ABSTRACT
This chapter explores making, and its associated values, through the lens of Maker-Centric, an Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded project that works with stakeholders and community groups to explore how arts and crafts, hand-making and digital fabrication methods might build community, social and cultural change, and, longer term, economic assets and agencies. The 'messiness' of the Maker-Centric process seemed to reflect inherent complexities in communities and community working, and became a defining aspect of the project. Craft and the act of making together as a means to produce knowledge and experience – including unique forms of embodied knowledge – also feed into and are of benefit to the wider ecology, a concern that framed the Community Asset-based Research & Enterprise (CARE) project and continues to inform Maker-Centric. A number of seasoned community participants from the CARE and Utopias projects took on the role of creative ambassadors to apply and further realise their skills as community researchers.
