order to break them. Jewelry must forget the psychoanalysis of the studio. Jewelry must steal and seek to be stolen.
In personal, all of them are related to psychological experience. As a jeweler, I suppose to find a link between people's feeling of acupuncture therapy and handicraft this year. What about participational game? How to make abstract experience to be clear visualization? Pain implies effect. Hence, what about keep this feeling in my project?
