RAFT is a research group concerned with materially-led creative processes and knowledge. It brings together researchers in craft theory and history, individuals undertaking creative research through practice, troubling notions of digital craft, speculating on critical making futures, and applying research-through-design methodologies.
As such, we encourage membership across disciplines and schools, external organisations, and welcome academics at all stages of their careers, including postgraduate students and doctoral researchers.
RAFT is chaired by Professor Sarah Kettley and supported by vice chair Dr Jessamy Kelly.
About the group
Our members include designers, makers, educators, students, technologists and researchers from a range of material-based disciplines.
As practitioners, we often feel disenchanted with emerging technologies. We explore technology through process, and we explore process through technology
Our aim is to regularly come together through workshops, talks and networking events to further explore the frictions and opportunities that emerging technologies can bring into our practices.
Unified through our shared interest of exploring the potential of handcrafted and digital technologies, we are linked across a diverse range of material based disciplines in order to provide peer support and interaction in the making process. The spaces between these disciplines are the places we try to pry open.
We aim to work collaboratively on projects and connect our own developmental pathways and practices as a research cohort.
Our awareness of the changing identity of creative design practices within an increasingly technologized environment motivates us to openly explore our group identity through our research activities.
As well as staff and students from across Edinburgh College of Art (ECA), the group currently includes the musician David Faleris, the jewellers Eva Fernandez Martos and Kathryn Hinton, Stephen Bottomley, Matt Coombes, Glasgow School of Art researcher Dr Mhairi Maxwell, and the artist Morvern Odling. We are also partnered with Craft Scotland, with whom we co-deliver our public talks series.
