The Significance of ‘Craft’ Qualities in Creating Experiential Design Products

The consumer's perception of the significance of an object to them as an individual has become of primary importance to the designer. This paper describes the current consumer trend towards the aestheticization of everday life and the significance of a desire to consume experiences within product design. It aims to address questions that arise through the designer's need to facilitate the consumer's desire to imbue objects with qualities that are meaningful to them within the currency of the contemporary aesthetics of everyday life. The paper goes on to examine the characteristics of craft products, and their ability to take on and embody the personal and individual experiences of the consumer. The author concludes that craft qualities in products appear to provide relevant communicative means for design in the contemporary era of experiential consumption. Craft qualities are discussed in the light of new consumer research that draws on the fields of psychology, sociology and marketing, and presents us with a rationale for the deep meanings of possessions thus attempting to explain our experiential and emotional relationships with products. Ideological and communicative craft qualities used in the discussion of this paper are drawn from the results of a previous sociological research project on the professional production of ‘value’ in Finnish ‘art craft’ objects (Kälviäinen, 1996; Kälviäinen, 1998). Ideologically craft qualities are based on the uniqueness and honesty of craft production, the quality of materials used, the forms or ideas from nature, and on the metamorphosis of the crafted object. These qualities, derived through the tradition of craft practice, seem to emphasize the visual and tactile qualities of a design in a way that enables them to be used as a vehicle for creating meaning within a current consumer trend towards the experiential aestheticization of everyday life.