Thinking with your hands

“The continuum between nature and human skill also forms one theme of the book,
which calls for reintegrating skilled craft knowledge into a deep history of human
interaction with the environment..”

(Smith, 2022)

Historian of artisanship Pamela Smith conceives of creative skills “as arising at the interface of the human senses and human body with the natural environment” (Smith, 2022).

“The act of making with natural materials could also form an act of knowing nature, that is, it was underpinned by a corpus of beliefs about nature and the behavior of natural materials, and these helped guide workshop practices.”

(Smith, 2022)

Smith, Pamela H. From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World. University of Chicago Press, 2022.

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Creativity

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Ymmärrys ry believes that creativity is an innate quality of every human being, which can be expressed through experimentation and practice. Given the right tools and the right encouragement and guidance, one can develop and cultivate the ability to use this innate quality. We collaborate with groups and communities to nurture and harness their own capacity and agency for creative expression, by engaging with storytelling practices, oral histories, narratives of change, intangible heritage, and local knowledge. All of the different ways of knowing, making, doing, and creating can be manifested tangibly through participatory and inclusive activities informed by art and design. All we need is a little helping hand to uncover and make visible our own stories and share them in various creative ways.

We recognize and honor our shared creative spark.

 

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We are the agents of our own transformation journeys.

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We conceptualize sustainability as collective social change (Aguilera et al., 2007; Hargrave and Van de Ven, 2006), and have developed social processes that are place-based and community-centric. In our projects and activities we aim to introduce creative practices for collaboration and cooperation to foster capacity for learning and experimentation. Our aim is to accelerate our capacity for transformation in a resilient and sustainable manner on an individual and communal level, through custom-designed methods and tools, to bridge the knowing-doing gap.

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In building a positive future, art and design plays an integral role in social harmony and innovation thinking. Our collaborative and cooperative creative practices and innovation methods provide the social infrastructure for self determined roadmaps for transformation.

Cognitive Justice: the right of different knowledges to coexist so long as they sustain the life, livelihoods, and life chances of a people. (Visvanathan, 2021)

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