Crafting Moments of Well-Being

Craft practices can contribute to personal well-being, social inclusion, and interdisciplinary education. This can happen across individual, collaborative, and societal contexts. The Craft Hub project, supported by Creative Europe, serves as a transnational case study to demonstrate how to strengthen craft within research, highlighting its potential to enhance interdisciplinary competence and its contributions to well-being. Through the theoretical framework of salutogenesis, the study explores how craft practice can cultivate the salutogenic concept of ‘a sense of coherence’ through connecting what is manageable, comprehensible, and meaningful through the challenges of creating unique, handmade objects. The findings show the essential qualities of such creative moments in craft practice: (1) for individual practitioners, craft can contribute to building resilience through ‘risk’-based problem solving; (2) craft practice can play a central role in communities and well-being, fostering connections through the creation of inclusive participatory spaces; and (3) craft can serve as a bridge between disciplines, enriching education, science, and research by connecting diverse methodologies to create a sense of coherence. The study concludes that research on craft practice has the potential to facilitate wider societal benefits explained through the theoretical framework of salutogenesis.