Design and self-production. The advanced dimension of handcraft

Handcrafted practices of young designers, capable of acting as draftsman, craftsman-producers and selling agents of their own creations, are triggering the revaluation and the transformation of hand-crafted activity in Europe. The overview of the situation, which has reached the highest point in the occasion of the design week in Milan, also appears in other Mediterra- nean countries and in some Latin American countries, but with different distinctive features. However, it delineates a new relationship between design and handicraft, so that is convenient in an ambivalent way. This specific kind of “hand-crafted practice”, defined “self-production”, sometimes “new-handicraft”, again “technological handicraft” or “electronic handicraft”, differs from the traditional practice for its progressed or “advanced” dimension, that is enable to interpret crafts, techniques and expression changes, harking back to the union between technical skill and design, manual aptitude and creative process.