About
About the Endangered Skill
The ambition of the Endangered Skill is to develop craft as a transformative practice through Craft Futures: a re-imagining of culture that is centred on craft as a sustainable mode of production, and the basis for sustainable ways of living.
It aims to:
- replace the unsustainable with the sustaining
- celebrate the knowledge and skills of the craftsperson
- create new desires
- break craft out of its servitude to the old economy
- herald an age of new, diverse and local economies
It invites others to join in a critical conversation of how to make visible the positive and engaging aspects of the tradition of craftsmanship, and how these traditions may be translated for a new way of living. If you wish to contribute please contact Nora.
About Nora Kinnunen
Nora is a redirective designer, researcher and academic. Her current PhD research at Queensland University of Technology, School of Design, is focused on craft futures and how craftspeople reconcile their craft making with the demands of the business environment. She also teaches in the QUT design program, is a researcher in the School of Design and the School of Civil Engineering and Built Environment, and maintains her design practice through her family's furniture design and manufacturing business Deka Design. The business also runs courses in furniture restoration, design and making through the Deka Design School of Furniture. She advocates on behalf of craft futures and participates in cross-disciplinary design and research projects that have sustainability as a focus.
Nora's experience has spanned sectors. She graduated as a mechanical engineer and worked as an aeronautical design engineer and project manager for many years, before returning to her craft roots to join the family's furniture business. Taking her craft-based sensibility as a basis for further research, she undertook a Master of Design Futures at Griffith University, Queensland College of Art, with Dr Tony Fry, and more recently a PhD, which set her on a path for craft futures - her current research and teaching focus.
"Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake"Hosted by Nora Kinnunen, a redirective designer, researcher and academic, the Endangered Skill is a project that explores the relationality of design and craft in the designed, and designing, world. It acknowledges the steady, escalating crisis of unsustainability and calls for a redirection of material culture towards sustain-able futures.
The Craftsman - Richard Sennett
The ambition of the Endangered Skill is to develop craft as a transformative practice through Craft Futures: a re-imagining of culture that is centred on craft as a sustainable mode of production, and the basis for sustainable ways of living.
It aims to:
- replace the unsustainable with the sustaining
- celebrate the knowledge and skills of the craftsperson
- create new desires
- break craft out of its servitude to the old economy
- herald an age of new, diverse and local economies
It invites others to join in a critical conversation of how to make visible the positive and engaging aspects of the tradition of craftsmanship, and how these traditions may be translated for a new way of living. If you wish to contribute please contact Nora.
About Nora Kinnunen
Nora is a redirective designer, researcher and academic. Her current PhD research at Queensland University of Technology, School of Design, is focused on craft futures and how craftspeople reconcile their craft making with the demands of the business environment. She also teaches in the QUT design program, is a researcher in the School of Design and the School of Civil Engineering and Built Environment, and maintains her design practice through her family's furniture design and manufacturing business Deka Design. The business also runs courses in furniture restoration, design and making through the Deka Design School of Furniture. She advocates on behalf of craft futures and participates in cross-disciplinary design and research projects that have sustainability as a focus.
Nora's experience has spanned sectors. She graduated as a mechanical engineer and worked as an aeronautical design engineer and project manager for many years, before returning to her craft roots to join the family's furniture business. Taking her craft-based sensibility as a basis for further research, she undertook a Master of Design Futures at Griffith University, Queensland College of Art, with Dr Tony Fry, and more recently a PhD, which set her on a path for craft futures - her current research and teaching focus.