Braiding Knowledge: Crafting Care Through Slöjd
Braiding Knowledge: Crafting Care through Slöjd is a practice- and material-based design research project exploring slöjd, a Nordic craft tradition, as a knowledge-bearing and relational practice. The project investigates how slöjd can evolve, develop, and be communicated within contemporary design practice. Through working with wood, straw, simple hand tools, and manual making, the project explores the role of the hand and how materials and people shape and influence one another through making. It focuses on embodied and tacit knowledge – knowledge developed through the body, the senses, and practical engagement with materials.
The project has been developed with Kålltorp’s Woodcraft Association and explores how making can function as a foundation for knowledge exchange, reflection, and community. The hand is understood not only as a tool for production, but also as a carrier of experience, memory, and tacit knowledge. Through carving and hands-on woodworking, the project raises questions about what is at risk of being lost in a society increasingly shaped by digitalisation, efficiency-driven thinking, reduced material knowledge, and growing distance from production processes, where fine motor skills and analogue practices are gradually being replaced and outcompeted.
As part of the project, the method Crafting Conversations was developed, exploring how making and materials can influence conversation and social interaction. Hand-carved wooden stools function as both material and relational objects, carrying traces of hands, tools, encounters, and shared knowledge. The stools are embedded with stories and learning processes that have become embodied experiences emerged through working with wood and through encounters within the slöjd community.