On the surface, a high-end art fair held in Dubai and a digital conference in Bristol might not seem to have very much in common. But both act as important indicators of the Craft Council's direction, suggesting where contemporary making could go in the future, as well as where objects created in the UK might be sold.
The rise of the Maker Movement has shown that people are hacking the physical, as well as the virtual, world. But why stop at hacking objects?
The brilliant scholar and critic Reyner Banham was best known for his treatises on architecture, where he would compare ice cream vans with mediaeval cathedrals and explain the importance of bike sheds. However, he was originally trained as an aero engineer and it was this background of actually making stuff that he drew on when in 1973 he delivered a lecture entitled Sparks from a Plastic Anvil: The Craftsman in Technology.
In 1774, the first Josiah Wedgwood wrote: 'I have often wish'd I had saved a single specimen of all the new articles I have made, and would now give 20 times the original value for such a collection. For 10 years past I have omitted doing this, because I did not begin it ten years sooner. I am now, from thinking, and talking a little more upon this subject... resolv'd to make a beginning.'
We live in an era of flux. Technology is changing the way we work and consume, opening up new markets and transforming the manner in which traditional industries - music, newspapers, book publishing - go about their business.
The nitty-gritty policy work that the Crafts Council does on behalf of the craft sector is not perhaps as glamorous as high profile exhibitions like the recent Power of Making at the V&A (their second most popular exhibition in the last ten years). However - it plays a vital role in how craft is perceived across government.
Earth's unofficial representative for Hallowe'en and supermodel (in that order), Heidi Klum, is renowned for her 31 October enthusiasm. At this time o...
