Craft for care, Design for life. Communication Design tools and Heritage contemporary enhancement as a resource for social changes, fostering diversity and inclusion.

Local identity vs global standardization, participatory vs authorial, kairos vs chronos, dichotomies that global change has brought to the reality we live in today, are emerging strongly both on a national (PNRR, 2021) and a European level (European framework for action on cultural heritage, 2019). The world we live in and how we relate to it is changing by those categories, both individually and synergistically. Within the framework of enabling and inclusive design tools to fight stereotypes, social exclusion, loss of cultural treasures, craft could be intended as a lever for inclusion, care for the social environment, a key asset to guide heritage to contemporary goals. Reading those topics under the craft lens means relaunching local economies by enhancing the territory's products, knowledge and techniques, putting craft at the center of the contemporary social debate. Global challenges, as the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, massively stimulate the cultures of the project, the design for real world (Papanek, 2019), within which design moves to foster social innovation (Manzini, 2015), but perhaps still too little craft that is exploiting in a too small scale its strategic capacity for narrating local places, including different identities and excellences that characterize them. As the main attitude of design is to guide behaviors, objectify tastes, through the concretization of images capable of synthesizing form, function, meaning and value (Celaschi, 2016), also the craft can take on a new value linked to global challenges, by stimulating its inner relational attitude. This could be determined by embracing a flexible approach the contemporary culture by making adaptations into other disciplines, as design has done so deftly (Rawsthorn, 2022). In recent times, Craft has benefited from the injection of modern thinking driven by technology or by the support of design thinking and social innovation purposes. This crossing of knowledge is detectable, for example, in the work of Iris van Herpen, the first fashion designer to incorporate 3D printing technology into the fashion industry, mixing them with traditional handmade methods such as embroidery, knitting and spinning. Also, the enabling co-design and participatory methodologies can witness how craft can be supported by design thinking and social innovation methodologies, as in the work of the collective Droog Design or the duo Formafantasma, both recognized for a desire to incorporate into their work the design methods with craft symbolism and techniques. Instead, it is debatable whether there has been the same experimentation in the more established craft practice, traditional by definition, that can suffer from its being strongly tied to work done to perfection and strictly close to its context of belonging. The aim of this paper is therefore to investigate, through analysis of cases and polar comparisons, forays into adjacent worlds as art or design shifting into social, economic, cultural, areas of interest, what is contemporary craft, what happens when new technologies and contemporary expressive methods are associated with it and how it can act as a guiding resource for a sustainable and inclusive transformation concerning global challenges.