CRAFT-IT4SD CRAFT-IT4SD (Craft Revitalization Action for Future-proofing the Transition to Innovative Technologies for Sustainable Development) aims to activate the CCSI towards the green transition by building on the rich cultural heritage and strong creative traditions which underpin the European CCSI. It is the ambition of CRAFT-IT4SD to revitalize knowledge, practices and traditional techniques as shared cultural resources for sustainability as well as spillovers into a new, customer driven and sustainable creative economy, allowing for born-sustainable small and micro-sized enterprises to share climate impact data and flourish via an open source and open data platform. CRAFT-IT4SD explores cross-sectoral CCSI innovation through a new ecosystem approach and with four pilot clusters (DK, ES, FI, RO), where regional governance, public private partnerships, entrepreneurial living labs, learning communities, and consumer-engagement approaches support shared experimentation towards the green transition. CRAFT-IT4SD goes beyond the state of art by merging otherwise often siloed CCI sectors, to further articulate a holistic approach, bridging past, present and future design and production opportunities, in the sense that CRAFT-IT4SD - combines techniques, skills and materials associated with traditional crafts with emerging possibilities for integration with new digital technologies and data analytics processes and services; and - adopts a new ecosystem approach to facilitate co-creation between traditional craft stakeholders, the fashion industry, SMEs by designers, artisans, artists through immersive media technologies. CRAFT-IT4SD holds the ambition to replicate insights, learnings and tangible results leading to a CCSI driven green transition – informed by the EIT CLIMATE KIC and inspired by the New European Bauhaus – in other CCSI ecosystems and thus to contribute to the EIT Culture and Creativity KIC, across its Co-location Centers.

Tracks4Crafts examines and transforms the transmission of traditional crafts knowledge (TCK) to enhance the societal and economic valuation of crafts and align them with a future-oriented heritage approach in Europe. As intangible cultural heritage (ICH), crafts and TCK can be seen as resources for competitiveness, innovation, and sustainable development and quality of life, contributing to SDG 4, 8 and 11. Yet the tools, formats and instruments needed to foster the transmission and employment of TCK are lagging behind, which hampers the full development of its potential. Our objectives are to enhance and transform the transmission of TCK for a more effective economic as well as societal valuation of crafts. This is achieved in 4 Tracks, in which we (1) transform learning processes in physical spaces in which crafts people collaborate (in hi-tech environments, including fablabs and maker spaces etc.), (2) develop new digital technologies that enhance and transform transmission of TCK, (3) produce tools and instruments which enable capturing and optimising the value of the produced TCK (business modelling, certification and property protection), and (4) create networks to foster and disseminate the societal and economic value of TCK (e.g. through the CHARTER-alliance). The output is based on experiments in 8 craft ecosystems in which we develop and test formats for learning and tools for certification and validation in which (1) the economic and cultural barriers related to traditional TCK-transmission are addressed (i.a. the lengthy nature of learning, the fear of the craft getting lost…) and (2) the full potential of technology is tapped (i.a. for turning embodied TCK in open-source knowledge). To ensure that the solutions bridge the heritage perspective and the economic and societal needs and that our solutions are shared and transferable, our approach is deeply interdisciplinary and based on processes of multi-stakeholder co-creation (including action research).