hello everyone i'm Zhicong Lu from the City University of Hong Kong. Today i'm glad to share our work, The Crafts+Fabrication Workshop.
So there are many different types of intangible cultural heritage in China,
and they were passed down through oral mentoring or apprenticeship.
However, a lot of such practices are suffering from the lack of interest in
the local communities, especially among the younger generations. So Cantonese porcelain is
such a practice in Guangdong province, and actually such Cantonese porcelain
is very famous in Europe, so it's like a very important export product in Guangdong province.
However, actually still a lot of young people do not really know Cantonese porcelain, even
in Guangdong, and even fewer want to learn about these skills. So that's a sad fact, right?
The government is concerned about this so there are actually a lot of measures taken to at least try
to engage more participants from the local communities, especially the young generations.
A lot of participatory design workshops and ICH-related experiential workshops are hosted in many cities.
However, through our involvement in such workshops, we found that the
effectiveness of these workshops is a little concerning,
like they're not very effective. They mostly lasted very short-term like only one or
two days and the participants had very limited interactions with real ICH professionals
and also they have very shallow engagement with the skills. It's more like they just
play around with the tools but did not really learn much about the ICH practices and skills
so that led us to consider if we can better design ICH-related workshops to further
have better effect, effectiveness, in terms of like transmitting or safeguarding intangible cultural heritage.
In light of the maker's movement, especially like personal fabrication and programming, we thought if we can combine traditional crafts plus fabrication
to further improve our workshops, and especially considering like cantonese porcelain which is a
traditional crafting skill. It shares a lot of things in common with
digital fabrication or personal fabrication. So that's the rationale of combining crafts plus
fabrication in our ICH workshop. Our workshop lasted four weeks so that it ensures
more deeper engagement with ICH practices and we recruited 30 students from art and design,
both undergrad and postgraduate students, and they're mostly novice in ICH and programming.
The workshop involves a lot of materials we prepared so we consulted the ICH professionals
to come up with the taxonomy of cantonese porcelain and we also compiled the knowledge
cards which have different types of knowledge covered to help students better understand
such ICH practice, and the students can refer to these knowledge cards throughout the workshop
The workshop involves lectures, talks by the ICH professionals, prototyping, digital fabrication
and presentation, so a lot of different activities involved. And most importantly, the ICH
oriented creative design. So the students were asked to work in groups to come up
with their design so they were required to use digital fabrication tools and combine
ICH elements in their design to create innovative ICH-oriented creative design
and to conduct the research we observed all the students activities and we interviewed them
throughout the workshop. We also had several focus groups with both the students and the ICH professionals to reflect on the process and the outcomes of the ICH workshops
I'll just briefly talk about the key findings in this talk. We found that there are pros and
cons of involving digital fabrication in such ICH workshop. So on the one hand the students
were attracted to learn more about both the ICH and the digital fabrication so they would
like to design and also try different strategies using digital fabrication tools
and they have a very high interest in both. however, the ICH professionals noted that it might not be a good thing to emphasize too much on the digital fabrication
they (the student) may still not develop enough interest in using traditional tools and also
they may still lack knowledge about traditional ICH skills. So, it's really a trade-off like how
much we emphasize on the digital fabrication and how much we emphasize the ICH.
Secondly, we found that cultural contexts have an influence on students design choice of
material and technology. For example they may choose material based on how the material
reflects cultural context and also they choose different technology according to culture
and because of this, students actually also have misunderstandings about the core concept
of ICH, so there was a failure in choosing representative ICH elements because they
did not have deep enough understanding and some students actually direct copy ICH elements in
their design without a clear understanding of it so the design might be
not ideal or they may over design like um they use the elements too much in their design
which again did not reflect the essence of the ICH. So when reflecting on the findings we
thought that we should prioritize cultural authenticity in ICH creative design. So during
the design process the students should also have "original schema" of the style of ICH in mind
rather than randomly selecting peripheral features or elements of ICH as the focus of their design
and we should further improve students engagement with ICH through technology especially let them
engage with ICH more thoroughly like not only the ICH features or elements but also
like the material and texture and only if they pick up the traditional tools to make something
could they learn how to create an artifact. In our workshop maybe the engagement is not enough, especially with traditional tools.
Because traditional tools are also part of the ICH practices that need safeguarding, future ICH design workshops should
consider using a hybrid form of tools, for example leveraging both technology-enhanced traditional
tools and tradition-embedded digital fabrication tools. That's all of our talk, thank you very much!