About

About the Endangered Skill
"Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake"  
The Craftsman - Richard Sennett
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 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. She has researched craft futures and how craftspeople reconcile their craft making with making a living. She has taught in the Queensland University of Technology design program and is a former researcher in the School of Design and the School of Civil Engineering and Built Environment. Nora maintains her design practice through her family's furniture business Deka, which also runs courses in furniture restoration, design and making through the Deka Design School of Furniture. She works in Australia and Finland, advocating on behalf of craft futures and participates in 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. She undertook a Master of Design Futures at Griffith University, Queensland College of Art, with Dr Tony Fry, which set her on a path for craft futures.