Resurgent Homecraft, Design for Resilience, and the Everyday Practices of Sustainable Living

Centred on the home, this paper reports on design research serving the broad social agendas of affordable, sustainable housing and food sovereignty. Intended to inform ecological design, the project has revealed rich sites of values-driven craft and design as the enactment of sustainable living by householders. Practices of self-provisioning through growing, preserving, waste cycling, re-using and re-purposing feature strongly in this exploration of twelve Tasmanian households. Discernible within these settings is a craft-design interface resonant with Christopher Frayling’s (2011) call for a renewed ‘head-heart-hand’ convergence. The project’s backdrop is cast through an initial thematic analysis exploring dominant norms in housing and food culture. Invoked, for example, is the global flat-pack kitchen’s role in erasing culturally-nuanced food practices and their embedded crafts, along with the rise of ‘green counterpart’ consumer goods. Insights and examples from the multi-household ethnography follow, emphasising the potential for homecraft to illuminate values, experiential knowledge, skills and practices bound within deliberative sustainable living. Emerging from project participants’ responses to generative design tasks is the potential for resilience thinking to productively unify craft and design practice, and connect diverse domains of knowledge with social, material and post-material practices. I close with a call for all new and adapted housing design to make space – both conceptual and material – for resurgent homecraft, irrespective of tenure, as conditional to living more sustainably everyday.