Radical craft

An excellent account of the Radical Craft conference Janet Abrams, Director of the University of Minnesota Design Institute, can be found here on the Core 77 website.

She kicks the piece off thus:

Call me a Luddite, but I went to Radical Craft, the second biennial Art Center Design Conference, hoping for insights into the shifting definitions of craft and how it is evolving in an age of post-industrial design and manufacturing. With the exception of a few talks that touched on things hand-made in a digital era, however, few of the speakers addressed this fascinating issue head-on.

And finishes it with this challenge:

Could a design conference truly galvanize, challenge its audience, provoke us into action, spurred rather than dazed by the stunning variety of its speakers' agendas and accomplishments?

Now, that would be radical.