The PLUSTEX project will be disseminated at Making Futures 3, at Plymouth College of Art, is a peer reviewed conference exploring the interfaces between craft knowledge and design with a focus on new opportunities for social innovation and sustainable practice.
From their website:
 The aims of Making Futures are to investigate contemporary craft as a ‘change agent’ within 21st century society – particularly in relation to global environmental and sustainability issues, social equity, social innovation and socially embedded practices including social entrepreneurialism. In doing so, the conference tries to explore whether these imperatives present opportunities for the crafts to redefine and reconstitute themselves as more centrally productive forces in society.
The Plustex team brought together two interrelated indicative themes and workshops of the conference :
- Social Innovation & Community Activism: Similar in many respects to âSustainability Innovation & Activismâ above, this thematic will explore the contributions of art, craft and design-to-make to resilient relationship and community building and ethical processes of making and selling, including in relation to indigenous peoples and traditions. It will focus upon practices supporting positive social change that enable and empower forms of social innovation and so-called âsocial entrepreneurialismâ, exploring whether these legitimately uphold the assertion that craft activity dignifies and enhances self and others; the extent to which they draw upon wider factors – for example, local demographic and economic profiles; and how they are determined by scale, location, proximity and relate to global scales of organization and virtual networks.
- Â Transformative Practices in / through Textiles
Our working title for the paper is Sustaing Craft economies: a European perspective and we will be presenting our research on the 26 and 27th September 2013.