hiCraft is a 38 month AHRC funded project (completing in Feburary 2025), based in the North East of the UK, exploring healthier ways to live with IoT using craft as a methodological and practical lens. hiCraft speaks to current concerns about trust, bias and the lack of transparency around data use, focusing on IoT. Our investigation seeks to define and foster a healthy relationship between people, the internet and smart technologies using craft approaches.

The central ethos that this research seeks to embody is defined by craft practices and notions of:

• Localism & Provenance (Focusing on the locally attuned, not global ubiquity and recognising the value of knowing where things come from)
• Personalisation & Bespokeness (Aiming at the particular, rather than the general)
• Materiality & Embodiment (The importance of material engagement as a way of knowing and the significance of our somatic/physical/bodily experiences)
• Lived experience (Thinking and doing being tethered to lived experience and the insights gained through the physical engagement with something – living with and through things).
• Authenticity (Valuing ‘honesty’ in terms of both material expression and explicit function)
• Care (Expressed as both careful skilled making and as a political act/position). 
• Active (Championing active creation over passive consumption).
• Sensitive Responsiveness (Recognition of the unpredictability, complexity or messiness of a situation and the potential to improvise, being responsive rather than interventionist.

See Workbook 1 for detail on the hiCraft project progress and outcomes as of November 2022. 

Contact
Prof. Justin Marshall or hiCraft Northumbria