IASDR CONFERENCE 2025, TAIPEH, TAIWAN
Monja Hirscher will be giving a presentation at the IADSR Conference 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan in early December 2025. The paper “From Experience to Insight: Entangled Learning in Craft-Based Design Practices” is co-authored by Irene Posch.
In this paper, we discuss process-oriented and craft-based design practice as an educational approach and in its role in design and propose it as a context for acquiring experiential knowledge. We discuss the extent to which such a design practice is informed by its context and entanglements and the learnings that arise from them. Interviews with five participants of a university course of a bachelor’s program in Design and Technology (teacher training) trace experiential and thought processes that allow us to understand the informing qualities of the entanglements that may arise. Bodymind and practice inform each other and form the context for entanglements with people and matter, which in turn evoke notions of pasts and futures, as well as of values and structures. The resulting experiences, insights, relations, and objects are interwoven in multiple dimensions and influence each other in various directions. We show how participants transfer their embodied experiences to broader contexts and thus engage personally with social and political issues. We frame craft as a regenerative practice that is a means of building more-than-human and human relationships, generating knowledge, experiences, and values that can support eco-social change.