About the symposium

​Crafting Futures​

This project investigates how craft knowledge and know-how are valued in Flanders and Brussels. The project starts from the observation that craft knowledge and craftership remain contested and poorly defined across different contexts, including education, policy, markets, cultural heritage and makerspaces. Persistent binaries—such as hand versus mind, tradition versus innovation, and craft versus art and design—can obscure the complexity and value of embodied knowledge and material practice.

Crafting Futures critically examines the paradigms, conventions and tensions that shape the evaluation and validation of crafts. The project combines scholarly research with practice-based and action research to explore how craft knowledge is transmitted, negotiated and valued in diverse settings, including craft education, makerspaces, social enterprises and cultural heritage institutions.

A key ambition is to develop new conceptual and methodological tools for understanding craft valuation, while translating research findings into practical outcomes. These include new approaches to training and business models, instruments for the assessment and validation of craft knowledge, and recommendations for educational, legal and policy frameworks that can better support sustainable and inclusive craft ecosystems.

​Tracks4Crafts​

This project explores how the transmission of traditional crafts knowledge can be transformed to strengthen the societal and economic value of crafts and support a future-oriented approach to cultural heritage in Europe. The project views traditional crafts knowledge as a resource for innovation, sustainability, social inclusion and quality of life, while addressing the barriers that currently limit its transmission and wider application.

Tracks4Crafts brings together four interconnected areas of transformation i.e. learning, technology, value creation and collaboration. Through Tracks4Training, it develops new learning clusters and training formats; Tracks4Tech explores how digital technologies can complement and transform the transmission of embodied craft knowledge; Tracks4Markets develops business-modelling, certification and intellectual-property tools; and EUnite4Tracks strengthens collaboration and networks across craft ecosystems.

These approaches are tested through experiments in eight European craft ecosystems, bringing researchers, craftspeople, educators, cultural organisations, entrepreneurs and other stakeholders together through interdisciplinary research and multi-stakeholder co-creation. By connecting heritage with contemporary economic, technological and societal needs, Tracks4Crafts seeks to make traditional crafts knowledge more transferable, sustainable and impactful.

The Tracks4Crafts project is part of the broader CRAFTOUR network, an extensive European research and innovation network bringing together 75 organisations from 21 member states. The network focuses on policy and research exploring how craftsmanship and traditional knowledge can contribute to sustainable, inclusive and circular transitions across Europe. Within this broader framework, the University of Antwerp hosted a first interdisciplinary conference on the state of the art in craft research on 29 January 2026, organised by Tracks4Crafts.

Bringing the projects together

While approaching crafts from complementary perspectives and scales, Crafting Futures and Tracks4Crafts share a common concern: how craft knowledge and know-how can be recognised, transmitted, transformed and valued in the present and future. Their collaboration brings together critical research on the systems and controversies surrounding craft valuation with practical experimentation in education, technology, markets and craft ecosystems. This symposium creates a space to reflect on these questions collectively and to explore new ways of understanding and supporting the future of crafts.