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In his work Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer suggests rehabilitating the decorative element in art, which was discredited by Kant’s aesthetics in an antithetical relationship to the concept of art based on ‘pure form.’ As decoration is determined by its relation to what it is decorating, it is neither placeless nor timeless. The temporality and place of the work of decorative art question “the aesthetic consciousness according to which the work of art is what is outside all space and all time.” Drawing on Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, this study aims to explore how the London-based antique and curiosity dealer Murray Marks (c. 1840-1918) contributed to the appropriation of Chinese porcelain and Italian Renaissance bronzes by three different artistic regimes in Europe. Marks’s transfer of the three-dimensional decorative objects into various artistic circles achieved such mobility – between East and West, past and present, and public and private spheres. Marks integrated Chinese porcelain and Italian Renaissance bronzes into a modernist artistic practice (The British Aesthetic Movement in the 1860s and 1870s), the public museum (the South Kensington Museum around 1880), and cataloguing projects based on subjectivity-centered aesthetics (with Wilhelm von Bode of the Berlin Museums from the late 1880s). This continual migration of objects demonstrates that understanding a work of art is rather a question of interpretation across time and space than a transcendental aesthetic experience. In this respect, this study will investigate Marks’s role as a cultural translator.

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The current uncertainty centres around Craft as a discipline as opposed to a set of skills applied to a process for a predefined product. This dichotomy is partly due to the lack of a clear definition of craft practice, its theoretical underpinning, and criteria for the evaluation of the products of practice. It appears that this problem emanates from craft itself which has few, if any, practitioners writing from their perspective of practice. A practitioner herself, with all the tacit knowledge from which craft practice is built, enables the researcher to articulate a particular viewpoint, that of the practitioner‘s. She has used this knowledge in the presentation of this thesis and has conducted the research necessarily informed by her own practice. She has also specifically sought the views of other practitioners in order to maintain the voice of practice within this thesis. The term =Fine Craft practice‘ is used by the Past Present and Future Craft Practice1 project to which the researcher is affiliated. In order to understand what Fine Craft practice is, it is necessary to define within the Project context what is meant by this from the perspective of practice. A working definition of Fine Craft practice was developed and this definition became the tool with which to identify possible historical and contemporary Fine Craft practice and to examine the process of progress within these craft practices in order to develop a model of interrogating progress within one‘s own practice and within that of another. This process verified the definition of Fine Craft Practice. Interviews with a cross-section of contemporary craft practitioners were conducted to enable a critical analysis of their methodological approaches. Analysis of practitioners‘ responses formed the basis of a progress wheel, which was divided into equal quadrants. This progress wheel can, through self-reflection and through interview, identify the process of progress within one‘s own or another practitioner‘s practice, dependant on the balance of segments within the wheel. Fine Craft practice is the goal of dedicated practitioners, and the model developed is the yardstick against which to measure that progress and to identify the gaps in practice, which can be addressed. The relevance and importance of this research to craft practitioners and to education was discussed and further research identified. The House of Falkland in Fife, Scotland, a Grade A listed building, was part of the investigation. The wonderful original Arts and Crafts and Byzantium features were part of the refurbishment in 1890‘s, undertaken by G.W. Schultz, H.W.Lonsdale and others who were significant practitioners of the Arts and Crafts movement. A case study of the Vine Corridor2 within the House of Falkland, gave opportunity to critically analyse historical craft using the Advanced Practice Model which gave insight into the methodological approaches embedded within historical Fine Craft practice and verified the model as a tool for interrogating the practitioner responsible for the craftsmanship.

The present thesis aims to explore creativity as representation, action and cultural participation in the context of a traditional folk art. It develops a cultural psychological approach to the phenomenon, one that considers creativity situated between creators, creations, audiences, and a complex background of norms and beliefs. A tetradic framework is thus formulated trying to capture the dynamic between self and other, “new” and “old” in creative production and in particular their inter-relation through processes of integration, externalisation, internalisation and social interaction. This model guided the research design, starting from the three main questions of the thesis: how people attribute creative value to the craft, what makes the activity of decoration creative and how children’s engagement with this practice develops during ontogenesis. The folk art chosen for this study is Easter egg decoration in two socio-cultural milieus in Romania, the urban setting of Bucharest and the village of Ciocăneşti. This craft was selected for its rich symbolism and polyphony of practices that situate it at the intersection between folklore, religion, art and a growing market. In this context, the first research included in the thesis investigates patterns of creativity evaluation in the case of ethnographers, priests, art teachers and folk artists and highlights their relation to the practices and beliefs particular for each of these groups. The second study uses a pragmatist-inspired model to analyse creative action in the case of decorators from the urban and rural setting and outlines the general stages and micro-genetic aspects of creativity specific for both contexts. Finally, the last piece of research considers creativity development in the two settings above as shaped by different practices of socialisation and enculturation. In the end, reflections are offered on the general conception of egg decoration as mastery in ways that bring to the fore the interdependence between tradition and creativity and suggest the existence of habitual forms of creative expression.

The thesis investigates the methods used in the contemporary crowdsourcing of creative crowdwork and in particular the succession of conflicting ideas and concepts that led to the development of dedi- cated, profit-oriented, online platforms after 2005 for the outsourcing of cognitive tasks and creative labour to a large and unspecified group of people via open calls on the internet. It traces the historic trajectory of the notion of the crowd as well as the development of tech- nologies for online collaboration, with a focus on the accompanying narratives in the form of a dis- course analysis. One focus of the thesis is the clash between the narrative of the empowerment of the individual user through digital tools and the reinvention of the concept of the crowd as a way to refer to users of online platforms in their aggregate form. The thesis argues that the revivification of the notion of the crowd is indicative of a power shift that has diminished the agency of the individual user and empowered the commercial platform providers who, in turn, take unfair advantage of the crowdworker. The thesis examines the workings and the rhetoric of these platforms by comparing the way they address the masses today with historic notions of the crowd, formed by authors like Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud and Elias Canetti. Today’s practice of crowdwork is also juxtaposed with older, arguably more humanist, visions of distributed online collaboration, collective intelligence, free soft- ware and commons-based peer production. The study is a history of ideas, taking some of the utopian concepts of early online history as a vantage point from which to view current and, at times, dystopian applications of crowdsourced creative labour online. The goal is to better understand the social mech- anisms employed by the platforms to motivate and control the crowds they gather, and to uncover the parameters that define their structure as well as the scope for their potential redesign. At its core, the thesis offers a comparison of Amazon Mechanical Turk (2005), the most prominent and infamous example for so-called microtasking or cognitive piecework, with the design of platforms for contest-based creative crowdwork, in particular with Jovoto (2007) and 99designs (2008). The crowdsourcing of design work is organised in decidedly differently ways to other forms of digital labour and the question is why should that be so? What does this tell us about changes in the practice and commissioning of design and what are its effects on design as a profession? However, the thesis is not just about the crowdsourcing of design work: it is also about the design of crowdsourcing as a system. It is about the ethics of these human-made, contingent social systems that are promoted as the future of work. The question underlying the entire thesis is: can crowdsourcing be designed in a way that is fair and sustainable to all stakeholders? The analysis is based on an extensive study of literature from Design Studies, Media and Cul- ture Studies, Business Studies and Human-Computer Interaction, combined with participant observa- tion within several crowdsourcing platforms for design and a series of interviews with different stake- holders.

This thesis addresses the overlooked contribution of female graduates of the Birmingham Municipal School of Art to the Arts and Crafts movement, during the period of 1880 to 1930. Despite the special status which the Birmingham School enjoyed in its time, Birmingham’s Arts and Crafts movement as a whole has been relatively little studied. The role of women artists within this regional phenomenon has been even further neglected. Employing an object-led approach, this thesis uses artworks as the starting point and main vectors for the exploration of issues tied to materiality, technique, collaboration, authorship, politics, religion, regionalism and gender. The work of Georgie Gaskin (1866-1934), Celia Levetus (1874-1936), Kate Bunce (1856-1927), Myra Bunce (1854-1919), Florence Camm (1874-1960), Margaret A. Rope (1882-1953), and Mary Newill (1860-1947) will be studied in detail. It will be argued that these women artists were integral to the renewal of book-illustration, the revival of the artistic technique of painting in tempera, stained glass making and embroidery. A web of interactions crucial to their professional success will be traced based on geographical proximity, shared workspaces, and social connections. Craftswomen’s role as educators will also be investigated, revealing them as shapers and not merely followers or consumers of the movement. Informed in particular by the theoretical writings of the philosophers Arthur C. Danto, Jacques Rancière and feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, this thesis will offer a valuable update to a field largely untouched by current academic debates and saturated with survey publications. Combined with extensive archival research and the close inspection of artworks, this study aims to go beyond the additive approach of reinsertion. It seeks to provide a critical discussion of the materialisations of women’s participation in the formation of culture.

Recently, more and more disputations about how demand response should be compensated have arisen. Moreover, the court is about to rehear the Order 745. It probably will have significant impact on the whole working system used to be built for demand response before. Nowadays, some power companies and utilities think that they will endure profits leakage while demand response resources still are compensated. In this research, knowledge of demand response, local marginal price, Order 745 and other related concept will be explained in detail in case of misunderstanding. Associated with all these knowledge, a possible compensation method will be proposed. It combines many existing compensation methods. It mainly can be divided into three parts, i.e., high load period, off-peak period and low load period. The demand response resources will be compensated appropriately through these three periods. The compensation method endeavors to be just and reasonable.

This thesis investigates design methods and phase models towards a reinterpretation of the design process towards a specific design task. The study reveals the essence of the process as a design process core, onto which may be built design process models to suit design tasks of diverse nature and scale.

Auslöser dieses Sammelbandes war eine Exkursion in die Franche-Comté mit Studierenden der Europastudien und Europäischen Geschichte der Technischen Universität Chemnitz im Juni 2009 unter dem Titel: „Franche-Comté – Die Erfindung einer Region in Transnationalität und Transkulturalität“. Der vorliegende Band will Einblicke in die Franche-Comté und Besançon geben. Er lädt Sie ein, die Region und Ihre Hauptstadt zu entdecken und gemeinsam mit den AutorInnen eine virtuelle Reise zu unternehmen.